I read that Blaerg is an anagram for ‘garble’. How did you come up with this name?
Quite honestly it was a nonsense word i uttered once while yawning. My wife found it to be extremely funny so it became an oft-repeated thing around the house. So the word was drifting around in my head about the time I started toying with the idea of production, and once I started creating tracks and using it as a moniker (It was one certain way to ensure I wouldn’t end up with a duplicate name – who would want to use that stupid word?), I was told that “blarg” was onomatopoeia for vomiting in the Norwegian language. It was also an excuse to use the ash grapheme (Æ) for no reason at all, other than it looks cool. After years using this name, a friend pointed out that it was an anagram for “garble” (Pria gets credit in the Dysphoric liner notes). An anagram is a rearrangement, garble means rearrangement, my music is an exercise in rearrangement – perfect!
I found your limited EP, Auspices & Vagaries, to be a lot more musical then the darker Dysphoric Sonorities. Would you agree? And which one of these styles of breakcore do you enjoy making the most?
I would say Auspices is more directly melodious, but not more musical. I always think of certain things I would like to accomplish with my tracks, but I find my attempts usually fail completely and I end up with some other strange result that is equally, if not more, pleasing. I think some people can have a mental conception of a track and then execute it, but this is not something i’m able to do. Instead I merely collect a disparate amount of elements together and see if they pastiche favorably. I trust this process and let the samples tell me where they’d like to go. So, the most enjoyable part of the process is after all the samples have been collected and loaded into the sequencer and the first melodies are constructed. There is a “eureka!” moment where I think “this will work!” and then I proceed to flesh out the tune, which is a very energizing and life-affirming activity for me.
So is that live bass guitar that I’m hearing on some tracks? What about percussion? Where do you get your drum samples from?
Nope! Recording is a whole extra process that I find tedious, so I prefer to glean samples from whatever happens to cross my ear, which is as often music I love as it is music I loathe. I am especially enamored with “clean” drum sounds from dry-sounding jazz recordings, but anything is fair game: sample packs, horrible commercial pop music, death metal, ethnic sounds.
Who are your musical influences, and who would you like to collaborate with in the future if given an opportunity?
I will state for the record that my favorite album of all time is Atheist – Unquestionable Presence. It has energy, technicality, diverse and quick-changing ideas, supremely executed musicianship, incredibly catchy melodies… it is an endlessly inspiring work for me. I also get a lot out of the “big” melodies of Frank Zappa. I wish I could write melodies like that, they just well up a huge emotional reaction every time. I have collaborated in the past with other projects, but for BLÆRG I prefer to control all aspects of the process. I’ll likely stick to that method for the foreseeable future.
What are you working on right now?
A bachelor’s degree in social work, hahaha. It is strange to take a break from producing, but I have some other areas of life that need attention right now and the remaining time isn’t sufficient to work on music properly. If I never complete another BLÆRG track I can feel satisfied about the past work, but I fully intend to continue on with the project at some distant point in the future.
