Okay, I’m getting dangerously hooked on a Flickr-via-Facebook internet meme. You’ve probably all seen it by now, you know the one:

Create your own album cover

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in. (you can untag yourself if you don’t want this photo up.)

This kind of formal restriction is always tempting in that you just have to mount (and make some sense of) the three random parts – title, band name, photo – and The way you will alawys add meaning to the juxtaposition is, well, very much do with comics if you ask me.

No? Don’t ask me, then.

My first offering was as drummer with black metal band Blue Leach on their second and last album, Your Work is All You Are. The strains of making a concept album from the Egyptian Book of the Dead drove keyboardist/singer/guitarist/harmonica player and main songwriter Trond Spàfon to steady, manual labor shortly afterward.

A few years later, I joined avant rock band Prix Novembre as a session musician for the recording of their fifth album (ominously, their 13th if you count splits, special edition remix albums, anniversary digipaks and live albums) named Half of Them are True. Don’t believe anything you’ve heard, it was the tucan that started on the heavy drugs, and his performance was the worse for it.

The American Experiment: it was worth the try (2003)

Only in the beginning of the 21st century did I found the post-rock project The American Experiment, and in the fall of 2003 published what was intended to be a stark, satirical comment on the War on Terror, the It Was Worth a Try EP. Only later I discovered that the record was used by the US Army in interrogating prisoners in Guantánamò. That send my musical carreer on hiatus for a couple of years.

That was not the end of my music endeavors, however. Watch this space …