| gnom | Skambankt | Zahl/Uncle Deadly | Janove Ottesen |
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| gnom was the band from which Kaizers Orchestra emerged. Officially, it consisted of Janove and Geir, but as (guest) musicians, Rune, Helge, and Terje were already on board. gnom released one cd that was re-released in 2003 in a slightly different version. In the booklet of the new release, you can find the following statement from Janove & Geir that pretty much explains what you need to know about the band (as always, I don't take any responsibility for errors in the translation *g*): | |
| Everything has a beginning. gnom maybe wasn't the beginning, but it wasn't far from it either, at least from that what should later become Kaizer Orchestra. Boredom can lead to so much weird stuff. In our case, it lead to music. With the slightly absurd teenage duo-project Blod, Snått & Juling we had managed to kill some time and make a lot of songs, but the time had come to go one step further now, to let the teen years be teen years, so to speak. We went to the city to study there and found out that the time was right to found a complete and a little more serious band. The city was Bergen, the year was 1998, and the band should be called gnom. With small g. We don't remember why, but in any case better than Sludd (= sleet), like someone suggested. After half a year and practicing approximately every Monday, the recording of Mys started in the beginning of September 1998. The band consisted of a totally accidental group of people. Rune and Helge went to school with Janove, and for lack of anything more exciting they hang around with Janove and practiced in their free minutes. We called up Rolf because he was the only one we knew of who could play the stand-up bass. We also had guest musicians, among others Terje, a friend from Jæren, who came over from Oslo to chip in the electric guitar. We agreed that we would cover his expenses for the train when we balanced our account again, because this couldn't take too long. He never got those 500 kroner. We had never thought that it could be so hard to sell records. But it was. Out of the 1500 gnom record we pressed, about 600 were sold during the next year. The rest were given away or sit on some pallet and collect dust somewhere. We don't know. Anyway the original release is still a reminder of the past, as we didn't take care of the cover graphic, and as we are now making the record available again, we took the freedom to remove three songs about which we now think in retrospect that we succeeded least with. At the same time, we came up with a new order of the songs. Special for you. To make things a little interesting, we have added a song that actually didn't make it on the Mys record in 98, but that we played at the release party in Kvarteret in November of 98. Bastard was a milestone for us and pointed out a new direction for the band. It's also here that the name Kaizer appears for the first time. Bastard came out on a demo EP in connection with by:Larm in Bergen in 2000, and if you are smart, you can hear that we have used elements of this song ever since. Yepp. Enjoy it then. Janove & Geir, Oslo, October 2003 | |
Mys (Original) | |
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 9/98 Norway |
Mys (Re-Release) | |
| Translation of the lyrics | |
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 10/03 Norway |