Tæl have always had a single technical question at the center of the project: can one bass do what a guitar and a bass usually do together? Antonio, the Oslo duo’s bassist and only original member, has been working on the answer since the end of 2021. Their self-titled second album, out May 1st across seven international labels, is the latest pass at it.
The band’s own description on Bandcamp: “Sometimes really fast, sometimes really slow, always loud, no guitars.”
Fifteen tracks, eleven of them under a minute. Drums tracked by Bjarte Lund Rolland at Endless Tinnitus Studio in Oslo last June. Vocals and sax done at Bryn Ballroom Studio in October, engineered by the band themselves. Bass and noise recorded at home in between. Mixed and mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios.
There’s lineage for the no-guitar approach in powerviolence. Man Is The Bastard wrote the template. Water Torture, Lana Dagales, Sordo and Family Vacation kept it going.
Bands like World Peace and Hong Kong Fuck You are giving it new life right now. Antonio’s twist runs the opposite direction from most of them. Where the standard bass-only PV move is to lean into the rumble and use the low end as a weapon for what it is, he wants people to forget there’s no guitar.
“I wanted to play in a way that it could sound like the full spectrum,” he says. The toolkit: alternate tunings, signal splits to different amps, a pile of pedals. He’s still working out how to push it further. “The process is the fun part.” On the Bandcamp page for the new album, the band put it more bluntly: “No guitar but bass guitar.”
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He started Tæl after moving to Oslo at the end of 2021, fueled by three things. The first was meeting people. “I’ve always gotten to connect to people through DIY, volunteering, and music,” he says, “so I started helping out at Blitz, and forming the band.” The second was the technical experiment. The third was solidarity.
Tæl donate a cut of what they earn from every run of shows. Antonio doesn’t oversell the gesture. “It’s very obvious that a band won’t change the world, and most of the time it feels like it doesn’t make sense to talk about some stuff in shows, because it feels like preaching to the converted. But I feel like we can have a positive impact and make someone’s life better this way.”
By his account, Oslo’s punk scene is in better shape than outsiders probably assume. “There are several DIY places, some fully squatted, some through an agreement with the municipality, but fully autonomous,” he says.
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“Blitz, Barrikaden, Boksen and Endless Tinnitus are where most of the magic happens.” Two collectives, Den Bisarre Lyd and Mental Booking, bring in international bands and can pull more than a hundred people to punk shows on weekdays. The people running them play in Draümar, Stabber, Halvsugd, Molbo and Problems. Professional venues like Vaterland, Brewgata, Ukultur and Kafé Hærverk handle the bigger bookings. Oslo isn’t big, which is why you can catch Full of Hell or Envy in a hundred-capacity room.
Powerviolence, grindcore and fastcore are thinner on the ground locally. The Oslo natives are Higgs Boson, the city’s PV OGs, and Avgrundsljud, who Antonio calls “a crusty grind bulldozer.” For more, you have to travel. Tower in Tønsberg, Tæl’s best friends and Antonio’s pick for best riffs in the country, sit at the top of his list. Makkmat in Bergen, with members of the legendary Livstid, sit a little further north. Kobol all the way up by the Arctic Circle, who he calls “insanely underrated.”
The new album came together through a messy stretch. Tæl have churned through several lineups since their last record, and Antonio is the only one left from the original three-piece.
New drummer Magnus had basically never played a blast beat before joining the band. They worked through an adaptation period. Antonio calls it a blessing in disguise. “He adds a lot of hardcore punk feeling on the fills, the accents, the transitions between riffs, and it doesn’t feel so straightforward.”
The shrink from a three-piece to a duo also left Antonio handling vocals on top of bass, in Norwegian, which isn’t his first language. “There are grammar and pronunciation mistakes in the lyrics, since it’s not my native language,” he says, “but it’s honest. I didn’t want to change the language of the band, and took it as an exercise to improve.”
The physical edition got serious attention. The release comes on transparent vinyl with a screenprinted B-side, plus a zine packed with lyrics, translations, song-by-song explanations and an illustration for each track.
Antonio handled the artwork himself. “Sometimes there’s a lot to convey in 30 seconds of screams and blast beats,” he says, “so it feels nice to have a little extra space to speak your mind, and also to give something nice to the people who spend their money on the album.”
The vinyl is going out across seven labels: Here and Now Records (Italy), Loner Cult (Belgium), Global Help Records (Spain), ZAS Autoproduzioni (Italy), Producciones Tudancas (Spain), Throne of Lies (USA) and I Feel Good Records (France). Esagoya Records handle the CD in Japan. The cassette is self-released.
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