Words and Interview by Alexander Cheves
The cult Norwegian band Sadomaoistan was active in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Now it’s getting a second life with its first digital and vinyl release. The band’s founder and primary musician, Halvard Haldorsen, lives in Berlin and sat down with me for an honest, tender interview about the band’s incendiary past, its history of AIDS activism, and how it feels to bring the band’s queer chaos back into the light.
Sadomaoistan was a queer, industrial proto-techno group in Norway, active in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, known for extreme onstage antics—their performances often involved nudity, self-cutting, and fire.
These days, in niche audiophile circles, the band is considered an early pioneer of Norwegian electronic music.
Halvard Haldorsen does not look like someone who used to thrash onstage. He’s a sweet gentleman who lives in Berlin, with a grey beard and bright blue eyes. Haldorsen co-founded Sadomaoistan in 1985 with his buddy, Ivar, and was its primary musician and vocalist.
There are a couple of music encyclopedias that describe us as frontrunners of electronic music in Norway. They say we influenced the next generation of artists—like Röyksopp, Bjørn Torske, Rune Lindbæk.
Halvard Haldorsen has a comfortable, post-career life in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighbourhood, where he can sometimes be seen chilling at the gay coffee shop Romeo und Romeo, working on a laptop and cruising the gay weekend visitors.
This is where I first met him. As a side gig, he sells gay fetish t-shirts, mostly for guys in the fisting scene. The most popular design is of an emoji fist printed oversized and bright red across the chest.
Sadomaoistan was kind of a protest group. We were all active in the queer scene in Norway at the time. And we were angry about AIDS.
To his surprise, the band got a second life: in September, nearly forty years after its members split up, Sadomaoistan’s music will be available on digital and vinyl for the first time. He did not expect this new development—he didn’t do it himself.
Why is Sadomaoistan’s music getting attention 40 years later?
Halvard Haldorsen gives a bewildered laugh.
“In 2023, a guy who runs a record company in Norway contacted me,” he says. “He had noticed that our last album, released in 1997, was not available anywhere, and he asked me why.”
Haldorsen admits that, by this point, he had “more or less forgotten the whole project and the music I made back in those days.”
At the same time—and entirely by chance—another guy from a different music company, one that presses vinyl records, messaged him and asked if they could do a vinyl release of Sadomaoistan’s music.
Sensing that something interesting was happening, Haldorsen helped collaborate on a digital and vinyl release between the companies. Both versions of the music will drop on all major platforms on September 26th.
How many albums did Sadomaoistan make?
In its run, the band released two albums, Retroskopi and Terror Incognita, which will be released as a limited-edition double vinyl—it’s currently available for pre-order on Bandcamp.
Neither album has been widely or readily available in the years since, but the new release will feature the original cover art, plus a small booklet with dozens of photos of the band, along with a brief written history of its run.
In Haldorsen’s ground-floor apartment off Motzstraße, I looked at the finished product, with its art and archival photos, and flipped through the booklet. It’s so fucking cool.
The aesthetic falls somewhere between Marilyn Manson during his Antichrist Superstar album and the work of gay erotic photographer David E. Armstrong—punk, Satanic, sexy.
How does it feel to see Sadomaoistan get new life?
Halvard was shocked. He did not think there was any remaining interest in the band or its music.
“And it wasn’t just the guys at these music companies,” he says. “It was listeners. People remembered us!”
Now, Halvard hopes a new audience of listeners will discover his music. “It’s insane,” he says. “When we existed, we did not feel popular. No one wanted to touch us with a ten-foot pole.”
Along with the new release, a remix project is now underway, and several past songs are already available as remises on streaming platforms.
The remix project came as a huge surprise. It was all from the record company. They suggested that, since we were at the forefront of electronic music in Norway, they would ask contemporary artists to remix our stuff.
He gave the project a thumbs up and watched it happen—and is amazed at the songs that have come out.
Contemporary artists like Biosphere and The Soft Pink Truth (a side project from Drew Daniel, one-half of experimental electronic duo Matmos) have remixed music he hasn’t touched in thirty years.
“I haven’t lifted a finger for this project!” he says. “These guys who knew about the band, knew our music, and had been listening to us for years—they did everything. It’s nice to know that, when the band was active, we left a lasting impact.”
How would you describe Sadomaoistan’s music?
We weren’t puritans with music direction. We had a free and open approach and didn’t go for a specific style or genre. We just made it up as we went.
But, he says, it ranged from post-punk to early experimental electronica, with a lot of percussion.
“We used all our instruments as percussion instruments. We beat everything up.”
What brought you to Berlin?
Berlin is Halvard Haldorsen’s home now—and he loves it. He lives with Bo, his partner of seven years, who also makes music under the name Kuddsnack.
In Berlin, our standard of living fell through the floor, but our quality of life went through the roof.
I ask what he means by this. He laughs: “Oslo is really expensive, but you get paid more money there. When we lived in Oslo, we could afford to go on holiday. We could buy stuff. But life was quite boring.”
He gestures at the furniture in his apartment—the beaten-up, Devil-red armchair, the stone gargoyle on his bookshelf, and the male nude art on the wall.
Everything you see around me is freebies given by people, kind souls in the neighbourhood. We’re broke. But in Berlin, we are much, much happier.
Why does Berlin feel like home?
“Berlin attracts a lot of nice and interesting people. And if you’re into the gay arts—you know, the fun stuff—there is no place better to live.”
He winks as he says this.
By “gay arts,” I know he means the delights of Schöneberg, Berlin’s “gay ghetto”—the leather bars, backrooms, parties, fetish clubs, and general erotic mayhem that make Berlin so fun for gay and queer men (for me) and such a draw for international gay visitors.
Berlin is great. And I don’t just mean the sex. That is one part of it. But also the music scene.
Both he and Bo are “obsessed with music.”
The couple’s move here in 2019 was quick, almost impulsive. “I met Bo in Oslo, and this is our seventh year together. We visited Berlin, and then we quit our jobs in Oslo after a year and decided to stay here full-time. Berlin spoke to us that quickly. I knew it was home within six months of being here.”
He reflects on this. “I’m from a fishing village that’s about as far north in Europe as you can get. And yet, coming here, I felt like I was coming home. That was a weird feeling. Living in a city with three and a half million people and feeling like it’s home.”
Will there be a Sadomaoistan music release party?
Yes, in Oslo. “We are going to try to reform the band, not for a regular concert, but to just make a little appearance together.”
Will the band ever perform together regularly again?
No, Halvard doesn’t think so.
“But for that night, we will do a little performance. But long ago, I decided I would not go back to the intense performance world. I did it too much.”
He admits that the band was sometimes more performance art than music.
“We did very elaborate shows. It required a lot of energy, and it could sometimes divert my focus away from what I was truly interested in, which was the music.”
He says that if he ever does perform his music again, there will “absolutely” be a visual element.
I’m too much of a visual whore to not do something visual with my music. But if I performed it now, I’d probably use film. Not actual fire.
Can you tell me more about these performances?
Halvard shows me a brief video clip. There’s a fog machine, several nearly-naked men onstage, and all the bandmates are wearing bulky, industrial, demonic-looking costumes. Then someone takes a knife and starts cutting themselves.
“It was as much political action as performance,” he says. “We had this idea of doing quite spontaneous and improvised music. So we didn’t spend tons of time rehearsing. During the first three or four years, we did a lot of concerts with very aggressive music. Very in-your-face.”
He shows me his old guitar, which seems to have bite marks on it. “These are from where I hit it so much with my drumsticks,” he says. “The music had a lot of aggression.”
Why so much aggression? What were you protesting?
We were very clear about us being openly gay and not being the sweet, cute gay guy band. And we were outspoken about the AIDS crisis, because Ivar, our bass guitarist, the guy I started the band with, became HIV-positive in 1985, the year we started, and died in 1991.
Tell me about Ivar.
Halvard gets quieter.
“This was in the peak plague years. There wasn’t even AZT then. There was nothing, no treatment. We just watched him die.”
Halvard Haldorsen was the only one Ivar told about his diagnosis. “He told me not to tell anyone, not even the other guys. He didn’t even tell his family.”
At the time, Halvard was 20, and Ivar was 31. After Ivar died, the first version of the band, which Halvard calls its “first phase,” ended. “That was around 1992.”
That first era—what he calls the band’s “industrial post-punk period”—ended abruptly, and not just because of Ivar’s death.
“A car accident meant that another band member couldn’t play, so everything just fell apart. But I didn’t stop making music.”
Eventually, he formed a new band under the same name with new members, and they released the second album, Terror Incongnita.
On the second album, there’s some underlying sadness in it. I was mourning. A lot of the tracks contain fragments of Ivar’s playing. I wanted to make sure there was some base tone or something in the music from him. There’s an echo of his memory in the songs because I wanted him to keep playing with us.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why all this aggression was so present. It became an outlet for our frustration and anger. All the fury and loss.”
In the band’s second phase, “We dove directly into more electronic music. And we got fairly well known for our stage shows.”
The shows were even dangerous at times.
“First of all, you had all the nakedness. We set things on fire. We did a lot of real knife cuttings. Really harsh stuff. But in time, the balance between what was important, music or activism, grew a little blurry.”
Did the band ever get in any trouble?
We never got banned from anywhere. And we never got in much trouble with the police. But it took the crowd by surprise every time. Promoters would come up after the show and tell us they did not expect this, and they were pissed.
This “second phase” lasted from 1993 until 1997.
What made the band stop for a second time?
There was no single event that made everybody decide to quit.
“I think we were just exhausted,” Haldorsen says. “Especially after the second album.”
And, he says, the feeling of collaboration started to wear thin.
“We struggled with each other. We were always this close-knit group of friends, but they went in their direction, and I went in mine. That’s normal. That’s what happens when you’re in your late 20s.”
Today, the old bandmates live all over the place. One lives in Oslo. “I think another guy lives in Rotterdam or something like that,” Halvard says. “People moved on with their lives.”
After that, Haldorsen was not very active musically—until he met his boyfriend in Oslo.
Their shared passion for music reignited their creativity, and a few years ago, they released an album together under the name “The Machines.”
“We wanted a name that was very generic!” he laughs.
What does queerness mean to you?
Throughout our conversation, Haldorsen calls himself—and Sadomaoistan—queer. I note that, at least in the United States, where I’m from, comfort with the word “queer” seems to stop at a certain age. Many men Halvard’s age remember the term as a painful slur and don’t use it so easily. Were things different in Norway?
“We called ourselves queer even back then,” he says with a sense of pride and defiance in his voice—and in that moment, I see it: the rockstar.
“We saw ourselves as a queer band. But I think the term queer has changed a lot over the years.”
He says “queer” was still, unquestionably, a slur in Norway in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“But we did not see it as a slur,” he says. “We saw it as a way to express our outsider identity. We all saw ourselves as part of the gay liberation movement, and within that movement were gays, lesbians, trans people, and queer people. And honestly, I feel it’s the same way now.”
Halvard admits he has grown a bit weary of debates over language and labelling in the community.
I avoid discussions between gay and queer. In Berlin, it feels like something that just exists to separate people. It has this divisive effect. Here, I sense people often just want to divide and separate into groups. So I always find this discussion about gay and queer gets us nowhere. The desire to find common ground doesn’t exist so much.
Are you still political?
Halvard’s politics have not shifted—he remains firmly on the left, firmly on the protesting, queer side of life, with an activist’s heart—but his approach has mellowed.
“I’m a leftist. All my friends are leftists. That’s been the reality of my life. But I also know many people, especially in Oslo, who are on the right, and we would never agree on anything politically. But I try not to separate from those people. I know that, at the end of the day, we won’t agree, so I don’t talk about that stuff with them. I think that comes with age. Call it an old man’s foolish wisdom, but I just want to keep the peace now.”
What did you do in Oslo after you quit the band?
“I was a TV producer!” he says. He produced reality television, various music documentaries, and several popular TV shows, starting in the mid-90s.
“When I first started working in television, it was a much more creative place. You could use your artistic side. But after 2000, maybe 2005, it started to be very controlled and formatted. You could only play within the format.”
He produced the Norwegian version of Survivor, a competition reality show where people stuck on an island have to overcome challenges and vote each other off until one final “survivor” is left. But in Norway, the show was called Robinson—from Robinson Crusoe. “I did tons of them,” he says.
Do any memories from your TV production years stand out?
Just one. He did a feature documentary about a music festival in Norway where Aphex Twin was playing. He asked the band’s manager if he could interview them. The band said yes— “But there can be no cameras or microphones.”
Halvard shrugs. “This was for television, and they knew that,” he says. “It was a very polite, very indirect way of saying no.”
His professional skills recently became useful in a way he did not foresee. Various people have asked if there’s any footage of Sadomaoistan’s live performances. At first, he was convinced there were none.
“This was the early ‘90s,” he says. “No one had smartphones, and you didn’t see video cameras at concerts.”
But after a year of digging—messaging the right people, scouring the internet, online hunting—he found enough footage to make an hour-long documentary about the band. It recently appeared at a queer film festival in Norway.
“I’ve just finished making the English subtitles,” he says. “I plan to send it to more places.”
Are you nervous about performing again—even for a one-time, special event?
Yes. When he performs in Oslo this September for the launch, he will perform at least one new piece of music—and he’s “panicking.”
The last time I was on a stage was 2006. So right now I am a yo-yo between super excitement and panic. But the panic is a guarantee that I will focus my energy to do well. I use the panic to create energy.
So, is Sadomaoistan back? Will you keep making music under the same name?
I sense this is a complex subject. “That’s a good question,” he says. The short answer: he’s not sure.
“For now, I’m keeping it. As far as the band goes, I’m the last man standing.” He says it’s not entirely accurate that he was the “primary force” of the band’s music—he was the music.
“But it’s strange to have left something in the ‘90s and pick it up again, because I’m not in the same place now as I was at that point in my life. I was 30 when I stopped producing this music. Now I’m turning 62. So much life has been lived. If I keep the name, I’m dragging my past into my new life, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
He debates this. Should he start over, with a new name? Can he start over now?
“These are questions I’m asking myself. But keeping the name gives me a platform to work from, so it’s tricky. No matter what happens, the whole thing has ignited something new in me.”
How does it feel to make music again?
He smiles. “When you do music—and I guess this is true with all art—when you stop, something is missing from your life. There’s a void. When you find a reignition, there’s nothing better.”
He goes on. “I’m not sure if a chapter is closing or opening, but my creativity has definitely come back.”
“When I make music, I still have that original approach that it should have a freedom aspect, and that it shouldn’t be restricted by marketing ideas or commerciality. My head is still in the world of making art for art’s sake and making music for music’s sake. I have to create something that aligns with that direction, because only then can I succeed.”
As we talk, I realise Halvard is giddy—childlike, excited—and I know how that feels. I have felt that same happiness, the joy of making something others recognise and want more of.
“I’m over the moon,” he says. “And just really ready to get started.”
How do you keep this energy up? What’s your secret?
He tells me he once asked someone the same question—a famous Norwegian actress named Sossen Krohg—back when the band was active. The actress was “a free spirit, as we used to say.” She agreed to do some spoken-word poetry that he later incorporated into one of the band’s songs.
They finished cutting the record in the early hours of the morning, and the actress—who was in her seventies at the time—had to be on set at 7 am to film the TV show she starred in.
“I asked her how she did it, how she had the energy, what her secret was. And she gave me this advice: With the stuff you love, never slow down. And that’s what I try to remember. Never slow down.”
Halvard Haldorsen is on Instagram, and his new releases are available to buy on Bandcamp. Sadomaoistan’s “EP 1 Remixed by…” was released on Snick Snack Music in May 2025.
Words: Alexander Cheves
Pictures: Mara Menzel
