Re-Make Re-Model is a collaboration conducted through interference. Bruce Russell and Lasse Marhaug do not meet in a studio, improvise together, and divide the resulting recording into tracks. Instead, each enters the other’s archive, removes selected works from their original circumstances, and subjects them to new systems of damage, exaggeration, reduction, misinterpretation, and reconstruction. The source material remains present, but often as buried architecture rather than recognizable surface.
The project began during the isolation of the COVID-19 period as a friendly challenge between two artists separated by almost the greatest distance available on Earth: Marhaug in Norway and Russell in New Zealand. They would select recordings from one another’s catalogs and devise methods for transforming them. The challenge continued for five years, gradually becoming a competitive exchange in which each new piece encouraged the other to invent something more intricate, stubborn, or unnecessarily elaborate.
Russell describes the process as a form of one-upmanship. Each participant attempted to surpass the other through inventiveness, “baroque and pointless complexity,” and what he calls sheer bloody-mindedness. That phrase reveals the humor beneath the severity. Re-Make Re-Model is not a solemn demonstration of technological mastery. It is two experienced experimentalists setting traps for one another, then responding by constructing better traps.
Competition here does not oppose friendship. It depends upon attention. In order to damage another artist’s recording meaningfully, you must listen closely enough to understand what can be removed, magnified, inverted, repeated, concealed, or turned against itself. Careful destruction is a form of study.
Marhaug and Russell make particularly suitable opponents because their careers overlap without duplicating one another. Russell emerged from New Zealand’s independent underground as a founding member of The Dead C, whose music treated rock form as something that could be dragged through malfunctioning amplification, primitive recording, repetition, distance, and refusal. His work with A Handful of Dust pushed further into free noise, while the Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum labels helped create distribution networks for music too strange, unstable, or locally specific for ordinary industry structures.
Russell is also a writer, editor, archivist, and theorist. Sound is rarely separated in his work from questions of history, technology, ownership, circulation, and the strange meanings accumulated by obsolete objects. A damaged recording is not merely aesthetically attractive. It carries evidence of how the damage occurred, what machine produced it, and which hands kept the object moving after its original commercial life had ended.
Lasse Marhaug came through Norway’s noise and experimental underground during the early 1990s. His enormous catalog moves among harsh noise, electroacoustic composition, improvisation, jazz, metal, drone, field recording, installation, performance, production, photography, design, and publishing. He has worked with musicians including Merzbow, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love, Okkyung Lee, C. Spencer Yeh, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O’Rourke, and Mats Gustafsson, adapting his methods to collaborators without losing his appetite for physical sound.
Marhaug’s work also extends beyond recordings into the complete architecture surrounding them. Labels, books, photographs, layouts, printed matter, and historical documentation are not promotional accessories added after the music. They are part of the same creative practice. Re-Make Re-Model therefore arrives not merely as two compact discs, but as a hundred-page hardcover publication containing track notes, correspondence-like commentary, photographs, video stills, artwork, biographies, and Russell’s essay about collaboration and noise.
The first disc contains eight reconstructions made by Marhaug from Russell’s work. The second contains eight made by Russell from Marhaug. This division allows each artist to occupy an entire side of the argument before the roles reverse. The source artist becomes a hidden collaborator whose earlier decisions remain embedded inside the new piece without controlling its final behavior.
Even the track titles have been remodeled. “Nigerian Delta Oil Well Blues” becomes “Turntable Oil Blues.” Marhaug’s Nothing But Sound from Now On reappears somewhere inside Russell’s “Nothing But Wolf from Now On.” Spaghetti Western Rainbow mutates into “Spaghetti Western Fireside.” Titles retain enough of their ancestors to suggest a family relationship, but the altered words announce that identity has become unstable.
This naming method is funny, but it also acts as archival information. The listener is given a clue without being handed a complete explanation. Anyone familiar with the original catalogs can begin tracing the materials backward, while a newcomer encounters the transformed object first and may discover its source later.
“Turntable Oil Blues” opens Marhaug’s disc by reworking Russell’s “Nigerian Delta Oil Well Blues,” a short piece from 21st Century Field Hollers and Prison Songs. The ascending and descending slides sound as though a turntable is being slowed and accelerated, yet those motions were already present in Russell’s source. Marhaug plays the original at the wrong speed and progressively distorts repeated passes through it.
This is both remix and practical joke. The title encourages the listener to imagine a particular technology producing the instability, while the source contains that instability before Marhaug touches it. He then exaggerates the illusion until the distinction between the original gesture and the remixer’s treatment becomes difficult to locate.
The track establishes one of the album’s central questions: at what point does transformation become composition? If a piece is replayed at another speed, distorted, layered, and progressively altered, the resulting work remains dependent upon the original. Yet its duration, shape, pressure, and emotional effect have been created by the person conducting the transformation.
Authorship becomes less like ownership of a solid object and more like responsibility for a chain of decisions.
“Structures of Dominion and Democracy” suggests that even political systems might be approached as signal processing. Dominion imposes order from above; democracy supposedly distributes agency among participants. A studio reconstruction can contain both impulses. Marhaug controls the material absolutely while permitting Russell’s source to retain enough independence to resist him.
“Everything Wrong With Guitar” turns instrumental error into a possible program. Russell’s long relationship with the electric guitar has rarely depended upon conventional clarity. Feedback, malfunction, cheap equipment, unstable amplification, room noise, improper technique, and accidental interference can reveal properties that a perfectly managed signal would conceal. Marhaug’s title treats these supposed failures as an inventory of desirable features.
The phrase also contains affectionate criticism. To remake someone else’s guitar work is to hear its habits from outside. What one artist experiences as instinct may become raw material to another. Marhaug can isolate, exaggerate, or contradict aspects Russell might never have separated from his own performance.
“Piano and Delhi Amp Battle” presents the album’s competitive principle almost as cartoon combat. Instruments and amplification systems are placed in opposition, but a battle between them cannot produce a normal winner. The amplifier may overwhelm the piano, yet the piano supplies the material that allows the amplifier’s distortion to become legible. Victory requires the opponent to remain present.
“Masters of Time” points toward the primary authority held by anyone working with recorded sound. Tape, digital files, turntables, samplers, and editing systems allow time to be repeated, reversed, elongated, compressed, interrupted, and layered against itself. A performer experiences time once; a recording artist can force the moment to undergo repeated interrogation.
This authority is never complete. Old media introduce their own rhythms through hiss, flutter, decay, mechanical tolerance, lost data, and damage. The operator may imagine control while the equipment quietly composes beside him.
“Aquarium Acorn, Less Bruce” has the structure of an instruction delivered after a dream. It suggests reduction, substitution, and perhaps the comic possibility of removing Russell from Russell’s own recording. Yet no reconstruction here can completely subtract the source artist. Even silence created by removing his material is shaped by what occupied that space before.
“Kick Out the Landscape” treats environment as something that can be expelled rather than documented. Field recording is often discussed as though a microphone neutrally captures a place. In reality, every landscape is already edited by microphone position, weather, equipment, duration, human attention, and the frequencies the recorder fails to preserve. Marhaug’s title seems to propose a landscape recording whose landscape has been forcibly removed, leaving only the mechanism of removal.
The first disc ends with the sixteen-minute “No More Storage Call Me,” the longest piece in the entire collection. Its title sounds like a corrupted telephone message, an exhausted hard drive, a failed commercial slogan, or an instruction generated by several unrelated fragments colliding. The duration gives Marhaug room to turn transformation into inhabitable space. The listener no longer hears a source being treated moment by moment. The treatment becomes a new environment with its own internal weather.
Russell begins the second disc with “Nothing But Wolf from Now On,” a title that rewrites one of the best-known phrases in Marhaug’s catalog. Replacing “sound” with “wolf” changes abstraction into animal presence. Sound can refer to everything audible; a wolf introduces appetite, fear, territory, myth, pack behavior, extinction, and the unseen creature heard beyond the edge of safety.
The title also describes Russell’s approach to Marhaug. He does not merely preserve sound from now on. He releases something living and potentially hostile from inside it.
“The Letter” is based upon material from Marhaug’s Carnival of Souls, created as a soundtrack to a short film with the same title. Russell chopped sections from the original, changed their pitch, pushed the left and right channels out of synchronization, and continued manipulating them until the result became deeply disorienting.
A letter normally travels from one person to another while attempting to preserve meaning across distance. Russell’s version behaves like correspondence damaged in transit. Sentences arrive out of alignment. One side of the message reaches the listener before the other. The original communication remains present, but its timing has been altered enough to create suspicion.
That method reflects the larger project. Norway sends New Zealand a recording. New Zealand replies with a rearranged version whose channels no longer agree about what happened. The distortion is not a communication failure. It is the reply.
“Slight Violence” offers an almost comic measurement. Violence is ordinarily recognized by consequence rather than degree, yet studio processing allows harm to be administered gradually. A sound can be clipped slightly, stretched slightly, filtered slightly, or subjected to a hundred small alterations whose accumulated effect becomes extreme.
The title may also describe Russell’s preferred relationship with source material. Instead of obliterating Marhaug beneath a single wall of noise, he can apply pressure selectively, preserving enough identity for the listener to hear what is being violated.
“Science Fiction Yachts” brings luxury and speculative technology into the same absurd harbor. A yacht is already a machine designed to remove its owner from ordinary geography and labor. Science fiction enlarges the escape until the vessel may be floating through space, memory, or an entirely synthetic ocean.
Re-Make Re-Model repeatedly uses titles this way, placing familiar objects inside combinations that prevent stable visualization. The sounds perform a similar function. Acoustic traces, electronic processing, distortion, and apparent field material are recognizable individually, but their arrangement produces environments that cannot exist outside the recording.
“Poisoners of Venus” turns the planet associated with love and beauty into the location of contamination. The title could belong to a forgotten paperback, a cheap film serial, or a political allegory disguised as pulp science fiction. Russell has often understood obsolete popular culture as usable philosophical machinery. A ridiculous phrase can carry serious knowledge precisely because it reaches the listener without the protective formality of theory.
“Spaghetti Western Fireside” reworks the title of Marhaug’s Spaghetti Western Rainbow. A rainbow is distant, optical, and impossible to touch. A fireside is local, warm, domestic, and physically dangerous. The title replacement brings the imagined landscape indoors.
The spaghetti western was itself a European reconstruction of American mythology, filmed in one landscape while pretending to represent another. Russell reconstructing Marhaug’s reconstruction continues the chain. Geography becomes performance. Norway encounters New Zealand through an Italian version of the American West, then gathers beside a fictional fire.
“Gotcha!” is the shortest possible description of the project’s competitive pleasure. A successful reconstruction catches the other artist inside his own assumptions. It reveals a property of the source that its creator may not have noticed or forces the original into a context where it behaves unexpectedly.
The exclamation mark matters. This is not detached academic deconstruction. It is a hand appearing from behind the studio door.
“Electric Yangon” closes the album by joining technological voltage with the former capital of Myanmar. Whether the source was instrumental, environmental, documentary, or already heavily processed, the title establishes another impossible location in which electricity becomes geographic atmosphere.
As the final piece, it also prevents the project from returning neatly to either Norway or New Zealand. Re-Make Re-Model ends elsewhere, in a place named by one artist using matter taken from another. The exchange has produced a third territory that belongs completely to neither.
Across its sixteen pieces, the collection moves between heavily processed noise, distortion, drone, manipulated recordings, guitar-related matter, and comparatively sparse or recognizably acoustic sources. The important unity does not come from one sound. It comes from the repeated act of transformation.
This distinguishes the project from a tribute album. Marhaug and Russell do not honor one another by imitating favorite performances or preserving recognizable themes. They honor each other by assuming the material is strong enough to survive mistreatment.
They also resist the modern expectation that collaboration must produce a seamless shared identity. Each disc remains clearly credited to the artist performing the reconstruction. Difference is preserved. Marhaug does not pretend to become Russell, and Russell does not disappear inside Marhaug’s studio language.
The collaboration occurs through disagreement.
One artist proposes a sound.
The other hears another possibility inside it.
That possibility is returned as a challenge.
The process begins again.
The hundred-page book makes this chain visible. Track notes explain the sources and methods, often allowing the original artist to comment upon what was done to his work. Russell’s essay considers the project’s origins and the nature of collaboration. Marhaug contributes photographs made while traveling between home and studio, while Russell supplies still images from a video work created during the same broad period.
The physical edition therefore functions as an archive of an archive being altered. The compact discs contain transformations of earlier recordings. The book contains explanations, reactions, photographs, and visual residues surrounding those transformations. Even the digital edition includes the publication as a PDF, preserving the idea that the writing and images are not detachable promotional extras.
The limited run of three hundred copies intensifies the object’s archival quality. This is a substantial hundred-page book carrying almost ninety-nine minutes of sound, yet only a small number of physical copies enter circulation. The release may eventually become another scarce source for future artists to copy, digitize, misremember, and remodel.
That possibility is already implicit in the title. Re-Make Re-Model inevitably recalls the idea that no form needs to remain final. A model is something to follow, but also something provisional, constructed so it can be examined and altered. To remake is not necessarily to improve. It is to discover which properties appear only after the object has been forced through another mind.
Noise music is often described as destruction, but this album demonstrates how generative destruction can be. The original recordings remain available. Nothing has been erased from history. The new pieces create additional routes into the catalogs, encouraging listeners to move backward, compare sources, and hear familiar recordings through the knowledge of what another artist found hidden there.
Anyone who already knows the Russell and Marhaug discographies will possess another layer of listening. Source fragments may emerge unexpectedly, titles may reveal private jokes, and a process described in the book may change how a passage is understood. Listeners who recognize further origins or studio methods should leave those clues behind. This is a record built for comparison, argument, correction, and continued excavation.
Re-Make Re-Model is a friendship expressed through sabotage.
Each artist receives the other’s history.
Neither returns it undamaged.
That is the gift.
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