Alog

Under the Alog moniker, Tromsø-born Dag-Are Haugan (1970) and Oslo-born Espen Sommer Eide (1972) fuse home-studio captures, analogue instruments, laptop processing, and painstaking post-production into an unusual hybrid. The project name arose when the pair chose to appropriate the BASF logo for sleeve art and therefore required a four-letter title; they later reflected that the choice may also have nodded to the word “analog.” Paralleling Eide’s Phonophani work—which equates public suspicion of genetic engineering with widespread distrust of sample-based music—the duo maintains no “sound hierarchy,” freely mixing their own performances with samples and found material. Their partnership first took shape in a Tromsø kindergarten basement, where they assembled gear once the children had left for the day; among the equipment was Eide’s laptop holding unused samples drawn from his father’s big-band record collection. Live, Eide operates under the self-applied tag “Digitalman” on a pair of laptops while Haugan, calling himself “Analogman,” handles analogue synth and draws a double-bass bow across a cymbal; these divisions soften in the studio. Both Eide’s Phonophani recordings and Haugan’s solo work feed into Alog, supplying concepts as well as concrete sounds. The track “As Complicated And As Beautiful As Always,” included on the 2001 album Duck-Rabbit, was conceived as an homage to My Bloody Valentine and laid down a decade after the release of that band’s Loveless; the guitar-like timbres, however, actually originate from a Commodore 64 game soundtrack.