THE NASUM VAULT - 1998-2004: THE ALBUM YEARS
The first American Nasum show 1999
A few years ago, I wrote a blog entry about Nasum vs American Festivals and mentioned this - in many ways - first show at the Milwaukee Metalfest in 1999. It was the first live show on the US tour, it was the first with Jesper - ever, the first where I played the drums and Mieszko played the guitar and... well, I can come up with a few more firsts, but you get the idea.
Anyway, I can't remember why I didn't add this video of the show to the old blog entry. Maybe I didn’t know that it was on YouTube at that point? I don't know, but here it is and I can rant slightly about this.
Perhaps I should back up a few months. "Inhale/Exhale" had been released about a year earlier and Relapse wanted to bring us on tour in the US. As we were a duo we obviously had a problem. This was many years before the non-bass bands became common, but for us it never was an option. Jesper had been a fan of the band for years and we had long phone conversations from time to time and Mieszko and I figured that we could ask him to tag along on the proposed US tour. So we spoke and I said: "We have an offer to go to the US for a few shows. We are playing at Milwaukee and CBGB's among others, do you wanna play the bass in Nasum?". I probably could have heard his positive response without the phone although we were miles apart…
So we started rehearsing as a three piece. Jesper came to our town every now and then and learnt the songs and I guess we rehearsed a lot because this show is quite tight, once it gets going for real.
As I mentioned in the last blog, we had some "issues" in the start of this show. It's obvious in the video. We had some monitor problems and I had quite the fight with drum kit that was moving around like crazy when I played during the entire show. If you are a fellow drummer you know that this is the worst ever! So the show kind of stops after the first song, which strangely enough is "Inhale/Exhale". We had this idea of starting with one of the "slow" songs to get warmed up and get used to the stage sound, and the idea was to glue the song to "Too Naked To Distort" and "There's No Escape" creating a block of songs, but that didn't happen this time. But when "Too Naked To Distort" finally kicks in, it has a certain "fuck it, let us blast this shit to bits" feeling.
I like this show. It's hard and aggressive and it is from a band point of view a release. We had travelled a long way from Sweden to the US, and then suffered a massive drive from Lancaster, PA to Milwaukee, WI. So it felt good to get grinding, so to speak.
The songs is mainly from "Inhale/Exhale" with a few older bits from "Industrislaven" and the "Regressive Hostility" compilation and more, and I really like this collection of songs. The sad thing with progressing as a live band, doing new records and so forth, is that you have to remove certain songs from you set list and a few of these songs disappeared from the set lists after this tour. Some of them I wished we had played on the Farewell tour.
This show is obviously in part affected by the technical issues but it's never the less a good show. Jesper is kicking hardcore ass and Mieszko has his microphone ridiculously low, but he sings both the high and low parts quite good, and I am wearing shorts and gloves! Yes, I had drum gloves on this tour to spare my hands from blisters. It worked, but I felt a bit posh when talking to Brann (Today is the Day, now in Mastodon) whose hands were a mess.
The show ends at 31 minutes approximately - the rest of the clip is a few repeats from the show for some reason, but this is the set list:
1. Inhale/Exhale
2. Too Naked To Distort
3. There's No Escape
4. Dis Sucks
5. I See Lies
6. No Sign Of Improvement
7. My Fear
8. The Masked Face
9. Löpandebandsprincipen
10. Eviscerated (By The Fiend)
11. The System Has Failed Again
12. Tested
13. Information Is Free
14. The World That You Made
15. Fantasibilder
16. End
17. Du är bevakad
18. Shaping The End
19. Bullshit Tradition (Dropdead cover)
HELP ME FUND THE VAULT AND THE RARE NASUM
I have a lot of Nasum "vaults". There are the digital vaults, harddrives, CD-R's and whatever that contains some stuff. And then there are the analog vaults. Boxes filled with documents and notes and boxes filled with tapes containing rehearsals and rare stuff. I'd be more than happy to share this with the fans, but I need some funds to take time of from work to really do all that boring excavating that's needed to find and document everything.
I have put together a GoFundMe page for this: gofundme.com/the-rare-nasum and any donation is appreciated. You can also support this cause by buying The Rare Nasum stuff at Bandcamp. Or you can make a donation without going through GoFundMe or Bandcamp - just contact me at nasum@nasum.com. Everything that comes in via these channels are ear marked for a future massive excavation.
I really hope you can help me to preserve The Nasum Vault for the world. Thanks!
- Anders Jakobson.
ABOUT THE VAULT
THE NASUM VAULT is the "umbrella" for a number of projects collecting information and items from the Nasum history.
• The Vault Blog shares "interesting, semi-interesting or uninteresting things" from the Nasum Vault.
• The Rare Nasum publishes audio goodies on Bandcamp.
• The Official Nasum YouTube Channel is the home for video oddities.
• The Nasum Vault Homepage is the portal for the whole project.
INHALE/EXHALE VAULT EXCAVATION
• Rehearsal #1 1997 with comments
• Rehearsal #2 1997 with comments
• Liner notes from the 2014 LP reissue
• Discography page
• Track by track commentariers
• Lyrics
© NASUM. Design and programming by Anders Jakobson based on Halcyonic from 
