The first time I saw Altaar play, they were a duo consisting of noise master Sten Ove Toft and metal/hardcore man Andreas Tylden. That time, at Musikkfest Oslo 2009, I was met by a wall of sound, obstructing any indie band’s attempt to strum a ukulele within the Grünerløkka perimeter. When celebrating Toft’s birthday at the end of last year, this was again the prospect – two grown men, clad in black, kneeled on the floor in a circle of candle lights, playing with their toys.
When I met up with them just before by:Larm I was intrigued by the prospect that they were performing with a full band – vocals and all. And what a band. The line-up during by:Larm included drummer Kenneth Lamond, from Tylden’s old band JR Ewing; third guitarist Espen Hangård, of KILLL and Dischord, and for the Stratos gig, bass player Didrik Telle from Obliteration. This will be the first time they’re five on stage and, in the words of Tylden, “it will be fucking loud”. In retrospect Nö Music can vouch for this.
Ironically, Hell(’s Kitchen) is full, so we stroll over to Bonanza – one symbolic bar after the other, and to avoid fighting for attention with Neil Young’s guitar solos erupting ever so often from the speakers, we retreat to the cold gallery overlooking Youngstorget. “Suits us right,” Tylden points out. “We’re metal guys, we’re supposed to suffer and well in our own misery.”
To try to introduce this band softly to the diverse crowd by:Larm sees, I ask them how they answer accusations from aunts, that you can’t possibly listen to this, it’s just noise..! “It is just noise,” Tylden responds shrugging his shoulders as his Toft counterpart elaborates:
SOT: It’s not just noise. I mean, I’ve been doing noise music ten years now, ten years, he leans over the Dictaphone, repeating it, and there are different degrees of noise – and I feel I can separate good from bad. Within pure noise genres particularly, there’s great variation. Noise music in itself is about energy; it is the pure rock or metal energy that emerges. There’s a classic quote from Merzbow, the noise legend, he said that if you take the twenty or thirty last seconds of the best rock concert you’ve ever been to, where there’s just a euphoric state of noise and an energy the entire audience can feel, if you can take this and stretch it over half an hour, or 45 minutes – if you manage this, then you’ve got good noise.
AT: And people who are into noise, or what we do, discover elements in the music they find interesting. If you look for it, you’ll hear both melodies and things that are attractive.
Nö: Are there any ideas you should be aware of in order to find these elements?
AT: You need tolerance, and an open mind for unconventional musical means. Having said that, we don’t play pure noise. It’s a mixture of that I come from a metal background, and he’s from noise. And it’s the same with metal, to many that’s just noise, but those who seek shall find – both this and that…
Nö: You’ve been picked for both the international magazine nights, The Stool Pigeon’s and Stereogum’s, why do you suppose this is?
AT: It’s a bit of a wonder, really. To relate it to the Eurovision Song Contest, and Keep of Kalessin, people love underdogs and what stands out from the crowd. And I dare say we do [stand out from] this year’s by:Larm lineup.
Toft points out how important it is that by:Larm shows this side of Norwegian music – the black metal scene is what the world associates with Norwegian music, and often what international acts coming to town want to hear about.
AT: It’s also a valid point that we’re not, I should be careful saying this, but we’re not just another indie band. And the internationals find this expression very exotic.
Nö: You’re obviously different from most other acts on the lineup this weekend, but what is it that separates Altaar from other bands in your genre?
AT: I think it is that we focus on improvisation; every time we play a gig we have a maximum of two rehearsals. That’s a combination of everybody being busy, and that it’s become our thing, that we actually don’t need more. And, like I said earlier, that we’re not a pure metal band, not a pure doom band, not a pure noise band, we end up falling between two stools, but in a good way.
Nö: That you mix genres?
AT: Yeah, that’s our major strength. We’re pretty much a crossover act.
At this point Toft bursts into a raw laughter, and concurs – “It’s fusion”.
AT: We don’t fall between two stools, we fall between two coffins! Two gold-coated coffins from ancient times.
The conversation continues into discussing how rock’s always been attracted to darkness, from love songs by Elvis to Poison. It’s never interested the two to well in what is beautiful and nice about the world.
AT: It’s about doing something that’s challenging musically and lyrically. Personally, I get nothing out of singing about lovely beaches and how great life is. ‘Cause it’s not that great – now I’m being very cheesy here…
When Espen Hangård joined he insisted on including vocals, they tell me, even though the initial idea was to have Altaar remain instrumental. So I ask what the lyrical themes are, will we find typical black metal aesthetics here?
AT: Now, nothing’s really written down officially. It’s pretty abstract. My experience is that it’s better to […] camouflage the language so you can interpret it in all sorts of directions, instead of laying your cards on the table – so people can make up their own minds.
We continue to chat a bit about by:Larm, Statoil-funding, and the prospect of being “discovered”, but by:Larm’s soon to be over and done with, Altaar’s two concerts have now been played and at the time I was more interested at sneeking a peek at a rehearsing room placed in a grey, concrete building, hidden in a fest of exhaust noise, at the centre of an Oslo traffic dump. Here I meet the rest of the band, and after a good half hour of connecting effects pedals, finding the weak patch cable link, making Silver’s drum kit less… well, Silver, running to a kiosk to get a distortion pedal that’s been left behind and meticulously drawing up the settings of the well of Toft’s pedals, I leave them to run through their one-song set for the second, and last, time before their gig at Samfunnssalen the next day. And as it turned out, two rehearsals are by far enough for this band to pull off a great concert.
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