Supersilent

The act of communication, in its classic definition, implies the processing of a given set of information by one or more individuals and its subsequent sharing with one or more recipients. Shifting the issue to the musical field (popular or otherwise), the goal has always been, with due exceptions, to make a duly codified message as accessible as possible to the listening public — and, as such, reproducible. But what happens when the code of communication is untranscribable, unreproducible and excessively arduous — something that doesn't even apply to John Cage's famous four minutes and thirty-three seconds, to cite one well-known provocation — and the entities emitting it deliberately refuse to share a common one among themselves?

One possible answer to this question requires stepping back some twenty years and jumping north by as many degrees of latitude. Rune Kristoffersen, formerly a member of Fra Lippo Lippi – a Norwegian group capable of penning a couple of notable works, in a field hardly short on competition like Eighties new wave – hangs up his bass to get himself entangled in a rather ambitious exercise in musical patronage. In Oslo, he founds a record label with a name that's half self-referential, half grandiose – Rune Grammofon – laying down a few simple stylistic rules: openness to every musical genre, artwork entrusted to the multi-talented Kim Hiorthøy and, above all, no plastic jewel cases, only digipacks, for the benefit of the die-hard fetishists of physical-format collecting.

What's so ambitious about all this, you might ask? It's soon explained. The very first release is reserved for the triple somersault into the record business of an obscure and unknown outfit operating under the banner of "death-jazz-ambient-avant-rock", to quote directly from the sparse press notes, while disclaiming any responsibility for the labeling. Not without some difficulty, we're able to trace the members of the quartet: trumpeter Arve Henriksen, keyboardist Ståle Storløkken and drummer Jarle Vespestad – already active in sophisticated Nordic European jazz circles under the name Veslefrekk – aided in production and in the "audiovirus" department (whatever that means) by Helge Sten, better known under the moniker Deathprod, already orbiting around Motorpsycho.

With identities clarified, the scant concessions made to the press force us to venture into the realm of urban legend. It seems, first of all, that the name Supersilent was chosen after spotting a sticker on the back of a truck that was very promising in the soundproofing department. Nothing especially outlandish, if the company's business didn't happen to be selling sounds. Moving on to matters of substance: the group, if we can call it that, doesn't talk about music, doesn't rehearse in a practice room, doesn't write scores or arrangements at a desk, nor does it manipulate tapes in post-production. Creative process and performance overlap until they become indissolubly one and the same.

Crystallized at the moment of recording, the material is carefully catalogued with a plain sequential numbering system and handed over to the listener exactly as it is, raw and unfiltered. No titles, no lyrics, no cultural references that might assist the listener by stirring up areas of the brain other than those devoted to mere auditory function. Even the aforementioned Hiorthøy does his part, with a rather cold and, needless to say, minimalist cover (while the artwork for the reissue a few years later would turn out to be a typographic template updated, album after album, only in colour and barcode).

The premise, you'll agree, is hardly ideal for trying to break any sales records. Nor does the listening experience make things any easier: preceded by a brief tribal preamble, Deathprod decides to put the dots over the å's right from the first track, empirically clarifying the definition of "audiovirus". What follows is a sonic battle lasting a good half hour (out of more than three in total) fit for R2-D2, AT-AT walkers, interstellar fighters and a solo Chewbacca (reciting the instructions for unspecified electronic equipment), with the various factions challenging and chasing each other across the two stereo channels. The tempo is, to put it mildly, erratic — don't even try to spot anything resembling a reasoned pattern.

The percussion begins to follow something like an order from the second track onward, considerably shorter and electrically less disturbed. Tension shoots back up on "1.3", a phenomenal piece where scraps of at least three decades of electronics, devoured and regurgitated, fly around every which way, while Vespestad flexes his muscles in a genuine feat of physical virtuosity. On the next track, amid spectral keyboards and drums that sound like the crackle of dying cosmic bonfires of rubble, Henriksen tries to give his trumpet a pseudo-conventional air – there's even something resembling a melody. The curtain thus falls on the first act: it's hard not to be struck, and not just figuratively.

The first track of the second disc revisits, almost unchanged, the atmospheres of "1.4", until the jolt at the ninth minute, an electronic progression straight out of the Tangerine Dream playbook. Deathprod resumes his mimicry of Star Wars robotic characters on "2.2", while on "2.3" it sounds as if the entire band decided to relocate lock, stock and barrel into a cement mixer. "2.4", introduced by asynchronous tolls of cracked Tibetan bells, evolves into the whirring and subsequent take-off of a nuclear-powered helicopter. "2.5", thanks above all to yet another well-judged shift in the drummer's register, sounds like the soundtrack to a half-hour chase scene lifted from a police thriller set in an ugly, filthy, vicious dystopian future.

Having made it to the third disc, let it be clear, no prize awaits. The only concession, almost a form of consolation for the listener, is a marked thinning-out of the atmospheres. "3.1" is by far the most ambient track of the lot: drums and keyboards seem to be coming from another studio altogether, while the trumpet, stripped of any filter, sounds heavy with melancholy. On "3.2" an overcharged defibrillator tries, at regular intervals, to revive an exceedingly faint and irregular heartbeat. Across the twenty-five minutes of "3.3" it feels as though one is picking through the ruins of a ghost civilization, all but razed to the ground by the preceding battles. Some form of artificial life exhales its final breaths amid piles of scrap and wreckage, while an android falsetto sends out a desperate call from beyond the world of replicants.

An electric pulse building slowly into a crescendo opens "3.4", the final track. Sinister synthetic interference threatens a new, imposing detonation – which, by this point, would hardly come as a surprise. Instead, everything turns ethereal and intangible, as Henriksen blows the final notes of farewell through his brass, before a closing fade that leaves the air thick with questions about an experience which, however you choose to categorize it, is unlike any other traditional listening experience.

With hindsight – which, as far as we're concerned, has done nothing but confirm and reinforce the enthusiasm of that very first listen – we can try to answer at least some of these questions. "Supersilent 1-3" is not merely the start of a dazzling career, whose twentieth anniversary we celebrate this year. It is not merely the first catalogue entry of a body of work that effectively serves as a guide to the least excruciating brand of Norwegian noise from the early years of the new millennium. And one that, aided by distribution through the celebrated ECM (forever be praised), managed to cross – by quite some distance – Scandinavia's borders. It is not merely confirmation that a new and different form of instrumental virtuosity is possible.

It is a work brimming with ideas, in whose more or less organized chaos come to fruition ambitions whose scope is directly proportional to their length and complexity: among the many, what stands out is the achievement of building, literally from nothing, a conceptual dimension while programmatically excluding every form of conceptuality from the creative process. A work that, while representing a hyper-evolution of several musical genres, can hardly be called a final destination, having instead pointed the way for an entire new generation of avant-gardists.

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25/11/2018