Supersilent - The Silent Storm

Flies don't get into a closed mouth.

In a certain sense, tackling a monographic reconstruction of Supersilent – a freeform musical combat unit based in Norway – is an easy task. Their output is divided into eight chapters, that is eight CDs simply titled with a progressive numbering (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8), in turn split into a certain number of tracks also christened in honor of their own cardinal number (for instance, “3.2” is the second track of the third record, “6.6” is the sixth track of the sixth). Pushing the game further, it's worth noting that the last four albums follow a scrupulous arithmetic progression: 5 has 5 tracks, 6 has 6, 7 has 7, 8 has 8.

And for anyone left a little puzzled by this glacial scheme, the artwork comes to the rescue. Every album has an identical cover: there's the number of the disc and of the tracks, the date, place and recording personnel, all written in lowercase, in a sans-serif typeface, on a monochrome background (though a different one for each release). No mention of musicians, composers or instrumentation, just the dutiful inclusion of a barcode, a quaint signal left for the benefit of some future humanity avidly fluent in binary language.

There's only one thing Supersilent really focus on: the performance. The band, in fact, not only doesn't talk about its own music, it doesn't even prepare it, write it, arrange it, or overdub it. It simply improvises it, freely, collectively, in the recording studio just as in concert.

And here is where things get complicated for this profile. Even though it isn't exactly binary, improvisation too is a language. And even when it's called “free”, it's still a language created out of necessity, for instance by polemically negating the rules of previous languages (like 1960s free-jazz). With Supersilent, something different happens. A relatively sidelined starting position is used to carefully build a genuine personal idiom, one that doesn't oppose anything in particular, and which, the moment it applies its own rules, forces the listener to go looking for its references, its boundaries.

Of course, usually, even when the aim is to be completely self-sufficient, improvisation is always “in relation to” something. The history of music counts improvisations on themes by Beethoven, improvisations on the theme of racial rights, improvisations on a phrase by Wittgenstein. In other words, there's almost always a model behind a performer's spontaneous impulses, whether it's a set of pre-existing melodies, a poem, or a philosophical concept. Not here: Supersilent deny even this, purging the improvised gesture of any explicit context. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” is all they want to say. The rest, they play.

Some juicier details can be gleaned from anecdotes. As the story has been told in various quarters, in 1997, between Trondheim and Oslo, Norway, there existed a research-music trio called Veslefrekk, made up of Ståle Storløkken (synthesizers), Jarle Vespetad (drums), and Arve Henriksen (trumpet and live electronics). That year, at the Bergen Jazz Festival, came the encounter – directly in an improvised jam – with the fourth member, Helge “Deathprod” Sten (electronics operator). It was in that fortunate jam that Supersilent were born, already fully formed in lineup and orientation.

Like the young John and Paul of the Sixties, who swore to sign all their songs as Lennon/McCartney, or perhaps like Lars Von Trier, who in 1995 amused himself drafting the Dogma manifesto on directing techniques, the newly formed quartet opts for an extremely rigorous set of rules. There's no talk of the music outside of performance, no rehearsals, nothing agreed in advance – and this holds true above all when they go into the studio to record. What's more, no titles are given to albums or tracks, no one bothers with pointless annotations about "who-played-what-and-when", no messages of any kind are attached (political, social, aesthetic) – in short, once the instruments are packed away, everyone goes their own way.

As for the ticklish formality of finding a name for the band, they settle it quickly: apparently someone had spotted a truck near Oslo with "supersilent" written on its trailer. Perfect. (Searching online you'll find plenty of tech gadgets advertised as "super-silent". Among the various results, I'd like to point out a rather notable chainsaw. Supersilent may be the child of a coincidence, but you could say that truck happened to pass by at just the right moment.)

1. The first rule of the group is that you don't talk about the group.

Supersilent thus makes its entrance on the record market with all the weight of an articulated lorry. In 1997, 1, 2 and 3 are in fact released all at once, as a triple CD. "We had seven hours of improvisations," Deathprod recalls, "and we're happy we managed to save at least three." And it's not just a remarkable quantity, it's also a colossal mass of sound. It's no coincidence the album was promoted by the label as "deathjazzambientavantrock" (credit to Rune Grammofon, which debuted in those years with this very record, miles away from any commercial hook). The three former Veslefrekk members were hardly a tame bunch to begin with, but now, with Deathprod on board (also handling production) and a new minimalist-nihilist philosophy, the group has clearly destabilizing intentions. Speaking of Deathprod, what can you say about someone who, in the album credits, claims to be responsible for "audio viruses"?

Indeed "1.1", the opening track, is a real gut punch. A long development, a preference for synthetic, electrified or distorted instruments, no recognizable pulse, sonic violence, a great audio-viral witches' sabbath. While you catch your breath, "1.2" introduces some stop-and-go passages with an interesting snare sound, but the group doesn't loosen its grip and keeps throwing sonic punches. With "1.3" we're in full seismic delirium, out of which emerge unsettling vocalizations (courtesy of Henriksen, more on him later). "1.4" calms things down a little, then the album starts bubbling again, with the trumpet asserting itself, elbowing its way in to take hold of what we might call the album's first theme.

2. The second rule of the group is that you don't talk about the group.

The second CD opens literally picking up where "1.4" left off (the very same kick-drum sound kicks off the slow funk of "2.1")… but it would be pointless to dwell on individual tracks. It's hard to pick a favourite, a "standout track" – in other words, to wander through this triple CD the way you would through an album of songs. 1–2–3 is a monolith, valid both as a concept and as an experience. On one hand it holds all the programmatic depth described above, on the other it translates that depth into sound without a single compromise, without any filter or flattery. As if to say that the direct experience of a radical concept isn't really possible – it would need to be approached gradually – but going gradually risks watering the concept down. So, no second thoughts: they go all in, unguarded.

3. We're here because someone broke the rules. Someone talked about the group.

Let's let a bit more information through. The three former Veslefrekk members were all, to varying degrees, part of the Scandinavian art-jazz scene, a scene they would continue to frequent in the following years alongside Supersilent. To give an example, all three recorded something for ECM, the prestigious German label known for cool, meditative jazz. Ståle Storløkken (a versatile pianist with a background in art-music composition), for instance, plays synths alongside guitarist Terje Ripdal. Jarle Vespetad is a sought-after drummer who has backed dozens of artists, including Tord Gustavsen. Arve Henriksen, who could well become Europe's new reference point for trumpet, was already being called upon by saxophonist Ian Bellamy back in 1999, and later recorded wonderful solo albums (highly recommended, Chiaroscuro above all). It's perhaps because of this shared background that people still insist on writing "jazz" as Supersilent's genre. Jazz? And what happens if we also throw in Deathprod, who comes from an entirely different parish? An uncompromising electronic experimenter with industrial-ambient albums under his belt (Morals And Dogma), who had already successfully teamed up with Motorpsycho back in 1993. Jazz? Thinking about it, yes. Jazz. Especially if you take the label and rough it up a little – the genre's guardian spirits, who never much loved it anyway, will surely forgive us – twisting it more into a subversive proposition than a record-shop definition.

4. The fight goes on as long as the fighters want it to.

We move on to 1998, a year after the debut. As in the best improvisations, anything could happen. Supersilent had set out pushing so hard on the pedals of spontaneity and hermeticism that it could almost have looked like a disposable, one-off Situationist gesture. Indeed, it's only because we've now reached 8 that we can confidently speak of the project's "consistency" or "depth". Imagined as an isolated one-off from ten years ago, 1-2-3 would probably strike us as the colossal nightmare of four wild-tasted freaks. But 4 carries a strong message: these likeable Scandinavian troublemakers are actually pursuing something coherent.

On 4, even just from a production standpoint, the quality is better. But it's above all on the artistic side that the group reveals it also possesses the precious gift of control. Taken as a whole, 4 considerably lowers the revs of the supersilent chainsaw, without losing any of its sharpness. "4.1" opens with a gorgeous trumpet-synth unison (it's instructive to follow the evolution of the two soloists, Ståle and Arve, across the records – so different, yet so mutually influenced) in a more liquid, lightly reverberated setting, where a few tastefully treated percussion loops (courtesy of Deathprod) also peek through.

The second track settles into a menacing rummage, but never overflows, with Henriksen hissing something like "does not separate" into the microphone. "4.3" shows off an enviable M-Base-style groove, a twisted funk that would make Steve Coleman envious (and Jarle Vespetad is a superb drummer precisely for his ability to play a rhythmic role without ever letting a precise tempo be pinned down).

4 is a record that offers greater variety and, at the same time, greater focus. The tracks quickly find their focal point (a particular timbre, a certain rhythm, a melodic progression) that sets them apart and makes them, in a sense, memorable. And so, faced with the maturity of 4, certain structures on 1-2-3, for all their brutal charm, end up seeming wordy and self-indulgent. The madness is still there (it surfaces furiously on "4.6"), but it can also give way to lunar atmospheres ("4.7"), where the sound seems to struggle to propagate for lack of air. But whether dirty, mean, ethereal or calm, what matters is that from now on these supersilent Situationists are here for real, and the numbering is bound to keep growing.

5. You don't talk about the group because, except for a few hours on a stage or in a recording studio, the group doesn't exist.

2001: in the years leading up to this, Supersilent increasingly showed up in the flesh. They toured Europe, they even came to Italy. So it's time to make a live album — though that's a manner of speaking, since in a certain sense nothing changes, the approach remains basically the same (who knows how they'll handle a greatest hits!). 5 thus collects five moments from the tour, recorded directly to stereo DAT on the nights of the shows, and shows, contrary to what you might expect from a live setting, an approach that's even more rarefied than previous efforts. The blasts of 1-2-3 feel very distant now, and the group clearly favors suspended, typically Nordic atmospheres, where noise, when it intrudes, does so with restraint (for instance, at the end of "5.1").

The new rarefied settings arrange themselves like a basin, around sonic voids that, for example in "5.2", wait to be filled by a soloistic intention. And indeed 5 is the album where the group's balance settles further, allowing the quartet to dynamically split into soloist plus accompanying trio. In "5.3", for the first time, a thin web of electric piano chords is woven, over which a distorted trumpet stands out (to the point of almost sounding like a synth), though played with a meditative touch. Even Deathprod is in a more musical mood, picking up the electric guitar here and there (played in his own way, of course).

Meanwhile, in 2002 Supersilent appear — the only Nordic name alongside Björk — in the triple box set "Adventures", celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Wire magazine.

6. The struggle is chaotic, and yet one is not subject to chaos.

The sixth is the album of "success" (relatively speaking). This writer first encountered Supersilent with 6 (I had the CD, having only skimmed a review online: I read "Supersilent 6" as one word, and thought it was the name of a sextet — and kept believing that for several listens).

In hindsight, listening to 6 as an unknown sonic object is a stroke of luck, not least because that's ultimately the mode of listening the group hopes for. In my case, the surprise effect also came from a misread opening. Listening to the first seconds of "6.1", I decide it's a very slow intro, with keyboards I hastily judge to be "atmospheric", and my attention soon drifts. After a few minutes, it's as if I realize something that defies the laws of physics: I look around and discover it's the CD, still spinning. Wow. The atmospheric synths have gone berserk in a way I didn't think possible. They're crossing and twisting in on themselves in a way I never thought anyone would have the nerve to attempt. Maybe Wagner, if he were thirty years old today! Or Stockhausen. The strange thing is that, working with this whole mass of keyboards, they come dangerously close to symphonic prog, yet miraculously the slip never happens (we're closer to Wendy Carlos than to Keith Emerson). Ståle, here, sits on Siegfried's throne. He wields a genuinely rich, multilayered synth sound, full of endless nuances and great warmth, which is fascinating to compare with the earlier albums (on 1-2-3, say, he didn't yet have a sound like this). And he shapes it through phrasing that makes him instantly recognizable. Bizarre, atonal scales with a twentieth-century flavor (perhaps Messiaen's "octatonic" scale, an artist he greatly admires), guided by a lyrical sense that makes them communicative, albeit always rather anxious.

Wide-eyed, then, in the face of the storm of oscillators. Which ends elegantly, making way for the other seductive side of hell. "6.2" could in fact be a track off "Get Up With It" by Miles Davis (the last album of stratospheric 70s-era Miles), a kind of "He Loved Him Madly", updated through Jon Hassell and Brian Eno. A regular pulse, but wildly stretched out and reverberated, with a few distant electric textures, over which Arve Henriksen weaves a perfect trumpet solo, expressively exploiting the distortion effect.

"6.3" is one of the most "narrative" pieces, so to speak, with drum toms that at irregular intervals tear through the silence, marking out some inescapable event (let everyone find their own images, and thank the band for refusing to give it a title). Finally, "6.6" fittingly closes the album with a multiplication of planes/pianos (in every sense, both as musical instrument and as level of depth), in which a sampled piano hands the melody over to a real piano, followed in turn by a prepared piano and yet another "aged" piano.

7. No one knows the full plan, but everyone is trained to perform one precise task to perfection.

In 2005, right on schedule, comes 7. There's the major novelty of the DVD. The whole album is the complete reissue of a celebrated concert in Oslo, and although it's obviously possible to just listen to the audio, it's definitely worth following the footage too (in a well-judged black and white, remarkably grainy and distorted). Finally we get to see our heroes. And on 7 the hero is above all Arve Henriksen. His highly personal trumpet sound, so close to the Japanese shakuhachi flute, welcomes us right from the quiet opening bric-a-brac of "7.1". His mystical voice follows soon after, and it's impossible not to be captivated. We finally get to see Deathprod too, wonderful in handling his machines and keeping, with a nod of the head, a rhythm that only he can hear, but which must indeed be there somewhere. Together with the others, he helps stoke the piece's simmering boil, right up to the ending, which is the kind any good improviser would happily sign off on: tight and coordinated.

In "7.2" the trumpet sound is beyond anything you could imagine, but if you look closely you discover that Henriksen has fitted a sax mouthpiece onto his instrument, with unprecedented effects, including classic saxophonist lip smacks (which Deathprod promptly picks up and echoes with his own machinery). And it's still not over: Arve screams as if possessed, picks up the trumpet and plays in an ultra-high register straight out of a "Star Wars" cantina band, then finally sings a melody with an ethnic flavor. Impossible not to be floored by it.

Beyond such feats, the album also stands out for a certain fondness for choral effect. Unlike 5, here you can feel the warmth and the brashness of the live setting. In "7.4" and "7.6" too, the tracks end up in a great choral blend, dominated by open, Nordic melodies (echoing Jaga Jazzist) which, while not always shining with exceptional inventiveness, still carry the crowd along, clapping their hands raw.

8. Silence is the absence of any intention.

2007, ten years into their career, a small reckoning. 6 represented the qualitative breakthrough, a milestone in the group's evolution, 7 held the astonishing energy of the live show, with the valuable testimony of the video track. What comes after all that? On paper, a "normal" album, initially announced as a double (it was supposed to be 8-9), which instead comes out as a single record.

8 finds our guys back in the studio, working with a tried-and-tested formula, apparently without major novelties. "8.1" takes shape as a somber march, built around a heartbeat, over which keyboard textures sketch pensive figures. "8.2" is once again marked by probing synths that circle around an electronic crackle, only to be jolted by sudden underwater explosions (Deathprod's work, perhaps?).

Through the nervous "8.3" (built on a stunning figure from Vespestad, constantly mobile yet locked onto some elusive beat) you realize you haven't actually heard Arve Henriksen yet. Only on "8.4" does the trumpet reappear, dueting with the synth. This is one of the small signs of renewal here: in reality Arve was very much present on the earlier tracks too, but for some time now he's been exploring other timbres, other interfaces, such as percussion and electronics. It's a sign found among the other members as well, and it shows a will not to remain anchored to their own instrumental clichés, even at the cost of grappling with an instrument not yet fully mastered.

It's an ambivalent promise (Ornette Coleman had similar ideas when he moved from sax to violin), but luckily the second half of the album is far from lacking in ideas. Indeed, "8.5" could go down as the most composite and varied piece Supersilent have ever made. It opens with Henriksen's voice filtered through a vocoder, gains momentum with a gorgeous entrance of synths, takes off further with the arrival of a dry drum groove, over which a complex arpeggio is then built, fading out near a trumpet solo. "8.6" is more synthetic, but no less on point: from an initial dialogue between drum machines, chaotically intertwining, Henriksen's falsetto voice rises up to paint a truly striking picture. With its vocal litany bordering on sacred music and its icy electronic rummaging, this could almost be a Björk track at the height of her experimentation. And watch out for "8.7" — they certainly haven't left the chainsaw in the closet.

9. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

How do they do it? Will they always be like this — tough and uncompromising, intransigent and unclassifiable, yet never short of inventiveness? Will they manage to "keep up with the times"? With a band like this, the question is misguided. If, as John Cage says, (super)silence is the absence of all intention, then Supersilent, rather than changing rationally, will evolve biologically. Rather than renewing themselves, they'll grow, like a plant. A plant that silently feeds on chaos and contemporaneity. Someone needs to remember to water it. We await the new blossoms.

In the subsequent Supersilent 9 (2009), however, unexpected upheavals take place. Drummer Jarle Vespestad leaves the band to pursue new professional interests. The album is therefore the first effort as a trio for the avant-jazz outfit that came in from the cold. The liner notes speak of a formula built on just three sessions, confirming a sort of communicative autism, and of a single recording session, in which the three survivors apparently amused themselves tinkering with as many Hammond organs. But the album disappoints on every level, veering into a kind of pseudo-ambient totally devoid of personality and bite. There are four tracks, identical and indistinguishable from one another. The effect is alienating, to say the least, enough to make you suspect a minimalist prank.

What were the reasons for the flop? First of all, a total and bleak absence of tension. And of contrasts: instead of the thrilling dichotomy between cacophony and melodic hints, we get a kind of cloying, flat middle ground. As if that weren't enough, Vespestad's departure was followed by a drastic loss of instrumental personality.

In the space of a couple of years, Supersilent stripped themselves bare — too bare, and too quickly. The Viking king has no clothes: the only thing worse would be releasing a blank disc.

Partly setting things right is 10 (largely produced by Jan Erik Kongshaug), a deeply evocative and introspective work (the most introspective of their now decade-plus-long career).

Built mainly around the interplay of trumpet (Arve Henriksen) and grand piano (newcomer Ståle Storløkken), "10" reveals a nocturnal, desolate soul, with that "desert-like" trumpet timbre able to evoke a Jon Hassell left to fend for himself in the middle of an inaccessible wasteland. Granted, without a rhythmic element this incarnation of Supersilent still struggles a bit to stand on its own (an undeniable touch of underlying mannerism, let's say), but at least this time you can trace a thread of poetry, with moments that are genuinely moving.

Aside from the four small panels (all steeped in frosty dismay) "10.1", "10.4", "10.7" and "10.10", the bulk of the record is given over to evening-toned conversations between sparse piano figures and the trumpet's nebulous textures. So "10.3" sounds like a gloomy serenade, "10.6" rocks gently in the groove of a pointillist impressionism, suggesting a Renaissance-like inclination, and "10.12" dissolves into the unsettling weave of tragedy. But it's the gorgeous "10.8" that reaches true heights of pure lyricism, sketching out the most fragile of thresholds where the boundaries between diaphanous exoticism and timid mysticism get lost.

The other side of the record, meanwhile, belongs to shadowy soundscapes dominated by slippery webs of synth, ranging from "arctic" ambient ("10.2"), to dark cosmic rumblings mixed with ghostly dissonance ("10.5"), to murky Tangerine Dream-style hypnosis ("10.9").

A few months later comes number 11, the first to be released exclusively on vinyl. This is material dating back to 2005 (to be precise, from the sessions for Supersilent 8), when drummer Jarle Vespestad was still part of the lineup.

Quality-wise, the material here only confirms a rather confused moment for the Norwegians.

Aside from the extremely stretched-out, desolate soundscapes of "11" (with the usual trumpet recalling Mr. Hassell) and the ethereal clearing of "11.5", the bulk of the operation is handed over to a kind of spastic, digital, abstract-souled free-funk ("11.1", "11.3" and "11.6"), although, in the end, the most interesting moment is the imaginative spatialism and the crooked but rock-solid jazz-rock groove of "11.4".

Produced by Deathprod, who had hours and hours of recordings to work with, the twelfth chapter of the Supersilent saga represents a full immersion into the darkest, most enigmatic soul of the Norwegian outfit. The thirteen snapshots gathered here, in fact, arise from layers of dark-ambient, cosmic music and electronic impressionism, transfigured into sonic allegories of far-off worlds. But it's an upward movement that ultimately resolves into pure introspection, because, minute after minute, those worlds end up looking more and more like the mysterious labyrinths that run through each of our own psyches.

Sidereal winds, scattered keyboard phrasing (“12.4”), cosmic swerves (“12.6”), transcendental modulations (“12.1”), the occasional trumpet call (“12.5”, “12.8”) or astral swells (“12.7”, “12.13” – the latter one of the most compelling moments, with its sharply accented dynamics and nostalgic horizons) break through the veil of darkness.

A succession of imperfect balances, of sinister suggestions and evocations, in which, however, all the extemporaneousness of a wavering inspiration comes to the fore, making these compositions less and less interesting the more the mind picks them apart.

From 2009 to today, the only continuous thread running through the work of Arve Henriksen, Helge Sten and Ståle Storløkken has been the outright dominance of synthesizers and live electronics, which, with the celebrated 6, introduced an alien sound into sessions that could still, however unorthodoxly, be filed under avant-jazz.

Metamorphosis number 13, almost entirely recorded in late 2014, seems intent on giving voice to as many expressive approaches as possible: at times exercising a near-zen control, a slow accumulation just minutes before the noise-rock fury unleashed in the fifth block, where out of nowhere a kind of Bach-like organ emerges, seized by grotesque convulsions.

There's no gap in the forced coexistence of “full” and “empty”: like punctuation marks, the unnatural chill of certain airless passages links together the most impetuous takes – amid schizoid synths and broken beats à la Autechre – wandering through deserted sci-fi landscapes of memory that grow harsher with increasing intensity (2, 4) up to the digital chasm of the seventh sequence, a possible resurrection of Trent Reznor's recurring nightmares; finally, amid post-industrial clangs, Henriksen's solitary trumpet makes its way through, perhaps the only note of feeling in a varied pot-pourri of reckless gestures and stubborn inaction.

While respecting the sequential numbering that identifies the chapters of their catalogue, the now-trio keeps drawing on sessions recorded in previous years, shaping a personal “chronology of the case” to give the appearance of a grand narrative arc to a body of research that has, in fact, always roamed in absolute freedom.

Even within a range of expression as broad and elusive as theirs, the twelve tracks collected on 14 come across as soundscapes more alien and unknowable than ever, at times bordering on the sinister, oppressive designs of Lynch's “Eraserhead” and the later darkjazz fascinations with Badalamenti, but with qualities as evocative as they are rigorously non-descriptive in shaping dense atmospheres that one finds oneself immersed in within moments – often for less than three minutes.

Distorted frequencies and subtle electronic alterations disturb the sonic surface, at times almost imperceptibly, following a transformative rather than additive logic in the handling of the elements at play, moving between more hushed, lyrical moments and decidedly solemn, weighty passages, decidedly close to the dark ambient composition dark ambient so familiar to Helge “Deathprod” Sten.

14 is proof of how, paradoxically, the impossibility of rationalizing music under the Supersilent name remains its unassailable strength, impervious to any metamorphosis.

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