Billeddikt XVI

Mr. Beautiful

Studelweiss

Sophistimouse Can Do It

Sungrip

Knotselstack

Fear of the Unknown

Everywhere

Swimming in the Heart of Aspic

Family Values

Ridittle

Look Into the Moon Eye

The Death of Rock & Roll

PopuLiszt Music

Love of the Common Products

Wankeldudl

Fear of the Known

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

– Vincent van Gogh

“I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it.”

– Vincent van Gogh

Freak Out!

We’re Only in It for the Money

Uncle Meat

Hot Rats

The Grand Wazoo

Bongo Fury

Sheik Yerbouti

Joe’s Garage

You Are What You Is

Civilization Phaze III

Snåsamannen 17. januar 2017: “Trump blir skutt.”

Kvinneguiden Forum 24. januar 2021: “Snåsamannen tok helt feil om Trump.”

Donald Trump 13. juli 2024: “Jeg ble skutt.”

Deep State

Conspiracy Theory I

Conspiracy Theory II

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”

– Albert Einstein

Does anyone believe that the “assassination” of Trump was not staged to make fun of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?

Born to Run

I look at the idiots of mankind with amusement.

A TRIBUTE TO THE PROJECT “NORSKE ALBUMKLASSIKERE”

It’s hard to believe that Norwegians
once were artistic
and creative people maybe,
but they were.

When Elvis came on the scene in the 1950s,
something happened.
People wanted to rock’n’roll.

When The Beatles came on the scene in the 1960s,
it was another explosion.
People wanted to be artistic.

And then came the 60s revolution,
with the psychedelics and the hippies,
and people wanted to be free.

The 1970s and the 80s and the 90s.
That’s a great period for Norwegian music.
There were so much going on.

Art, poetry, theatre, music.

And by the 2000s,
with the arrival of the tech-age
and neo-conformism,
it was over.

Ding Dang

Deepfake Ocean Tooth

Spøkesjel für Kakylji

Yasser Arafat i et palestinaskjerf? Nei, han råkker!

Fear No Evil

Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Arrow

Braindance

El Punktus Has Got It

A tribute to human shortcomings, the root of all evil. A little brain with big thoughts that falls short in practice.

The left side of multimillionaire Hollywood celebrities are coming out to endorse Kamala Harris, hot on the heels of Joe Biden. And the right endorses Donald Trump. I hope We The People know who to vote for! But I think this is going to be difficult for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The mainstream media ignores him, so you have to be an analyst to even know he’s a candidate.

As the human world only gets darker and more colorless (and thus makes my personal problems even bigger than they already are), my paintings only get brighter and more vibrantly colorful. Thanks for the inspiration, you rotten eggs!

Longing for Death

The Gathering

You Wanna Fight?!?

Rocky Balboa vs. Vincent van Gogh

In Wilderspock

Hekekkle ke for beginners

MUSIC HEAD

I have been excessively interested in music for fifty years.
I was almost born that way.
I can’t sing or play myself,
but I have a drive to listen to other people’s music.
And to collect records.
I dont know why. It’s just the way I am.

I’m glad I still have my record collection
of vinyl and CDs.
Through rough times
I have had the opportunity to keep it
in my mother’s basement.
There have been periods where it stood and dusted down,
when I was tired of music
and needed silence,
but in recent years I have enjoyed it a lot again.

Having a favorite artist
is an intense relationship.
People and friends and partners
and neighbors and colleagues
and aquaintances
come and go,
but your favorite artist remains.
There’s only one David Bowie,
one Prince, one The Beatles,
so there’s no one to replace them with,
if music is your life.
It is what separates music
from everything else.
They have this talent
that is greater than themselves.
If they are douchebags in real life,
like most of us,
it doesn’t matter.
The artist on stage triumphs
over the shortcomings
of the person backstage,
as long as you stick
to the saying;

“You should never meet your heroes.”

Thought I’d try to make a top ten list
(in no particular order)
of my favorite singers, musicians,
songwriters, composers
and bandleaders,
all these years later, or at least this week.
The artists that I always return to on my stereo
with the same vim and vigor
and admiration for their artistic output.
But ten was too skimpy.
I needed thirteen.
My lucky number.

And forgive my bad English.
I understand that it’s annoying to read,
but I’m trying to perfect
my own kind of broken English
or Norwenglish.

For me, grammar is a wonderland,
not a textbook.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART

If I put on “Trout Mask Replica” (1969) with others, they want it taken off. They refuse to listen to it. But putting it on for myself makes me want to draw and paint and write. Don Van Vliet AKA Captain Beefheart opens up my imagination. And I love him for it. I am also a fan of his paintings. It’s not celebrity art. It compliments his music, which was always as much influenced by painters as it was by musicians. To this day, many listeners wonder if he could really sing and play and write music, because his sense of rhythm is so disjointed. Captain Beefheart didn’t care what was considered good art or good music, he just wanted to express himself. A true original. “Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)” (1978) is a personal favorite of mine. It’s such a fun album. He also made two slightly more straight blues rock records in 1974, which I think are underrated. “Bluejeans & Moonbeams” and “Unconditionally Guaranteed”. It shows a more vulnerable Captain Beefheart, or Don Van Vliet behind the clown mask perhaps.

ELVIS PRESLEY

“Solid Gold” (1975). A compilation. I got the LP for Christmas in 1976. I count it as the first record in my collection. Right from the start I liked physical records. I’m interested in music.. and records. The songs on the record are 70’s Elvis and not 50’s Elvis, so already in my childhood I liked his 70’s ballads as much as the 50’s rockers. He is my favorite singer. The greatest singer in the history of music, in my opinion. And his 60s soundtrack albums are underrated, I think. He tried to sing all sorts of styles, like waltzes and bossanovas and tangos and Latin music and Middle Eastern music, etc. etc. It’s entertainment more than inspired works of art, but it’s fun to listen to if you don’t take it too seriously. “Elvis Presley” (1956), the first true rock album is essential in every record collection. In addition to compilation albums with famous hits, I think “Elvis’ Christmas Album” (1957), “Elvis Is Back!” (1960), “His Hand In Mine” (1960), “From Elvis in Memphis” (1969), “That’s the Way It Is” (1970), “Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old)” (1971) and “Moody Blue” (1977) are important Elvis albums. If you are super duper curious about his recording history, I recommend the 60CD box set “The RCA Album Collection” (2016) and the 5CD box set “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Complete 50’s Masters (1992), with all the early Sun Records recordings in chronology plus more.

SCOTT WALKER

As you get older, the excitement around new pop rock music starts to wane. You’ve heard it before, sort of. And if you are actively interested in music, you have also developed your understanding of music, so that you have opened yourself up to more advanced music, so to speak. In the early 21st century, Scott Walker is my favorite recording artist. Hearing a new album coming out from him was like rediscovering music: “Tilt” (1995), “The Drift” (2006), “Bish Bosch” (2012), “Soused” (2014). I love it. This is a creative artist who takes it all the way and creates his own poetic universe. And that voice! One of the finest ever. I’m just as big a fan of his early records in the 1960s (and teenybopper 50s), and what he did with The Walker Brothers. If you want to hear Scott Walker in full beautiful baritone voice without too much theatrical experimentation, I recommend “Scott 3” (1969), “Scott 4” (1969), “‘Til the Band Comes In” (1970), “Stretch” (1973), “We Had It All” (1974) and “Lines” [with The Walker Brothers] (1976) . They have everything from lush orchestrated ballads and Jacques Brel covers to country pop songs

MILES DAVIS

Miles Davis is the ultimate music head. From the first recordings in 1945 to the last in 1991, there is not a single lazy ‘rock holiday’ album. Everything is on fire. He is the most inclusive bandleader in music history, giving songwriting credit to his musicians as much as to himself. He could leave the stage for fifteen minutes to let the band play freely and improvise on their own and then come back in and join the trip, like a guest at his own concert. Call it jazz. Miles Davis called it directions in music. Jazz purists hate his poppy 1980s music, but I dig it myself. “You’re Under Arrest” (1985). I bought it when it came out and it became my door to the world of jazz. “‘Round About Midnight” (1957), “Kind of Blue” (1959), “Sketches of Spain” (1960), “E.S.P.” (1965), “In a Silent Way” (1969), “Bitches Brew” (1970). There is no good record collection without them. And that’s just the beginning. I have everything from obscure soundtracks to recordings with Charlie Parker in the 1940s to the 70CD box set The Complete Columbia Album Collection in my record collection.

JOHN LENNON

I choose John Lennon to be my favorite the greatest songwriter in music history, even if Bob Dylan is a contender. His songs have endless appeal to me. He’s written some of the catchiest songs, some of the saddest songs and some of the angriest songs in pop and rock music. He was a rocker and an avant gardist, a rebel and an art student, honest as an open book and a hypocrite. What more could you want from a songwriter who uses all sides of himself to write them? The Beatles were my first obsession with music. I had all the studio albums on LP before I was a teenager. It was about the only thing I wanted for Christmas and birthdays in the late 1970s. I also like what he did with Yoko Ono including “Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins”. It’s not necessarily that good to listen to, but I like the creative idea. It’s a good record to think about. John & Yoko’s “Double Fantasy” (1980) was the only Lennon album that I had the pleasure of hearing on release, so it means a lot to me. The personal nerve in “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” can be touched and felt. John Lennon was a lot of things and that suits me just fine. I’m not going to say how many records I have with The Beatles and The Ex-Beatles in total, because I actually don’t know. I haven’t counted.

PRINCE

Being a fan of Prince in the 1980s is the closest I’ll get to being a fan of David Bowie in the 70s or The Beatles in the 60s. I was at the perfect age for “Purple Rain” (1984) when it came out. Both the film and the soundtrack. And the excitement of the albums he released afterwards.. He was on a roll where everything he touched became a masterpiece. Some people call Prince an 80s artist, but I don’t think so. He was a true original in the world of popular culture, writing the weirdest songs in a decade of pop clichés that were nevertheless as magically catchy as they were strangely popular. And it doesn’t stop there. Just the hitmaker. “I am music”, Prince once said. And it is believable. Everything he released between 1978 and 2015 is worth a listen, for better or worse. “Controversy” (1981), “Purple Rain” (1984), “Around the World in a Day” (1985), “Parade” (1986), “Sign “☮︎” the Times” (1987), “Lovesexy” (1988), “The Gold Experience” (1995), “The Rainbow Children” (2001), “Musicology” (2004), “3121” (2006), “Planet Earth” (2007) and “Hit n Run Phase Two” (2015), are my favorite Prince albums (right now). The three albums he made as Prince and the Revolution have my favorite psychedelic sound, although he played with more virtuoso musicians later, like in the funky and jazzy New Power Generation. There’s a unique ramshackle charm to the band-sound of The Revolution. Not only as a backing band for Prince but in pop and rock history.

DAVID BOWIE

Bowie was popular with my schoolmates in the early 1980s. Ten years before, he had conquered the glam rock generation with “Ziggy Stardust” (1972), and now he did it again with “Ashes to Ashes” (1980). He was still seen as somewhat of a freak. The dark Berlin-trilogy was a new language in music, and it scared listeners. I don’t think that we thought that he was a normal person at all, lol, but we liked him. Then came “Let’s Dance” (1983) and everybody screamed sell-out, except me. I loved it. The punchy drums, the soaring blues guitar licks by Stevie Ray Vaughan weaving around the spot on rhythm section and Bowie’s powerful voice in the front. Then came two decades of everyone saying ‘the best album since “Scary Monsters” (1980)’ with every single release. But Bowie was a true music head. His records in the 90s were very creative and against all odds, his debut album from 1967 sounds better than ever. It’s more cabaret than rock. Good humour. “David Bowie” (1967), “Hunky Dory” (1971), “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” (1972), “Diamond Dogs” (1974), “Station to Station” (1976), “Low” (1977), “Heroes” (1977), “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” (1980), “Tin Machine” (1989), “Black Tie White Noise” (1993), “Earthling” (1997), “Heathen (2002) and “Blackstar” (2016). There is no record collection without a decent overview of Bowie’s entire recording career, not just the 70s. I like all his records including the weakest ones in the 80’s.

FRANK ZAPPA

Zappa was big in Norway when I was twelve. “Bobby Brown” (1979) was number one on the singles charts and “Joe’s Garage, Act I” (1979) topped the album charts. It was mostly older teenagers and twenty-somethings who listened to him. I remember his older fans thought it was too commercial. I liked “Sheik Yerbouti” (1979). I liked Zappa’s voice, but musically it was quite complicated and I was not a dedicated Zappa fan in my youth. I listened more to simpler arty pop or faster rock songs and/or soppy ballads. Not so much jazz fushion.. yet. But all these years later, I have about 40 Zappa/The Mothers albums in my collection that I listen to regularly. And I would definitely rank Frank Zappa as one of my favorite artists, musicians, bandleaders. Zappa was more like an inventor of music, rather than a songwriter or composer. The records he released with the original line-up of The Mothers of Invention between 1966 and 1970 are the funniest. It was a comical bunch of freaks, lol. After this phase, the musical aspect of Zappa’s music became a bit more serious with virtuoso musicians, but the sarcastic humor is the same, or maybe even more precise. “Hot Rats” (1969), “The Grand Wazoo” (1972), “Over-Nite Sensation” (1973), “One Size Fits All” (1975), the already mentioned Yerbouti and Joe’s Garage, “You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol. 1” (1988), “The Yellow Shark” [with Ensemble Modern], and the posthumous “Civilization Phaze III” (1994), are all waiting for you at your local record store to come and pick them up.

BRIAN WILSON

I choose Brian Wilson to represent my favorite pop music genius, even if Paul McCartney and Barry Gibb are in the Guinness Book of Records for their amount of hits. But even for popular culture, it’s not all about sales and popularity. Not for me anyway. It is just as much about the art of music. And I like underdogs. In the 80s when I was growing up, “Pet Sounds” (1966) was the only album by The Beach Boys that was mentioned in the music magazines with artistic respect. Everything after that was seen as a crash landing. In the late 90s, all their studio albums were reissued as twofer CDs, with two original LPs for the price of one CD. For some reason I wanted to get hold of them all and listen to them. And I did. It left me totally flabbergasted. I thought “Friends” (1968), “Sunflower” (1970), “Surf’s Up” (1971), “Holland” (1973) and “Love You” (1977) were or were close to musical masterpieces. And let’s not forget his underrated solo career. An album as late as “No Pier Pressure” (2015) sounds good to my ears, even if it received bad reviews in the music press. It makes me SMiLE.

ROBERT WYATT

In the 90s, I was introduced to progressive rock by a drummer in a way that I hadn’t listened to that type of music before, even though I liked Yes, for example. He put on the first Soft Machine album from 1968. There was so much going on musically that I felt dizzy, lol. But I liked it. Robert Wyatt was the drummer, singer and frontman in the psychedelic 60s version of the jazz-rock band. And while I also thought what they made after he quit (or got fired) in 1971 was musically good too, there was something about Robert Wyatt that interested me and made me check out his solo career, like the mighty “Rock Bottom” (1974). It was slower music with more open spaces. Wyatt broke his back in 1973 and was confined to a wheelchair, which forced him to make music in a different way than the ferocious drummer he had been before. “Shleep” is one of my favorite 90s albums. And “Cuckooland” (2003), “Comicopera” (2007) and ‘…For the Ghosts Within’ [as Wyatt/Atzmon/Stephen] (2010) remain some of my favorite records of the early 21st Century, before he decided to retire from his music career in 2014.

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA

I have discovered the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla in the last ten years, so he’s not one of those musicians that go way back to my youth, but my discovery of his progressive music came with such force (and ease of tinnitus) that I now consider him among my favorite musicians. “Tango: Zero Hour” (1986). It’s one of those 80s albums that I didn’t discover until thirty years later. An absolute musical masterpiece, which really has nothing to do with the musical trends of the 80s. No synth, no bombastic drum machines (which can be cool enough when it suits the music), but just a bunch of incredible musicians and a master of the bandoneon. My purchase of the CD box set “The American Clavé Recordings” (2022) with three of his most groundbreaking albums of the 80s, including “Tango: Zero Hour” (1986), “La Camorra” (1989) and “The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (Tango Apasionado)” (1988) sealed my new found faith in the late-career masterpieces of Astor Piazzolla (and the New Tango Quintet). And this man’s musical genius can be traced back to recordings in the 1940s.

DAEVID ALLEN

As with Robert Wyatt, I discovered Daevid Allen in the 1990s with a newfound interest in progressive rock. They both came from the legendary Canterbury Scene. The 80s and the 90s represented a simplification of music. Musicianship became unfashionable. All the progressive rock bands of the 70s came crashing into the 80s. The record companies demanded big hits and million-selling records. The 80s were a pop decade. And the 90s were metal and hip hop and techno. On the charts (to date) there wasn’t much music that was imaginative or intricate and detailed. It was about spewing sound and beats per minute. To my ears, hearing Daevid Allen’s Gong was a breath of fresh air. As with soft Machine, I was dizzy at first, lol, because there was so much going on musically. It took a few listens to get into it. Daevid Allen didn’t just make Gong music, he created a whole world around it, called Planet Gong with strange creatures like The Pot Head Pixies. It was all very hippie and in the 70s they were as much a collective as they were a band. Daevid Allen remained a lifelong hippie-spirit. The classic Gong albums were made in the 70s with “Camembert Electrique” (1971) and the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy “Flying Teapot” (1973), “Angel’s Egg” (1973) and “You” (1974).

After a period out of the band, Daevid Allen’s Gong made a strong comeback in the 2000s with albums such as “Zero to Infinity” (2000), “2032” (2009) and “I See You” (2014). Allen died in 2015 (and co-founder Gilli Smyth in 2016), but wanted the band to continue without him, and they did. He was not just a mystic. A solo album like “Dreamin’ a Dream” (1995) is straight up socially critical about life on planet Earth without attributing it to a fantasy world. I recommend the posthumous release “Elevenses” (2016) with The Daevid Allen Weird Quartet, if you like psychedelic rock ala Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, which was Daevid Allen’s great musical inspiration. The art of glissando guitar which is a technique first invented by Syd Barrett and developped by Daevid Allen who made it his trademark.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

It was tempting to choose Rachmaninov for this list because I’ve been listening to a lot of his music lately. But I have around twenty records of Bach’s music in my collection and he is probably the most regular on my stereo system in the world of classical composers. The sound of baroque period instruments is very appealing to my ears, like the harpsichord. Nowadays music geeks, for example, call the synthesized 1980s production dated, as they do with anything that has what I call a period sound. I don’t like to use the word dated on music. The harpischord was a predecessor of the piano, but that doesn’t mean it has expired. It has a distinctive sound that stands on its own legs. In the mid-1960s, the harpsichord was also used in a rock context, later called baroque pop. It can be heard on records by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, etc. I love this period when the bands used a lot of non-rock instruments. It is interesting how things can be resurrected three hundred years later in a context other than that in which they were originally used. The Brandenburg Concertos (1721) rocks and rolls. And so does the Harpsichord Concertos (1715). I play the Christmas Oratorio (1734) in December and the St. John Passion (1724) at Easter. Glenn Gould’s The Goldberg Variations are legendary.

I worked in the sales department for Naxos Records as a temporary substitute for a few months in 2001. I suddenly remembered that when I made Music Head. We all sat in our closed booths where we were handed out information about the records we were going to sell. We were not allowed to listen to the records. On the phone, we were only supposed to repeat what we had read on the notes we were given. It was just about sales and money. If you think classical music is more serious than the pop industry, you’d be in for a surprise, as I was.