The compilation LP SKROT - The New Machine Sound of Odense and the Giedo Primo EP Empty Circles are now almost done and will be released in the beginning of January 2010. Unfortunately the Genespleizer EP Skrotwerk will have to wait a little longer due to technical difficulties.

Contents of SKROT - The New Machine Sound of Odense:

Side A:
Genespleizer: Skrotstep Live
Strozqnu: Zap
Ekkoregimet: Ekkoskrot
Ras Bolding: Zombiesjæler
Bashcorpo: Friend of Death

Side B:
Papa Stein: UFO'er over Svendborg
Giedo Primo: Mental Maze
Commodore Combat Unit: Puck Man
Hr. Eide: Brain Rape
Organbox: Doctor Clown

The record will also include an insert with the following notes, about skrot music, the musicians participating, and the city of Odense:

SKROT- The Sound of Odense!
It is as if the city of Odense has been caught up in a vicious circle of cultural apathy and brain loss for years; a self-perpetuating minority complex for which there seems only one cure – to get away as soon as possible. This problem may not seem pressing for the bourgeoisie to whom culture and creativity is a question of good taste, nice objects, and ready-made events, but to each new young generation that feels an appetite for the strange and the original, the cultural landscape of the city seems desolate. Even though some choose the spirit of do-it-yourself and create something in Odense, most people, in time, opt for the easier solution and venture to Copenhagen where everything seems within reach. Each and every year ambitious forces within the underground flee the city and it becomes increasingly difficult to establish scenes in Odense, which in turn only makes the temptation of a quick escape so much stronger.

One can only speculate what Odense could offer if the numerous lost generations of talent had stayed in the city and accumulated a mass of creativity. Instead one must take comfort in the positive side effect which is a result of the state of affairs, the fact that those brightly burning candles that stayed behind have shown a tendency towards a unique expression, an expression entirely their own, often unhindered by obvious career compromises.

It seems indeed a possible claim that it is often the strangest and most original of artists who resist the call of the capitol – those who, at the end of the day, do feel a curious kind of love for Odense exactly because of its desolation, those who are not easily impressed by the fast whims and trends of Copenhagen.

During the past years it would seem something of this nature has been happening within the electronic music scene of Odense. A number of very different artists have developed their own attitude towards something that can perhaps be considered a unique and local expression – a loosely connected and very open scene which could maybe go by the name, skrot. Skrot is the Danish expression for scrap, but includes everything from wrecked cars to derelict factories, all of which is present in abundance in the city of Odense.

Skrot music would seem to date back to somewhere around the mid-nineties gabber/hardcore/acid scenes in Odense, rooted in the Gabber Forze club and the series of Gabbatack raves. This scene, however, more or less collapsed around 1997, but many of its core elements continued and mutated over the years to come while new ingredients were added and assimilated into an increasingly more diverse and unique expression. Now, more than ten years later, the result is the sound of skrot which contains elements of everything from gabber and acid through dubstep and breakcore to noise and synth-pop but is neither of these ingredients, really. One might argue the core elements are 8-bit computer game sounds, clattering drum machine beats, and a love of melodious abundance and crazy ideas. Furthermore, skrot music is often live music making the concerts, typically based more or less on analogue hardware and machines, unique experiences. Indeed it would seem concerts are a more vital part of the scene compared to most laptop-based genres as is evident when following the live activities of Odense electronica clubs such as Hørbar and Ørentvist, the goth-club Golem, and the Phono Festival.

It might seem tempting to compare skrot to certain new and related genres such as skweee and wonky, but while these typically exhibit a sense of well-balanced, restrained, and crystal clear digital production, the sound of Odense is far more gritty and dramatic; a punk-version of skweee, perhaps. It is evident; however, that skrot is not retro-recycling of the various elements that find their use within this genre. You may find crazy acid bass lines, bleeping Gameboys and cold electro beats, but these ingredients are not used in an attempt to conjure up a nostalgic pastiche of acid, computer game music or electro. On the contrary these elements are reshaped and reworked, freed of their historical identity and systematised formulas, used instead as autonomous building blocks within the strange constructions of the skrot musicians.

This compilation; showcases most of the Odense skrot scene, from the archetypes to the esoteric eccentrics, from the pioneers to the latest newcomers. Some names are clearly related while others roam the peripheries of the pure skrot sound, and this record very deliberately demonstrates how, in Odense, the creative minds who stay in The Gray City, must work together if they want a scene at all. In a bigger and more self-cool city it would probably not be possible to make a scene around such diverse and unique artists. One can only hope to find more musicians – who will stay – and help make the sound of Odense continuously unique, strong, and multifaceted.

1. Genespleizer: Skrotstep Live (Stengade 30, April 19 2008, edits by Bashcorpo)
If anyone would claim they “invented” skrot music, the duo Genespleizer, debuting in 1996 for the legendary Gabbatack-raves, might be a good bet. Starting out within traditional gabber, Genespleizer mutated during the late nineties, focusing on heavy syncopated machine beats, sinister analogue sounds and grotesque cutup media imagery – the primeval essence of skrot. The band’s activity has been anything but stable, performing the odd concert from time to time, but over the past few years as the skrot scene has grown stronger, Genespleizer is back with a full-blown concept of skrot music. Skrotstep Live captures the wild and chaotic essence of Genespleizer’s concerts where the music constantly mutates and is bombarded by bizarre samples. One might compare the live energy of this track with the studio version found on the Genespleizer ep Skrotwerk co-released with this album.

2. Strozqnu: Zap
Strozqnu is your new favourite pet! Strozqnu is playful, energetic and good for dancing! Strozqnu is an unexpected fusion of natural elements! Strozqnu wants only the best for you and is in no way unhealthy, even at the end of the day! With a line-up consisting of one drummer and three keyboardists rooted in the experimental funk-punk-pop bands Plök and The Spy In The Mes, Strozqnu make up their very own niche within the skrot world of odd melodies and rusty beats. Live on stage Strozqnu transform their old worn-down keyboards into powerful FX-monsters and conjure up a heavy maelstrom of dark energy that will leave you dizzy. However, on the studio take Zap we see a completely different Strozqnu channelling their energy into a piece of electro music that is at once mercilessly ambitious as well as cheerful.

3. Ekkoregimet: Ekkoskrot
One might make the claim that Ekkoregimet represent the most pure essence of skrot music. Not only is the loose structure of the band rooted in other Odense-based skrot acts, the music itself is completely improvised live using a number of hardware machines and boxes. Thus the most consistent members of the band are rumoured to be a Commodore 64, a Gameboy, and a TB303. Ekkoskrot is a small fragment of a live session originally lasting hours and is in many ways the archetypal representation of pure skrot music, meaning raw, rusty, and dirty.

4. Ras Bolding: Zombiesjæler
Imagine something like a skrot crossover phenomenon and you have Ras Bolding. He has roamed the peripheries of the skrot scene ever since its first signs of existence but at the same time he has found a position all his own, successfully merging many of the same elements – metallic industrial sounds, computer game melodies and electro beats – fusing them with a kind of gothic synth-pop. The result is a strange bastard child, very difficult to pin down in words, but a bastard child, which, nonetheless, has found quite a large and diverse audience and definitely is part of the portrait of the Odense underground electronica scene. Bolding’s favourite themes seem to deal with matters such as technology and alienation, but usually sporting more than a hint of dark humour of which Zombiesjæler, sung in Danish and inspired indeed by a Danish children’s book about zombies, is a splendid example.

5. Bashcorpo: Friend Of Death
One half of Genespleizer, Bashcorpo has also done extensive visual design work, documenting skrot aesthetics, making him the leading graphic artist on the skrot scene. His solo music production has been of a more sporadic nature, but it does showcase a splendid control of the classic tracker techniques that dominated home computer-based music production before the success of the laptop. This is obvious on the track Friend Of Death which is a fascinating example of early skrot sound, still rooted in gabber but at the same time displaying an un-mistakenly playful attitude as well as crazy, creative ideas heading for the future.

6. Papa Stein: UFOs Over Svendborg
Rooted in everything from schmaltzy Danish pop and marimba-virtuosity to Gameboy soundtracks and electropop, Papa Stein is a superb example of a provincial background turned into a creative forte rather than a problem. Quite unaffected by trends and hip ideas, he has developed a unique sound that even varies a lot from one track to the other. Not because the music degenerates into lessons in style and genre but simply because Papa Stein’s musical background is so elastic that his sound mutates when needed. Is it skweee? Is it electro? Or chip tunes? Papa Stein’s music shows elements of all these styles, but he typically invents them on his own, from scratch, as with UFOs Over Svendborg which perhaps will make listeners think of Air Liquide, although the track presents a sound all its own. In fact, Papa Stein does not know Air Liquide.

7. Giedo Primo: Mental Maze
While the Bashcorpo half of Genespleizer has focused mostly on visual design, the Giedo Primo half has delved deeper into music. The starting point was analogue hardcore techno but this sound has been developed and reinvented ever since, in time resulting in the first completely purist example of skrot music. The traditional use of 8 bit-sound and drum machines was redefined, the beats turned odd and rusty, the melodies spiralled strangely, and the overall sound combined colourful synthetic aesthetics with a sense of ghost-like lo-fi. The 2007 debut album Infinity Machines Of The Second Moon was the first skrot release proper and it showcased a primarily moody and introvert Giedo Primo. Mental Maze is something quite different, showing off the wild and crazy melodious style that typically makes up the Giedo Primo concert experience and which is also the overall strategy on the ep Empty Circles, released to coincide with this album.

8. Commodore Combat Unit: Puck Man
An energetic live approach and a multifaceted idea of sound has turned Commodore Combat Unit into one of the most central names on the skrot scene within only a few years. Papa Stein’s playful sense of melodies are paired with the wild beats of Interzone who has himself been exploring the borders of skrot, expanding its sounds with inputs from noise, industrial, and dubstep. The main CCU trademark is a raw approach to hardware gear as exemplified by their unpredictable concerts that see them move from floating cosmic soundscapes to brutal psychedelic hardcore with ease, but all the time within the logic of their own deranged style. Puck Man shows CCU at their craziest peak, a full-blown flash of energy that combines 8 bit pop and explosive gabber so efficiently that you would never think they were separate entities in the first place!

9. Hr. Eide: Brain Rape
Hr. Eide is not only one of the latest acts on the Odense underground scene, he is also one of the most obscure and illusive ones. One recognizes the love of rusty analogue hardware, the improvisational approach and the torn-apart sense of aesthetics, but the definitions of skrot are pushed to its limits. Hr. Eide adds elements of industrial collage and psychedelic ambient, and Brain Rape is based on a number of recordings over time then put together into a highly radioactive manifestation, assisted by Interzone.

10. Organbox: Doctor Clown
Organbox was formed in 1999 by Jannik Juhl and Ras Bolding, rooted in their common love of seventies cosmic synth music and the sound of eighties Commodore 64 computer games soundtracks. Over the years the project mutated sound wise several times and Organbox played a both important as well as a strange and different role on the early skrot scene. Right from the beginning, the duo worked with many of the ideas and structures that only now are defining the sound of skrot, but at the same time the band’s activities have been sporadic, the expression undergoing perpetual changes resulting in everything from concerts in public transport busses to focusing on completely improvised electronica live shows in recent years. True to the Organbox nature, Doctor Clown is a song that moves in a new direction and aims for a deliberate over-the-top compositional complexity, as baroque and vulgar as possible. This is perhaps the sound of prog skrot?


The Seven Skrot Wonders Of Odense
It seems fair to conclude that Odense’s eternal “brand” as “fairy tale town” is part of the reason why the city finds it difficult to attract people who want to fight for a vital underground scene. Is it really truly inspiring or useful to creative ambitions when your home city is always defined only as the home of Hans Christian Andersen? Is the tourist-minded rape of a poor, defenseless writer who himself actually left his hometown as soon as possible a wonderful platform for defining and developing new and alternative culture? Is there really room for anything different?

The worst of it is not really the obligatory watered-down sense of ”fairy tale” that is forced down the throats of the citizens – after all it is not much worse than standard Disneyfied entertainment. No, the real problem is the city is losing every sense of an edge, of something unpredictable, in other words a sense of metropolis, instead reducing itself to a suffocating combination of petit bourgeois taste and nostalgic fairy tale scenery. It is a city made for tourists, house owners, and a tasteful creative segment that is hardly there at all, but also a desolate wasteland if you’re looking for the strange, the different, the unknown, if you find inspiration in languishing industrial aesthetics, if you are drawn towards places forgotten, places where the dreams of decay have not yet been destroyed by the excessive desire to please of urban renewal strategies.

Even though it seems impossible for the bourgeoisie and the town hall politicians to understand, part of what makes up the feeling of living in a metropolis are the remnants of an industrial past, left to decay, in time turning into zones of freedom and secrecy. If the city accepts this notion of alternative space instead of opting for repression through trivial consumer goods, a space where you can explore the wreckage of time and dwell on the flotsam of history, it is possible to sustain a cradle of underground creativity. Sometimes these places are used as unique underground venues within vital alternative culture, for concerts, exhibitions and so on, but it is also an essential point that they make up a fascinating “underworld”, an alternative to the nice and well-planned post-modern city space.

This is a fact: The ruthless destruction of these spaces of freedom can only lead to the destruction of local underground culture, and the creative minds that choose a life outside the ready-made mainstream limits will eventually leave the city. Odense will never be able to sustain a segment of creative youth if the city keeps destroying its fascinating concrete attractions and inspiring industrial ruins – all the elements that make Odense something else and more than just another, provincial scenery. This destruction is in itself a loss of culture because over the years Odense has seen a number of fantastic and invaluable skrot sites, most of which are now lost – irretrievably!!!

Here is a list of seven of the most fantastic skrot wonders of Odense – of which only one is still standing. It is our hope that the city shall never again destroy more of its important cultural heritage.

1: The Glassworks
This place was a world all its own, a strange and wondrous zone full of secrets and absolute beauty. The destruction of the glassworks ruin to make room for boring urban renewal was one of the first and most prominent examples of the city’s blind destruction of its own industrial heritage.

2: The Erik Car
Not only did this car wreck, named after prominent Danish cult actor and singer Erik Paaske, develop a shape so unnatural that it deserved preservation, it was also left to rot for years and turned into a unique and deeply fascinating monument; a monument which was eventually, and suddenly, removed, leaving only the memory of a legend.

3: The Freezer Warehouse
A dark and unreal cavern within the everyday life of the city. A cathedral of ice-cold concrete and metal.

4: The Skrot Farm
Located near a modern residential area, this abandoned overgrown farm, surrounded by rusty agricultural machines, served as a link between Odense of the present and its not so distant past when much of what today are city spaces where rural farm-areas. Today the farm has been demolished, and the place turned into yet another nice triviality.

5: The Sniffing Factory
An abandoned factory outside the centre of town that experienced a brief moment of stardom before it was “discovered” by a local newspaper, which immediately started a smear campaign that inevitably resulted in the quick and effective destruction of another of Odense’s skrot wonders.

6: The Meat Factory
What could have turned into a new glassworks wonder was destroyed after but a few months when the city decided to wreck the docks, that is transforming the entire port area into yet another trivial residential area for the well-to-do. But for a brief moment in time Odense had one of the most marvellous skrot wonders imaginable, an endless labyrinth of unknown rooms and corridors, unfathomable dimensions.

7: The Ammonia Globe
The only real landmark in Odense. Through years and years of wind and rain and numerous decorations, the Ammonia Globe by the docks has taken on a sculptural character. In addition to its outstanding beauty it has also gained importance as a locating and defining landmark of and for Odense, not unlike the pyramids of Egypt. To destroy the Ammonia Globe would be the very essence of idiocy, short-sightedness, and cultural callousness so profound that one could indeed compare it with the hypothetical destruction of the pyramids.