Morgen
Morgen

Let’s go back to ‘94, today is September 12th. Picture a blond, Norwegian, and talented footballer—not as talented as Erling Haaland, mind you—juggling a ball. Calm and alone on the edge of a hostile pitch in the notorious Tveita neighborhood of Oslo. Each touch with the instep is like a ticking clock. Use his dreamy juggling as an hourglass, start counting the minutes with those delicate touches. While time slips by, pull out the ultra-rare Morgen vinyl from its elusive cover and dive into its sound. Don’t be distracted by the cover now—the one depicting Munch’s The Scream: the painting from 1893, which merely stands as a symbol of existential fear and the despair of modern humanity. And really, what of it? Munch made several versions, after all.

Morgen (1969) is a unique and radical album, an example of American heavy psych that blends garage energy with complex acid rock structures. The deliberately raw production, the drenched fuzz guitars, prioritize distortion and the abrasive vocal presence of Steve Morgen, who screams as if he'd devoured tomes of Artaud and erased Kant from his life. The acid guitars seem to chase us through some unknown escape, like Klee’s canvases fired up with electric fury, all in the name of a sparkling garage rock drunk on verses by Rimbaud—by dawn, instead of skin, we find an actual Munch imprinted on our dazed faces. Now let’s plunge into the wild fuzz of Purple to catch future visions, an Apollonian omen foreshadowing Spacemen 3 and those chic worshippers of Japanese noise; in those unrepeatable moments when, like at dusk, acid rock stops being groovy and turns menacing.

Let’s go back to 1994.

Let’s go back to the football pitch.

Let’s go back to the solitary juggler. Pål Enger, failed midfielder and accomplished thief: a Vålrenga promise with a brief European cameo, a couple of appearances in European cups. An unusual pairing, football and art, at least nowadays—where they're slammed by assassin tackles and killer commercials like Shave Like a Bomber. Pål Enger is a romantic hero who washed ashore on an island that welcomed him with suspicion and loaded rifles. By day a promise and talent for Oslo’s main team, dribbling past rival defenders. By night, patrols. An irrepressible vocation for theft, though gallant and gentlemanly. Never violent, never a dealer, but with a boundless taste for Porsches, yachts, and bond girls. A futurist, convinced he was Beckham before Beckham. On the pitch, he scored little, but off the field he pulled off the biggest heist: on February 12, ‘94, while Norway watched the Lillehammer Olympics opening, he and an accomplice, in 50 seconds, took The Scream from the National Gallery, leaving behind a sarcastic note: “Thanks for the poor security.” A thief who turned a crime report into an art performance.

Oh, the ball has hit the ground, Pål was distracted for a moment, let’s go back to Morgen.

Enger’s heist is surely the most famous in history. But The Scream by Munch has been stolen so many times it almost feels like an initiation ritual by now: each theft opens a fresh chapter of aesthetic paranoia, every rescue of the painting brings the obsession back. It’s no surprise that this iconic image should end up on the cover of Welcome to the Void, as if the album itself were a sonic heist, an abduction of psychedelic innocence. Steve Morgen writhes like an expressionist actor trapped inside an amplifier, guitars drip poison as if Mantegna decided to paint with noise, and Of Dreams floats like a baroque ghost soaked in liquid LSD. Yes, Morgen sometimes loses himself in mannerisms—and Love, indeed, drifts like a Godard film with the director gone rogue—but the album captures that twilight moment when psychedelia stops being a colorful trip.

And becomes a lucid nightmare.

Morgen oozes improvisation, naivety, raw instinct, oddball chemistry born of strange scents. What struck me about Enger was the purity.

It’s dispossession. A search for distant and unspoken obsessions. It’s Don’t Shave Like a Bomber. More a collector of voids than a thief. It’s the jingle that glitches, it’s the famous TV host caught, at the moment of introducing his new book live, remembering he’d left it at home. Stealing a painting isn’t about possession, nor about financial speculation. There’s something deeper—an occult bond with those who spend $800 to own a first original Morgen pressing. It is the desire to snatch the artwork from the world, as if Art itself needed a reminder: I can still vanish. When he took Munch from the National Gallery, he didn’t steal pigments on canvas: he stole the echoing reverberations of a scream. Echoing off living room walls, through infinite university halls, down the gleaming hospital corridors, in gilded halls of power. Enger locked silence into a room, and heard the void screaming louder than himself.

Theft is a secret theater. No audience, no applause—just the thrill of knowing the world notices the absence. You enter, you take, you leave. And in that moment, you become director of a collective fear. Ironically, the painting always returns, like a ghost refusing to stay buried. It's not money, not power. It's Pål Enger's vertigo: turning art into absence, making the world shake with an invisible gesture. Enger lived off stolen moments, collected absences. No museums, no galleries—just the memory of having made silence scream. And tell me— isn’t that, after all, the real meaning of art? To create a void everyone wants to fill.