Larsen

I worked intimately with the band Larsen for three weeks, but I never saw their faces.

Over the course of a year I had received a series of CDRs, sent anonymously from Torino, Italy. The packages arrived punctually on the 1st day of each month, then again on the 21st. The packaging was always the same gray felt wrapped tightly around the CD, bound with rough twine. Sometimes, upon opening the package, little clumps of hair or a tablespoon of dark, moist earth would fall out.

Sometimes the CDs contained music a whispered song, accompanied by a distant accordion, as if playing in the next room, or a drone of unknown origin, or a short burst of percussive chaos sometimes just a single sound or noise, a scraping sound, as if someone were slowly etching a piece of rusted metal with a blade of some sort, or the sound of saliva working in the mouth.That's it no other explanation, just an obscure sonic message, little pieces of an arcane vocabulary I couldn't decipher.

Then one day a letter arrived. The text of the letter was simple: Come to Turino. You will work with us from the 1st day of next month through the 21st. You will depart on the 22nd. Consider the enclosed advance payment for your effort. Until Then, Larsen. Inside the envelope was an extremely generous amount of money and a round trip plane ticket to Torino. Since I was equally intrigued by both the music they'd sent me and by their temerity, I went.

Once there, I was never allowed to see them. The band played behind a screen in the recording studio. I was treated with perfect courtesy by their numerous assistants, who also acted as translators.

Their ideology seems to be obscure and extreme (though I'm not clear on all the exact details), and from what I could glean they operate as some sort of hermetic cult/collective they're obsessively protective of their personal identities, apparently out of both a need to remain hidden from legal authority and out of a sense that their personal identities are superfluous to the agenda of their work.

M. Gira / Young God Records