‘Where to?’

‘Let’s go to the poets.’

‘Ah, the Wessel and the Holberg. You know what the old actor said, don’t you? First I’ll go to the poets, then to the dogs.’

107

14

‘Before we go, you have to see … my composing room.’

He led me into the corridor and down to one of the furthest doors. There he opened a tiny closet of a room, so small that he probably had to go outside when he needed to turn over his sheet of music. A solid wooden shelf was attached to one wall and on it was a stereo system with all the latest features: turntable, tape and cassette decks, synth and sampler, drum machine and sequencer, all the bells and whistles.

‘This is where I compose,’ Jakob said proudly. He pointed to a digital audio workstation, an old-style piano and a gigantic computer keyboard. ‘The whole of my symphony orchestra is there in full evening dress at six in the morning if I choose. I can have the trumpets of Jericho blasting out and Ry Cooder’s slide guitar at the same time, if I want. I can honk a car horn, make telephones ring, select monkey noises from the jungle and the sound of New York traffic, owls hooting from the far side of the moon or whatever you want, Varg.’

‘Do you need it? The far side of the moon, I mean?’

‘Listen. I find a melody line and want to try it out on various instruments and at different speeds. The machine does this for me. I don’t play half as well myself – at least not without practising. And it can play all the instruments. I can only play a few. If I decide to write an arrangement I put together the orchestra. I key in all the various instruments and, hey presto! Then I can hear how it sounds.’108

‘And what sort of things do you write?’

‘Right now I’m writing a symphony. My first. I’m calling it Black Mass because that’s what it’s about. The black religious Mass we all take part in, inside ourselves.’ He sent me an earnest look.

I nodded pensively and cast my eyes over the walls, which were covered with written memos, sheet music, extracts from texts and black-and-white photos of Jakob himself in various settings, from the happy Bergen Beat years to Easter church concerts. ‘You’ve moved on quite a bit from where you started,’ I said.

‘Naturally. I’m forty-four. Music’s all about change and movement, and nothing ever sounds how it did twenty years before. Not even rock music, even though sometimes it might sound as if it does.’ He nodded towards the corridor again. ‘Are we off?’ I nodded back. We were off.

*

We went to the poets.

Wessel had left behind him a pile of satirical verse, an opera parody in rhyming verse and a drinking house in Bergen. After a few beers it was hard to distinguish the clientele from the figures in the large portraits inspired by the poet’s most inebriated comic characters. Here there were theatre people, writers, business students and other drunks. We didn’t stand out from the crowd.