Live stuff from 2000 added to the vault!

Posted: February 11, 2021 13:49:04 by Anders Jakobson

This is a VHS from Fuck The Commerce III. A German festival held in 2000. This VHS has been laying around for years and I finally found time to rip it to digital. The result is... well, it's something for the die-hard fans!

Here are some notes about the festival and the clip, and you can also see the video embedded or at The Offical Nasum YouTube Channel.

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Announcing The Nasum Vault with a free live show

Posted: February 2, 2021 14:46:44 by Anders Jakobson

In 2014 I started The Vault Blog as a way to publish "interesting, semi-interesting or uninteresting things" from my archives. It's been everything from rants with memories from tours to the origin of the Nasum logo and some audio and video goodies. Along the way The Rare Nasum was added as an audio feature over at Bandcamp. Currently there are two "rehearsal albums" available for download. I have also occasionally uploaded some video to The Official Nasum YouTube Channel. So it's been a bunch of stuff at different places.

Today I announce The Nasum Vault as a permanent part of nasum.com. It's basically a portal of sorts collecting all these different things in some kind of chronological order. It feels great to have everything organized in some way, which will make it easier to add things in the future, because that's the point of it all. The legacy of Nasum will be documented through The Nasum Vault.



To celebrate, as you should, I have uploaded a complete audio liveset to The Rare Nasum. As this is a pretty rough recording it's available for free (for a limited number of downloads, I am afraid) or "pay what you want". The source is a fanmade CD that was handed to me during the Farewell tour in 2012, but the actual show is from Berlin in 2004. Pretty cool!
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Here's the show and here are a few notes that I wrote down, and The Nasum Vault is right here!

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Rare Helvete rehearsal released!

Posted: December 23, 2020 13:36:27 by Anders Jakobson

Today would have been Mieszko's 46th birthday and to celebrate this I have excavated something from the massive, not really, Nasum vault: A rehearsal for the "Helvete"-session 2002! This is quite cool stuff as it has early versions of album songs that differ in some cases quite a lot from the final versions.

A few years ago I found a rehearsal tape with songs, some never finished, from the "Inhale/Exhale" sessions and created a page at Bandcamp called The Rare Nasum. This "Helvete"-rehearsal is the second installment, and I hope to release more stuff in the future.

I have written some comments to a few the songs which could be interesting reading material for the die-hard fans. Check it out here!

Anyway, raise a glass for Mieszko tonight (he was a whiskey guy) and have a listen to this old historic recording that never before has been heard by anyone outside of the band!

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Preorder new/old merch!

Posted: May 26, 2020 15:15:08 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

Today the merchandise page has been updated with four ”new” Nasum t-shirt designs. I have decided to do a new round of ”on demand” printing for the fans. It’s not ”on demand” in the common sense, but almost. To begin with I did a little research on the Nasum Facebook page regarding which past designs people was interested in. A lot of people wanted to see the old Shift and Red Factories again. As I always think bands should offer a plain logo t-shirt I added that to the lot and as a special bonus I decided to do a reimagining of the first Nasum design ever, the Blind World t-shirt.

So those four are available now in sizes S to 4XL. The preorder window is open from May 26 to June 10, then I will order all the t-shirts that has been preordered AND paid. Last time I did this, I did do a few extras of the common sizes (S to XL) but I am not entirely sure I will do that this time. So if you really want one of these designs, order and pay before June 10!

One final thing: from now on I will only accept payment in SEK, which is easily done for those using PayPal. The currency rates are always going up and down so it’s much easier to have a fixed price in SEK. I have added aprox. prices in EUR and USD on the page to give you a ballpark figure of what the price is.

So place your orders at the merchandise page, use the GREEN BUTTON to the right to place your order!

replicatime.me

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The many covers of Nasum

Posted: March 16, 2020 16:49:55 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

Last week, in the midst of all the Corona madness, the third official tribute album to Nasum was released. Yes, there are THREE full albums of Nasum covers available. In 2009 Power-It-Up released the international "A Tribute to Nasum" with 53 bands, two years ago, Playloud Records put out "Indonesian Tribute to Nasum" with 28 bands from Indonesia, and this week "A Brazilian Tribute to Nasum - Mieszko Lives" with 40 - yes, you guess it - Brazilian bands was released by The Grind Records.

That gives a total of 121 bands on these three records. But there are plenty more bands that has covered Nasum over the years. I just heard Slavestate from Belgium doing some blasting all though they officially are a sludge band.

It's very weird being the object of three full albums of tributes. How did that happen? Imagine if I could travel back in time to 1983-84 and tell that little boy that just had decided to start playing the drums and had no song writing capabilities whatsoever, that roughly 35 years late his music would be covered by bands all over the world... It's WEIRD in capital letters! What excites me the most is that the stuff I have been a part of has inspired so many bands and that they really have listened to the songs when they learned them. I am happy about some of the odd song choices some bands have made. Really cool.

But it's still very weird to listen to the albums. To be perfectly honest, not a lot of these 121 bands have managed to play the songs as they were written. Some are slightly wrong and others have completely failed to play the riffs. But that's understandable - it's not particularly easy picking out a riff when it's played with a raw guitar tone to blasting drums. I have recorded my fair share of covers during the years and I would guess that not a lot of them are 100 percent perfect. I remember back during the "Helvete" sessions when we recorded Napalm Death's "Unchallenged Hate". I had listened to two studio recordings and looked closely to "The DVD" and managed to pick out the song, but when we played it for Shane Embury when he came to record some bass for us, he said that it wasn't entirely right. And last year, I picked out the song "Dragnet" with Napalm Death, which was close to impossible to get right. There were two mixes from "Scum" to listen to and a chaotic live rendition I found on YouTube. And there were also some tabs and midi versions online that were completely wrong. In the end it was just a matter of making a logical version of what I thought I heard.

And that might be it. I believe every song writer has as a certain gallery of melodies and patterns when they write riffs that are based in taste and logic and when picking out some other song writers stuff that gallery is applied on what you think you hear. It becomes the logical rendition of the songs - unless you hear it completely clear.

I think a lot of bands have done this on these tribute albums. "This must be the logical way the song is written". And again, that's understandable and fine, but it really fucks with my head when listening to the songs! If someone really KNOWS the Nasum songs, it's me. All though I can't play them all on guitar I know every melody, nuance, rhythm and detail and when something isn't right, it really messes me up. It's like if someone was to list the members of the Beatles and repeatedly saying that they are John, Paul, George and Bingo. It's almost right but it isn't!

And again - for the third time - I understand this and I am very fine with it! For me it's very obvious when a band has gone that extra mile to get as close as possible (but adding their own touch along the way). That I appreciate, as well as every time I hear a drummer mimicking a detail I added to the song just to keep myself entertained. That is very cool.

I'm not going to list any favorites or rank the songs on these tributes. I am just happy that they exist and that I have inspired these bands with something. Perhaps they found something new in Nasum's music when they learned the song that they can develop in their own stuff.

YouTube bonanza!

A TRIBUTE TO NASUM (POWER-IT-UP, 2009)

INDONESIAN TRIBUTE TO NASUM (PLAYLOUD, 2018)
[Only 5 out of 28 songs...]



A BRAZILIAN TRIBUTE TO NASUM - MIESZKO LIVES (THE GRIND, 2020)

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Nasum vs Fury Fest 2004

Posted: October 16, 2019 15:35:00 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

While going through some stuff I found this DVD-R marked NASUM FURY FEST. The French festival Fury Fest was - to my knowledge - a precursor to Hell Fest and we played there in the Summer of 2004. Someone captured the show on camera and sent me this disc many years ago and I figured I should share this 15 year old show with the Nasum fan base. So I exported the video files and made a YouTube video of them.

This is not pro-shot in any way. It’s just some dude with a camera in the audience that sometimes does a quite badly work shooting the the show, but never mind that now! It’s a great memory to have all these years later. I wish I could send a proper thank you to ”the dude”, but I only found the disc ”raw” without any case or information.

As always when unearthing something from the vault, I try to rack my brains about what I actually remember from this particular show, or trip, as we were in France for a couple of days. Do I remember anything? Yes I do.

The first thing I remember is that we flew to Paris or more likely the "Ryan Air version of Paris". Some lanky guy in a van picked us up and he had one or two dogs loose in the van. I believe Mieszko had a slight allergy so he wasn’t exactly ”chuffed” about this. Then we found out that we had 6 or 8 hours to go to reach Le Mans (doesn’t make sense when I check Google Maps today, but with traffic in mind a 6 hour drive is plausible) so it was just a matter of sleeping through the whole trip. I remember that we went through Paris and at some point basically turing around the corner and - voila! - there was the Palace of Versailles!

Moving on: In Le Mans we hung out at a hotell where we actually set up a mobile version of Soundlab Studios. This show was scheduled in the middle of the recording of ”Shift” and Mieszko had brought a laptop with ProTools to do some tedious editing to not waste any time. I can’t remember exactly what this editing entailed but it was one of those things that needed to be done to process further.

From the actual festival I remember that both Discharge and Morbid Angel played after us (I found this list of bands at Blabbermouth) and I also remember seeing Slipknots gear backstage. Mieszko even mentions Slipknot in the video. What I remember absolutely the strongest is that we sold our merchandise ”illegally” at the festival. You were supposed to hand your stuff in at some organized merch table but we said fuck it and sold it ourselves. Actually, Jon did most of the yelling and selling and did it well. So good that some security guards showed up and wanted to remove our festival bands. Luckily they accepted that we packed up our stuff and ended the business.

And the show itself? Well, it sounds pretty good in the video.

Hope you enjoy this item from the vault. Here's the clip.

Would you like see more stuff like that? Support the Go fund me page for The Rare Nasum or buy the "Inhale/Exhale" rehearsal for as little or as much you want. There are lots of stuff in the vault just waiting to be unearthed…

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Nasum vs England/Ireland

Posted: October 22, 2018 19:55:33 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

I stumbled upon a YouTube clip from Nasum’s show in Dublin 2002. This has been on the video platform since 2006 and I have never seen it before. Strange, but never the less exciting to see after all these years. It’s nearly ten minutes long and includes six and a half songs, i.e. these:

1. The Idiot Parade (second half)
2. Den svarta fanan

3. Löpandebandsprincipen
4. A Welcome Breeze of Stinking Air
5. Fatal Search

6. The Black Swarm
7. Multinational Murderers Network

Since Mieszko says ”We are Nasum from Sweden” after the first two songs I am slightly baffled by the song order. ”The Idiot Parade” and ”Den svarta fanan” were usually songs played at the end of a set but on this particular night they were… first? Very weird.

Unfortunately I have no saved setlists or notes from this tour but I have some memories from the only proper UK/Ireland tour Nasum did, six days in May of 2002.

This was during the trio years. Mieszko, Jesper and I were the band and prior to this tour we had been in the US in 1999, Europe in 2000 and Scandinavia and Japan in 2001 with several one-off’s and festival shows scattered around over the years. On the Scandinavian tour, supporting The Haunted, we befriended Bo Lund who was (and by all means, still is) a great sound engineer from Denmark. We brought him on the Japan tour and we brought him to this little spring tour in jolly old England.

The tour was scheduled to start in London at Mean Fiddler May 3. At this time Jesper was attending the university of Lund in southern Sweden so he went to Copenhagen and flew to London with Bo, while Miezsko and I went two hours to Skavsta Airport to catch a Ryan Air flight to London. As we had boarded the flight the troubles began. To start with, take off was postponed 30 minutes. Then the captain said that there was a technical error in the data system and they had to contact the Ryan Air headquarters in Dublin to figure it out. Then they had to turn off all of the electricity and then we had to leave the plane.

In true low-fares flights fashion the information was scarce but finally we got word that a technician from Dublin had to be flown in to fix the problem and that meant a six hour delay and that there are no guarantee that it will be fixed right away. Further more there were no guarantee that all the passengers would get a seat on the next flight to London. Chaos ensued!

I called our booking agent at the time and asked him to check out quick options. Skavsta Airport is an hour away from Stockholm and the big Arlanda airport. He found a some flights but they were ridiculously expensive. In the meantime we got a message that it was possible to reschedule our flights to the Västerås Airport, 90 minutes away by car. We saw this as the only option for us to get to London and possible make it in time for the show. I called a friend that lived near Skavsta and begged him to drive us to Västerås but it was impossible, but Mieszko found two guys in suits that had booked a taxi so we tagged along.

In Västerås everything went smooth and we landed at Stanstead Airport outside of London after two hours. We got on the express train and while in London we caught a cab and came to the venue litteraly 15 minutes before stage time. I remember saying hello to Bo and Jesper and then getting to the stage and putting my cymbals on the stands and then getting dressed for the show and then: SHOW TIME. The only great thing about all this hassle was that there was no time to get nervous!

This tour had another huge set back and that was that our merchandise wasn’t delivered in time for the first show. We had printed a large number of t-shirts at our usual place in Örebro and ordered a delivery to the venue in London, but they never got there. And we never got them during the tour and we did all six shows without having anything to sell. This meant that our income on this tour was almost next to nothing. We got some money for each show but most of it covered the nightliner bus and the agents fee. It was terrible.

A few weeks later the merch boxes came back to the printers and they really took our side and demanded the delivery firm to pay half of the printing costs, which they did so ultimately we got a bunch of merchandise pretty cheap.

All the hassle aside - it was a fun tour. The Dillinger Escape Plan was the headlining band and a band called Rabies Caste opened the shows. It was quite a kick to see DEP a few nights in a row. Really, really cool. They also had a merch guy in their crew, whose name I absolutely not can remember, who introduced me to the movie ”Donnie Darko” which became an instant favorite.

The tour was pretty short, only six dates, then the touring party continued without Nasum for another week but with Genocide Super Stars taking our place so Mieszko kept his place in the bus. I guess Bo Lund stayed as well so Jesper and I fucked off back to Sweden to different airports. I remember reading the Mötley Crüe biography ”The Dirt” on the flight back home. That I remember, but I can’t remember that merch guys name?!

This clip brought back some memories. The shows in Dublin and Belfast the following day was the first and last times Nasum played in Ireland. That never happened again, which makes me slightly sad.

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The working titles of Helvete

Posted: October 11, 2018 16:59:09 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

"Helvete" celebrated 15 years earlier this year. While going through some boxes in the basement I found this pages in a notebook from the moment Mieszko and I made up the final track order and distributed the samples between some of the songs.
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The notes in parentheses are descriptions of the breaks between the songs, which are nothing out of the ordinary, but the fun thing about these pages are working titles. Some of them are basically the name of the band that the song was in some way inspired by, while others are a description of the unique thing of the song. And then there are the weird ones...

(Click on the image for a bigger version...)

Here’s the list with some short explanations to why the working title was chosen. As most of the titles are in Swedish all you non Swedish-speaking people can see this as your first lesson! Here we go:

1. Arslet (Violation)

The title is Swedish for "The Arse", which stems out of "arsel" being an intensifier, as in "arselsnabb", "arselmangel" and so forth. "Violation" was a song "fast as an arse" or something. It really makes no sense in English…

2. Tool (Scoop)

The main riff in "Scoop", as played as intro, chorus and outro has a certain Tool vibe.

3. Ryckig (Living Next Door to Malice)

This is Swedish for "Jerky" which is a way to describe the short breaks and stops in the beginning of the song.

4. Plockriff (Stormshield)

Swedish for "Picking riff", which sort of describes the unique parts of this song.

5. Krånglig (Time to Discharge)

Another Swedish "-ig" word, meaning "complicated". Apparently Mieszko thought my riffs and/or arrangement was a bit of the complex kind.

6. Snapcase (Bullshit)

I would imagine that this reference to the hardcore band is connected to the final part of the song that sort of sounds like Snapcase.

7. Breach (Relics)

Yet another title referencing another band. We loved Swedish Breach and they certainly inspired this track.

8. Snabba (We Curse You All)

Swedish for "The fast (one)", as if this song is faster than any other on the album?

9. Mycket grind (Doombringer)

"Lots of grind" is the translation of this title, which came out of the multiple blastbeat parts in the second half of the song.

10. Carcass/Metallica (Just Another Hog)

Well, how about that? Two "band titles" in one song! The intro made us think of Carcass for some reason and the following verse riff is basically a version of Metallica’s "Battery" riff. Thus: "Carcass/Metallica".

11. Punkgrind (Drop Dead)

This song was inspired by the hardcore punk based blastings of Drop Dead, so the working title and the final title is no surprise…

12. Mycket käng (I Hate People)

"Käng", short for "kängpunk", is the Swedish word for crust punk or d-beat based punk. The word "känga" or "kängor" is actually "boot" or "boots". Anyway, this particular title means "Lots of d-beat parts".

13. Grindig (Go!)

Well, you know the "-ig" words by now, so this is "Grindy"!

14. Crowbar (The Final Sleep)

Yep – Crowbar brought the inspiration for this song.

15. Fladder (Slaves to the Grind)

The title means "Flutter" and is a reference to some riff in the song that has some quick finger movements.

16. Jeppe 1 (Breach of Integrity)

Jesper’s first Nasum song.

17. Death glatt slut (The Everlasting Shame)

This is a weird one. "Death" is not a reference to the band, but to "death metal", and "glatt slut" means "happy ending"… Of the song, that is, you pervert! So: "Death (metal) happy ending (of the song)".

18. Bisvärm (Your Words Alone)

"Bisvärm" is a descriptive word for a certain type of riffing that was made popular by Eucharist and At The Gates (among others) in the 90’s. It’s "Bee swarm" in English and you know what kind of riffs I am talking about.

19. Thrashgrind (Preview of Hell)

Thrash metal + grind core = thrashgrind.

20. Jeppe 3 (Illogic)

Jesper’s third Nasum song, obviously.

21. Suffer the Nasum (Whip)

This was the song we wrote with the sole intention of bringing Shane Embury to the studio to track some bass (which also happened). It has a certain Napalm Death vibe, and perhaps some extra inspiration from "Suffer the Children".

22. Orientalisk (Worst Case Scenario)

The title means "Oriental" which came out of a long intro to the song that we cut during the mixing process. It was a semi-improvised part that had a certain oriental sound, and it was featured all the way until the mixing when we decided it was too weird and that song benefited from a more direct start.

Would you like see more stuff like that? Support the Go fund me page for The Rare Nasum or buy the "Inhale/Exhale" rehearsal for as little or as much you want. There are lots of stuff in the vault just waiting to be unearthed…

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Happy birthday, Inhale/Exhale! Let´s celebrate big!

Posted: May 26, 2018 14:16:48 by Anders Jakobson

Today it's the 20th birthday for "Inhale/Exhale". It was originally released May 26 1998. It's strange how time flies. In one way it doesn't feel like 20 years have passed, but it another way it really feels like that. Nasum has done a lot over the years, but still... Wow! 20 years!

My life has had a number of mile stones and this album is certainly one of them. Without the unexpected success of the album I had never been where I am today musically, so thanks for that "Inhale/Exhale"!

Obviously I want to celebrate. Today I launch a celebration page for "Inhale/Exhale" with a number of nuggets from the vaults, for example a 25 song in studio-rehearsal from 1997 with five songs NOT used on the album! This is pure gold for the die-hard Nasum fans, and I hope to be able to bring more stuff like this from the vault in the future.

The rehearsal is available FOR FREE at TheRareNasum.bandcamp.com which I hope can develop to be a home for a number of rare audio stuff, because I have lots. But to be able to locate everything and prepare it for free releases like this first rehearsal, I need some funds and I have put up a GoFundMe page for this sole purpose. Obviously you can donate funds through Bandcamp or just directly by contacting me at nasum@nasum.com. I'd really like to do a focused excavation of the vaults and get all this good stuff out there for everyone to enjoy.

But today we celebrate "Inhale/Exhale". Don't miss the celebration page with the rehearsal, comments and some other stuff. There ARE more to come...

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The design that would not leave

Posted: March 21, 2018 17:16:07 by ANDERS JAKOBSON

Back in early 2000 I started working on a t-shirt design for Nasum. I had a rough recycle symbol that I combined with an eye. I combined that piece of graphic with the logo and a clever phrase, ”Eye see lies”, a play on words from the ”Inhale/Exhale” song ”I see lies”. I remember that Mieszko liked it. However we never printed it and did a completely different design instead with a very famous mosquito picture and the text ”The Black Swarm”. That became the second official ”printed by the band” t-shirt from Nasum, see the Merch History for this design.

When we were about to embark on the seven week long tour with Napalm Death in the fall of 2000 we made one (1) design with the recycle graphic inside a ring with ”NASUM - GRINDCORE…” repeated. This single design was supposed to be our income/salery for the tour, as all of the other money went to recoup the tour support Relapse paid. Today I would not go on such a long tour with only one design (although we had ”Inhale/Exhale” and ”Human 2.0” design, but they were Relapse’s and not ours).

Years later that version of the design, minus the tour specific back print, was reprinted but with green color. I liked that combination a lot.

The recycle graphic stayed in the back of my mind, and followed me with every new computer I got. It inspired the ”Shift” graphics and it’s also featured in the footer of nasum.com.

On the US leg of the Farewell Tour in 2012 we decided to quickly make a limited edition t-shirt for Maryland Deathfest and the only thing I had available in high resolution in my computer was the recycle graphic. So 50 t-shirts were made and sold in a few minutes.

This design will not leave me alone. That’s quite obvious. And while I was going through the archives looking for something else recently the old file was there again, wanting to be used. So I did a ”Recycle 2018” version. I added a new and better eye and polished the edges slightly. I decided to have the logo at the bottom to get a triangular feeling and finished off with some ”distress”. The new bottle green color more or less happened by incident and it looks really cool.

The t-shirt is available exclusively from Selfmadegod Records. Check it out!

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