Alog

About Alog

Alog is the brainchild of Espen Sommer Eide and Dag-Are Haugan. One dark and snow-stormy day in the winter of 1997, the band was born in a basement of a Kindergarten in Tromsoe - a city located in the far north of Norway. This day a string of happy coincidences led them to meet up for a session of tablas and guitar, of which they had no idea would evolve into a creative burst of ideas, involving all kinds of found instruments and collected sounds. The set of 4-track recordings of these dark-but-warm winter constellations eventually made it onto Alog's debut release on Rune Grammofon, entitled Red Shift Swing . In 2001 they followed up with the critically acclaimed Duck-Rabbit CD.
The Duck-Rabbit is a famous gestalt psychological figure representing both a duck and a rabbit depending upon the point of view. This shifting and switching character is an essential part of the Alog ethos. Even the very word alog has this shifting quality, never settling into one meaning but playing with the stems of a large collection of interconnected words like analog , dialog , logic, a logbook, catalogue, analogy and so on. Alog promises always to strive for the unexpected and surprising - the unsettling and unnerving quality of sound that escapes any final categorisation.
If one where to choose a word to describe the music of Alog, it would have to be - details . A plethora of miniscule details is carefully arranged so as to inflict the strongest emotional and intellectual impact upon the listener. Like the painting of Ottoman miniatures the construction of new alogic tracks is painstakingly slow, and often involves both extensive travelling in search of the right sounds, and listening through hours upon hours of recorded material for that one second of pure audio bliss. In the alogic studios these tapes are then stitched together - sometimes hiding the joints, sometimes exposing them as open cracks. The use of alogic computer-software developed by the band, is an integral part of this process. With this extreme attention to detail and control, each track takes several months to finish, and a whole album may ferment for years before it is ready for the public. Like good aquavit it has to travel to Australia and back before touching someone's tongue. Live shows sample the current stage of this development, giving a glimpse into the creative process often involving violent improvising and playful experiments. Live they often also team up with the improv-maestro Nicholas H. Møllerhaug on instruments-at-hand, to expand the alogic musical mythology.
"A tangle of lines and a mix of musical languages result - it's Techno, minimalism, electronica, post-rock. It's original, it's derivative, it's spontaneous, it's contrived." - Julian Cowley, The Wire Magazine, UK [in Alog's Site]


Discografia:

- Red Shift Swing, cd.1999
- Duck-Rabbit, cd.2001
- Miniatures, cd.2005

Todos os albums foram lancados pela Rune Grammofon