Browse by Artist: DEATHPROD

Artist:	DEATHPROD
Title:	Morals and Dogma
Label:	RUNE GRAMMOFON (NORWAY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	RCD 2035CD

"Deathprod, or Helge Sten as his name is, has been an important player since the beginning of Rune Grammofon. As a member of Supersilent he was part of the very first release in January 1998, Supersilent 1-3 (RCD 2001), and later the same year he and Biosphere remixed Arne Nordheim“s electronic works on the album Nordheim Transformed (RCD 2005). Born in 1971, he has worked under the name Deathprod since around 1990 in all his work as musician and producer. He was a member rock group Motorpsycho from 92 to 94 adding 'audio noise', theremin, keyboards and sound-collages to the band's hard rock. He has also worked extensively in theatre, dance, performance, art exhibitions and installations with particular emphasis on interactive media and improvisation. He has appeared as a player on some 20 albums and produced and/or engineered a further 80. Associates in diverse contexts have ranged from members of rock groups Swans, Mazzy Star and My Bloody Valentine to the contemporary music interpreters of the Cikada Ensemble. He lives and works in Oslo.

       When talking about his work methods he has revealed that he often only uses one sound source for a track, and that he can elaborate on this sound for months until he“s completely satisfied. This attention to detail makes him quite unique and it“s difficult to compare him with specific contemporaries, but Biosphere and Thomas Köner comes to mind. From the Rune catalogue there“s the aforementioned remix album with Biosphere as well as Supesilent 5 (RCD 2018). Morals and Dogma is the new Deathprod album, the rightful follow-up to Treetop Drive and therefor given a separate release. Morals And Dogma, four pieces recorded intermittently between 1994 and 2000, is presented as music for the ceremonies of an imaginary secret society, a soundtrack to the arcane rituals of a fictitious freemasonry. Violins may evoke symbolism of the glass harmonica; harmonium may evoke the encoded mystical language of the organ. This is fertile ground for unearthing symbols and cracking codes.

       The title Morals And Dogma appears proscriptive, yet it alludes to obscure knowledge cloaked in sonic shadows, action glimpsed indistinctly through acoustic drizzle and failing light. That indistinctness, however, is paradoxically vivid. As the glint or shine of minerals externalize their interior structure, the shimmer and glow of this music registers the inner life of sounds and corresponding interconnectedness of our sensory responses to them. At the primeval level of perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, 'experience is so ambiguous that the rhythm of a sound brings about the merging of cinematographic images and creates space that allows for a perception of movement'. Such experience depends on 'acoustic sustenance'. This music supplies such sustenance, the image flow, the play of textures.

       Morals And Dogma is a potent distillation of Deathprod music, simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, mining seams of potentiality in mood and slow movement, at once finely detailed and vast, microscopic and boundless, breaking open temporal cells to access zones of timelessness."

Artist:	DEATHPROD
Title:	Deathprod
Label:	RUNE GRAMMOFON (NORWAY)
Format:	4CD BOX
Price:	$45.00
Catalog #:	RCD 2036CD

Repressed! What was once one of the most acclaimed releases of 2004 will be available one last time. Beautifully-packaged 4CD boxset (4 digipaks in a heavy-duty box, nearly all black packaging). Includes the 2004 album Morals And Dogma (which is also available separately), plus reissues of the 3 prior albums: Reference Frequencies, Treetop Drive, Imaginary Songs From Tristan de Cunha, with 32 pages of liner notes, all eloquently designed by Kim Hiorthųy. These four CDs here document the period from 1991 to 2001. Treetop Drive from '95 and Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha from '94, both remastered and included here in full, were originally released in limited editions of 500 copies. In his music laboratory in Oslo, Deathprod (Helge Sten) works at the threshold between the latent potential of musical technology and the forms of life that sound assumes: the life of vibrations; the life of imagination. Deathprod is suggestive of last and first things, physical decay and the processes of production, decomposition and composition, the breaking down of sound that precedes fresh musical creation. A guiding principle in Deathprod's laboratory work is that his music should have the capacity to evoke images without becoming excessively programmatic. He references the soundtracks made by Florian Fricke and his group Popol Vuh to accompany films by Werner Herzog. The Reference Frequencies series of nine live electronic improvisations was made in 1991, recorded to cassette using unpromisingly basic electronic equipment. Loops mysteriously slide from the groove of repetition into swirling forms and cryptic atmospheres. Layers thicken, some congeal and sink as others thin and evaporate in glistening spray. Figures stalk through clouds; strange topographies form from molten matter then dissolve in crystalline streams; curious stories in remote languages cry out to be deciphered.

       Imaginary Songs from Tristan da Cunha is an extraordinary adventure in ethnographic surrealism that began when Sten graduated from the Trondheim Art Academy. Tristan da Cunha is the most remote island in the world, a volcanic mound in the distant reaches of the South Atlantic.

       Treetop Drive, from 1993 and 1994, opens with a symphonic ending, a dying fall severed from some massive structure and reanimated as another music. Last and first things; the afterlife of a final chord; classical closure reversed by means of sampling and a homemade feedback device.

Artist:	DEATHPROD
Title:	6-track
Label:	RUNE GRAMMOFON (NORWAY)
Format:	10"
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	REP 2053EP

This is Norwegian producer and sonic manipulator Helge Sten's fourth release on Rune Grammofon. Sten has been an important player since the beginning of this label: as a member of Supersilent he was part of the very first release in January 1998, and later the same year he and Biosphere remixed Arne Nordheim's electronic works. A consummate producer, and former member of rock group Motorpsycho, Sten has since cemented his position as master sonic sculptor. Another stunning, beautifully-packaged deluxe limited edition vinyl release from Rune Grammofon. This is a single vinyl 10" in a pitch-black gatefold sleeve. And the music? Five Deathprod remixes of other artists, some of them difficult to find, one of them never before released, plus "Deerstalker," previously only available on Rune Grammofon's Money Will Ruin Everything compilation. The original artists being remixed are: Nils Petter Molvęr, Cloroform, Murcof and Larsen -- but this is all prime Deathprod. Printed in 1000 copies only and bound to become a collector's item, this is also an extremely rare occasion of Deathprod on vinyl and a must-have complement to the Deathprod box set. He has produced Arve Henriksen, Food, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra and The White Birch, as well as a number of artists for other labels, including Motorpsycho, Jaga Jazzist and Hope Sandoval.

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