* Deluxe 88 pages offset printed CMYK, sewn-glued binding, and folded flaps cover *  Building upon and furthering his efforts in attending to the contemporary landscape of music via insightful texts, from the ashes of his longstanding zine, Personal Best, Lasse Marhaug delivers his brand new outing in periodical publishing with the first installment of 8090 VÅG, Nothing Personal. Comprising interviews with Ronny Wærnes, Stina Stjern; Mental Overdrive, Government Alpha, Fredrik Nilsen, Jérôme Noetinger, Michèle Bokanowski, Ralf Wehowsky, and Jim O'Rourke, collectively covering a wealth of diverse subjects, ranging from Faust, analog tape process, techno, Japanese noise, the Los Angeles Free Music Society, Metamkine's 1990's Cinéma Pour L'Oreille 3"CD-series, numerous disciplines of visual art and publishing, and a whole lot more. With 8090 VÅG Marhaug ups his own game across the volume's incredible 88 pages, activating it as a vehicle for his efforts as a photographer, writer, and graphic designer, contributing one of the most striking, visually engaging, and informative publications active today.

Toward the end of 2024, much to our sadness, the Norwegian polymath musician, writer, designer, photographer, and publisher, Lasse Marhaug, announced the tenth and final issue of his longstanding zine, Personal Best, culminating a run that collectively comprised 85 interviews across a towering 1000 pages, appearing over the previous 13 years. Having loved Personal Best every step of the way, it felt like the end of an era, but Marhaug quietly hinted that new and exciting things were afoot. Just over a year later, he delivers on that promise with the first issue of his brand new, annual publication 8090 VÅG. Playfully subtitled Nothing Personal in a nod to its predecessor, 8090 VÅG builds upon Personal Best's dedication to the long-form interview, accompanied photos and artwork, but adds the inclusion of written pieces within a complete redesign, issued as 88 offset printed pages, overflowing with full color photos, sewn-glue bound in a deluxe folded flaps cover. Not to be outdone, even by Marhaug's own past, this incredibly ambitious volume gathers extensive interviews with Ronny Wærnes, augmented by photos of Faust's visit to Norway in 2006; Stina Stjern; Mental Overdrive; Government Alpha, accompanied by a wealth of recent and archival photographs, as well as collages by Yasutoshi Yoshida; Fredrik Nilsen, augmented by extensive historical photographic documentation of his activities in the Los Angeles Free Music Society; and a deep dive into Metamkine's 1990's Cinéma Pour L'Oreille 3"CD-series via an interview with its curator Jérôme Noetinger, accompanied by complementary interviews on the same subject with Michèle Bokanowski, Ralf Wehowsky, Jim O'Rourke, extensive photographic documentation of the series, and texts attending to each of its releases. As if that wasn't enough to satiate our appetites, threaded across the length of 8090 VÅG Marhaug's practices as a writer and visual artist emerge into center stage via brilliant introductory texts to each interview and extensive photographs, not only of many of the issues featured artists, but also of landscapes and circumstance within which he exists. While it was hard to imagine that he might top the lofty heights achieved by Personal Best, Marhaug has proved himself to be nothing short of a visionary, polymathic force to be reckoned with, doing exactly that with the first issue of 8090 VÅG. It sets a new bar for independently run periodicals, the likes of which currently exist nowhere else.

Since his emergence into the global landscape of experimental sound and music during the early 1990s, Lasse Marhaug has remained one of the contexts most radical and ambitious creative voices, spanning the fields of noise, free improvisation, jazz, rock, and metal, producing a remarkable catalog of solo work as well as collaborations with Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love, C. Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, Otomo Yoshihide, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Mats Gustafsson, and a slew of others. Remarkably, Marhaug's efforts don't end there. The years have encountered him working prolifically within the fields of dance, art installations and video art, as well as graphic design (notably both Personal Best and 8090 VÅG are entirely designed by him) as well as working as an organizer, promoter, and producer, and founding running numerous labels: TWR Tapes, Jazzassin Records, Pica Disk, and Prisma Records. More recently his efforts as a photographer have begun to enter the broader consciousness and, back in 2011, he took his expansive efforts one step further with the launch of Marhaug Forlag, his own print publishing venture, which gave way to his writing the absolutely fantastic, interview based fanzine Personal Best, which, over its 13 year run until late 2024, remained one of the most remarkable publications addressing the contemporary sonic landscape.

Much like its predecessor, 8090 VÅG - Marhaug Forlag's latest venture into the publication of serialized periodicals - departs from the position of offering incredible artists the platform to talk about their own work and experiences, via interviews conducted by Lasse Marhaug. If left at this alone, one might naturally wonder why the artist decide to draw the line under Personal Best. But, the gesture in itself illuminates how conceptually focussed and meticulous Marhaug is. While certainly building upon and related to his previous outing as a publisher, 8090 VÅG is also another thing entirely, allowing for greater scope in its contexts as well as more inclusivity of the artist's many practices, notably as both a writer and photographer. It's hard not to notice this instantly when cracking up its debut installment.

Subtitled Nothing Personal, the first issue of 8090 VÅG begins, rather than a predictable table of contents, with a fantastic run of Marhaug's landscape photographs, designed to seamlessly spill over from its cover, before launching in with an incredibly illuminating, in-depth interview with the musician Ronny Wærnes, who in addition to running the longstanding Norwegian festival, Nødutgang, has worked as a member of the projects Psykisk Tortur and Blaakraft, as well as within the pioneering Krautrock project, Faust, during its performances. Deeply intimate and insightful - drawing upon Marhaug and Wærnes' shared relationship to their own country and its landscape - as well as artistic sensibilities, the text is further augmented by photos of Faust's visit to Norway in 2006. From here we a treated to a fascinating interview with the Norwegian vocalist, composer, musician, and improvisor, Stina Stjern, centered around the artist's decision to work entirely on cassette tape when creating her 2025 full-length Vivid Peace Restored. Completing a triptych of interviews focused on artists hailing from Marhaug's own country, we're offered an intriguing deviation from explicitly experimental themes with a fantastic interview with Mental Overdrive's Per Martinsen, who has deployed the moniker since the early 1990s as a visionary vehicle for his techno pursuits. Deeply philosophical, tracing the artist's history alongside that of dance music itself, and the many ideas that percolate within sounds that are all too often reduced to being a vehicle for hedonism and escape, Marhaug manages to draw brilliant insights that continuously reorient and dramatically the reader as he goes.

Falling just shy of the halfway mark, 8090 VÅG departs from the inhabitants of its own landscape and shoots across the world in a deep dive into the world of the Japanese artist, Yasutoshi Yoshida, known by many for his seminal efforts in extreme noise under the moniker Government Alpha, dating back to the early 1990s. Informed by Marhaug and Yoshida's longstanding personal and creative relationship, this insightful interview unlocks the context of Japanese noise from the inside, as well as providing deeply intimate insights into Yoshida's life and practice as a visual artist via extensive archival photographs and reproductions of his brilliant work in collage. Continuing across the Pacific Ocean, 8090 VÅG's next interview lands us within the gritty creative netherworld that is LA, via a fantastic chat with Los Angeles Free Music Society's (LAFMS) Fredrik Nilsen. Tracing numerous engrossing subjects, including the early days and enduring activities of LAFMS, its connections with the art and music worlds of it home city, Nilsen's publishing ventures and the paired affinity for photography, not only through text and conversation, but also via a wealth of archival photographs, Marhaug cracks the doors wide open on the artist's truly singular world.

The final text selections of 8090 VÅG's debut installment, Nothing Personal, leap frog back over the Atlantic to Europe, concluding with what is arguably its most ambitious piece, a deep dive into the French imprint Metamkine's now legendary Cinéma Pour L'Oreille 3"CD-series, which, across much of the 1990s and early 2000s, released an astounding catalog of cinema affiliated musique concrète works by artists like Eliane Radigue, Michel Chion, Walter Ruttmann, Luc Ferrari, Lionel Marchetti, Michèle Bokanowski, Ralf Wehowsky, and Jim O'Rourke. Beginning with an interview with the series' curator Jérôme Noetinger (who also features within it via his own contribution Gloire A…), we are treated to unprecedented insights and historical details connected to it, before a stunningly detailed body of text penned by Marhaug, attending to each release in the entire series, as well as shorter interviews with Michèle Bokanowski, Ralf Wehowsky, and Jim O'Rourke, illuminating their own contributions to Cinéma Pour L'Oreille, and photographic documentation of the full discography.

As the epic journey provided by 8090 VÅG winds to a close, the deep generosity of Lasse Marhaug returns home to where it began, with a final suite of beautiful photographs by the artist, extending, through carefully attentive design, across the volume's pages and onto the back cover. On any set of standard or terms, 8090 VÅG is astounding: what we hope publications attending to our sonic landscape might be, but rarely are. When recognizing that these beautiful 88 pages of text, image, and design were collected and assembled by a single person, whose sensibilities quietly percolate across its entire length, it becomes that much more awe inspiring. Absolutely engrossing on every count, 8090 VÅG is a struggle to put down from the moment that you crack the first page: a potent reminder of the power of analog publishing and holding paper in your hands! Marhaug has upped his own game and left us waiting on bated breath to see what he comes up with next.