17:21 Pt. 1

21:08 Pt. 2

Composed by Lars Pedersen: programming, keyboards, harp, cello, percussion, sounds and voices

Recorded summer 1992 at Sound
Sector, Oslo with engineer Bernt Kanstad Mastered 2011 at Livingroom, Oslo by Morten Lund
Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, January 2015

Produced by When

The Black Death is based on Svartedauen (1900) by Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914)

All drawings by Theodor Kittelsen Coming out of the 1980’s Norwegian post-punk scene When is the solo-project of Lars Pedersen. When is like his own musical amusement park, every album differing a lot from the previous – Pedersen obviously likes to challenge himself and push for something new every time. The first albums were in a similar landscape as what he was doing with industrial art-rock band Holy Toy, and his later works have veered into everything from cartoon cut-up, psychedelic pop, prog. and even krautrock territories, but in between all this we find his fourth album from 1992 – The Black Death (and simultaneously titled as Svartedauen in Norwegian) – a decidedly darker creation. The album is a sound-journey of the great plague entering and ravishing Norway in 1349, killing two-thirds of the Norwegian population within a few years, reducing an already small population to a bare minimum of survivors. The album was inspired by a series of grim drawings on the subject by Theodor Kittelsen.Kittelsen is one of Norway’s most renowned artists, with Svartedauen being his seminal work from the year 1900, a national treasure as instantly recognizable to most Norwegians as Munch’s The Scream. Pedersen had the balls to make a soundtrack to it.
Svartedauen is a 38 minute musique concrète sound-collage. In a highly sophisticated manner it mixes elements of manipulated traditional Norwegian folk music (such as the eerie.......
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