Gazpacho are an art rock band from Norway. The original core of the band consisted of Jan-Henrik Ohme (vocals), Jon-Arne Vilbo (guitar), and Thomas Andersen (keyboards, programming, production). They started making music together in 1996, and the band has since expanded with Mikael Krømer (violin, co-producer), Robert R Johansen (drums), and Kristian Torp (bass).

Childhood friends Jon-Arne Vilbo and Thomas Andersen had played together in a band called Delerium before, which in their own words "whittled away". After several years of separation, the two friends met again and started making music together again. Andersen had met Jan-Henrik Ohme through his work as radio commercial producer and brought him into the jam sessions, which laid the foundation for Gazpacho as it exists today.

The band name comes from an attempt to describe their music.

Andersen: "We are a very unlikely mixture of people really, not the average types you'd expect to see in the same band... so we thought Gazpacho, which really is the bastard of soups (meshed up vegetables served cold), was the perfect name for our group(...)With Gazpacho you get a surprise, something unexpected, something out of the norm, a 'positive' contradiction. We feel this describes our band very well.".

Roy Funner played bass on the finished recordings of the band, though he wasn't part of the writing process. For the drum tracks, a computer was used.

For two years, the band worked on a concept album, Random Access Memory; a piece of work which they discarded altogether when they felt they had not yet reached the level of musical maturity for such an ambitious project.

All three members of Gazpacho were involved with the Scandinavian branch of Marillion's The Web fanclub. This led to Ohme being invited to sing the Marillion track Afraid of Sunlight at the Swap The Band show of the first Marillion Convention Weekend. At this convention, the band handed out free four-track promos called Get It While It's Cold to anyone interested. These promos also found their way to several internet magazines, which gave the band almost unanimous acclaim, with one reviewer calling the music "expertly-crafted and truly inventive".

In May 2002, Gazpacho entered a song contest on Make-A-Star with the song "Sea of Tranquility", and won. Their second entry, "Ghost", made it to second position, and this was enough to gain them the opportunity to release an album through MP3.com. Get It While It's Cold (37°C) contained three tracks of the promo EP and three new tracks. One of these new songs, "Nemo", saw the band winning the Make-A-Star contest for a second time. The release of the EP continued to garner them international acclaim.