THE NASUM VAULT - 1998-2004: THE ALBUM YEARS
Liner notes to "Inhale/Exhale" (from the LP reissue 2014)
When we got signed to Relapse, Mieszko and I stood in front of a huge challenge: making a full-length album. It was an immense task as we had put as many songs as possible within the time limit we had on compilations or on EP's we had done previously by cutting away all the fat and making short, to-the-point songs. We quickly realized that we couldn't work that way on our first album, as we would have been forced to write 60-70 songs to reach 45 minutes. So we left the fat in and wrote longer songs, taking some more adventurous roads to reach our musical goals, which eventually was expanded more on the following releases and thus became a part of the Nasum sound.
As we realized that we needed a lot of songs on the album it became evident that we also needed songs that stood out from the rest, songs that weren't just another grind song. We used to call these songs "break songs", because they worked as a break in all the chaos. The first one was "When Science Fails" which to me is a groovy hardcore song, as hardcore sounded in those days. Mieszko wrote "Worldcraft" which has more of an industrial feeling to it, but the song that stood out the most was the title track "Inhale/Exhale". I still can't say what kind of song it really is, but it became something of a "hit" for Nasum. It was probably performed at every show.
"Inhale/Exhale" was recorded on Dan Swanö's old 16 track tape recorder. Soundlab Studios was then located in a small basement next door to a Chinese restaurant's kitchen. It always smelled of old food and garbage. I don't remember much of the recording other than I once sang until I spat blood. The first indication that vocals might not be my instrument... Although Soundlab was sort of semi-professional at this point, it really felt like a DIY recording. It was mostly Mieszko and I down at the studio, going in and out of the two small recording rooms and sometimes experimenting wildly, like the "guitar solo" on "I See Lies" (a guitar chord rubbed against a metal chair) or the "scary noises" in the beginning of "Can De Lach" (a drum stick rubbed against a ride cymbal).
I got the cover picture from a friend years earlier and saved it for future use. When we started talking to Relapse I told them that we had a good cover idea and I made a quick montage in Photoshop and sent it to them. But when we did the cover with our friend Robert Ahlborg we got cold feet because we figured that it was a famous photo by some hot shot and we didn't want to get in trouble. So we did another cover to be safe. I got a call from Matt Jacobsen asking me: "Where are all the gas masks?". I told him about our worries and he said that they would take the risk. The cover turned out excellent and the gas masks became a gimmick for Nasum. In hindsight, my only regret is that "Inhale/Exhale" became a little bit longer than needed. We could easily have excluded perhaps as much as ten songs without making the album feel incomplete or short. Never the less it feels great that "Inhale/Exhale" has reached a certain status in the large catalogue of grindcore albums that have been produced during the last 25 years or so. Apparently the timing was perfect when it was released. There was a void in the array of extreme music in the end of the 90's that was filled with our very first album, something that we never could have thought of when we were racking our brains about how to make a full-length album...
- Anders Jakobson, September 2014
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 
