Lars Pedersen

Lars Pedersen (b. 1961, Oslo

Oslo

Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...

 Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

) his father, Tore Pedersen, was a Norwegian musical composer. At an early age, the younger Pedersen performed with his four older sisters and old brother; they were often compared to the Jackson 5 and The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family

The Partridge Family is an American television sitcom about a widowed mother and her five children who embark on a music career. The series originally ran from September 25, 1970 until August 31, 1974, the last new episode airing on March 23, 1974, on the ABC network, as part of a Friday-night lineup...

, popular bands of the time. Being in the spotlight at a young age, Pedersen met Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" , "Roll Over Beethoven" , "Rock and Roll Music" and "Johnny B...

 and other stars.

In the late 1970s Pedersen played in Hærverk, one of the first Norwegian punk

Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...

 bands, and later – as the 80's arrived – went on to form the band The Last James. The Last James explored The Beatles

The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...

/Beach Boys sound, releasing three albums, The Last James, Grape, and Kindergarten. During the 1980s and early 90's, Pedersen was also a member of the experimental

Experimental music

Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

/new wave

New Wave music

New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...

 group Holy Toy, together with Andrej D. Nebb.

Early releases

In 1983 Pedersen launched the one-man project Hospital Blimp, which would later become When. The debut album Drowning but Learning, was released in 1987, with When's trademark collage/cut-up technique already apparent.

In 1988 When released Death in the Blue Lake, inspired by Norwegian author André Bjerke

André Bjerke

Jarl André Bjerke was a Norwegian writer and poet. His debut was in 1940 with a collection of poems, Syngende Jord . He has written a wide range of material: poems , mystery novels , essays, and articles...

's psychological horror

Horror fiction

Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...

 novel of the same name. The album had a strong atmosphere of fear and mourning, and was quite popular in Norwegian black metal

Black metal

Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include fast tempos, shrieked vocals, highly distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, blast beat drumming, raw recording, and unconventional song structure....

 circles. An excerpt from the album's A-side was commissioned as an intro to Satyricon's Dark Medieval Times "Walk the path of sorrows". The B-side of the album is an amalgamation of ethnic music, blues harmonica, coughing, psychedelic pop and glissandi effects. Today it is almost impossible to track down a copy of the album.

Black, White & Grey, When's third album, conjured up images of war and urban decay. Chris Cutler (Henry Cow

Henry Cow

Henry Cow were an English avant-rock group, founded at Cambridge University in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. Henry Cow's personnel fluctuated over their decade together, but drummer Chris Cutler and bassoonist/oboist Lindsay Cooper were important long-term members...

, Art Bears

Art Bears

Art Bears were an English avant-rock group formed during the disassembly of Henry Cow in 1978 by three of its members, Chris Cutler , Fred Frith and Dagmar Krause...

, etc.), who contributed to the album, was also a central inspiration. The album was released on Cutler's RéR Megacorp in 1990.

1992 saw the release of Svartedauen (Norwegian for "The Black Death"), a 38-minute musical description of the ravages of the bubonic plague

Bubonic plague

Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...

 in Norway around 1349. The album borrows elements from Norwegian folk music

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

, and features a host of disturbing sounds: hearses, moans of the dying, rats, flagellant

Flagellant

Flagellants are practitioners of an extreme form of mortification of their own flesh by whipping it with various instruments.- History :Flagellantism was a 13th and 14th centuries movement, consisting of radicals in the Catholic Church. It began as a militant pilgrimage and was later condemned by...

s' whips and a scythe being sharpened, to name but a few.

On 1994's Prefab Wreckage, When slowly started moving from the more abstract soundtracks of the earlier albums and towards a more song-oriented sound. The inner sleeve is a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, one of the album's inspirations.

In 1997 When released Gynt, which according to the liner notes is a "satiric play on Edward Grieg's Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, loosely based on the fairy tale Per Gynt. It is the most widely performed Norwegian play. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones"...

. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen." As Pedersen says: "I tried to put irony into the music. There is a lot of humour in When's music, it's not bloody serious all the time."

Jester Records

After Gynt, When was signed by Jester Records, newly set-up by Kristoffer Garm Rygg

Kristoffer Rygg

Kristoffer Rygg , also known as Garm, Trickster G. and recently also God Head is a Spellemannprisen nominated vocalist, musician and producer known as the frontman of Ulver and former vocalist for Arcturus...

 of Ulver

Ulver

Ulver is a musical group from Norway. Since their first, folklore-influenced black metal release entitled Bergtatt – Et eeventyr i 5 capitler , Ulver’s musical style has been fluid and increasingly eclectic, blending genres such as rock, electronica, symphonic and chamber traditions, noise and...

, and the next album would mark another radical change in When's musical direction. Psychedelic Wunderbaum was indeed a psychedelic mix, with apparent inspirations from rock, noise, and cartoon music, and with lyrics taken from Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...

 and Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...

. Pedersen remarked:

I fetched many grooves from old, obscure psychedelic garage bands. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I thought that it might be too audacious. But as more and more artists seem to be using that method, I figured that I could do it too. I dug up the old Farfisa organ that I had used in Holy Toy and got Bjørn Sorknes, the old Holy Toy guitarist, with me. We worked together on the production as well. It became a sort of crossing between industrial and psychedelic rock.

The next album, The Lobster Boys, was Pedersen's most pop-oriented effort so far. Many of the songs were reminiscent of The Beach Boys and/or The Beatles, but there's always something just a little "off" and odd about When's music that sets it apart from more mainstream acts. Some tracks start out as "normal" rock, but often end up in a cacophony of weird samples and madness before reaching an end. The Lobster Boys was also heavily inspired by Arabic music.

Nils Arne Øvergård and Øyvind Borgemoen joined When as full members on this recording. The trio has played several concerts, including the release party for the single "Sunshine Superhead", where they performed in bear costumes with paper-mâché guitars. The same song also got heavy radio rotation in Norway that summer.

In 2003 When released Pearl-Harvest, more or less The Lobster Boys part II, but with lyrical concepts taken from The Arabian Nights. Combine those fables with sampled, shambling Middle Eastern bazaar muzak, jangling exotica and electronics, and you've got When's winning formula.

When's 2004 album Whenever features a characteristic mix of Middle Eastern influences, African tribal rhythms, as well as trademark When collages and cartoon loops. The lyrics, written by Chris Cutler, often deal with grim subject matter such as the apocalypse

Apocalypse

An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...

 and death.

In 2007, When released their latest album, "Trippy Happy". Bringing back a sound that hasn't been heard since the late 60s, Trippy Happy explored folky pop ballads, banjo lullabies, baroque psychedelia, and industrial cartoon surrealism.

The album was a return to the sound of The Last James, as it featured appearances by Haakon Ellingsen of the Last James on banjo, voices, and piano and Øyvind Borgemoen on accordion/piano.

On February 17, 2008, When announced the forthcoming release of their twelfth album, You Are Silent, for April 28, 2008. The announcement suggests that the sound is darker and closer to Prefab Wreckage than to recent releases.

Discography

• Drowning but Learning (1987)
• Death in the Blue Lake (1988)
• Black White & Grey (1991)
• Svartedauen (1992)
• Prefab Wreckage (1994)
• Gynt (1997)
• Psychedelic Wunderbaum (1999)
• WriterCakebox: The Unblessed World of When 1983–1998 (2000)
• The Lobster Boys (2001)
• "Sunshine Superhead" (single, 2001)
• Pearl-harvest (2003)
• Whenever (2005)
• Trippy Happy (2007)
• You Are Silent (2008)
• Homage Series Vol. 1: SUN RA (2009)

Compilation appearances

• ReR Records Quarterly Vol. 2 No. 3
• The Eye Decay Theory, or when the garden becomes a time lapse
• ReR Records Quarterly Vol. 3 No. 3
• Ur-Rauten
• Art Bears: The Art Box