Blod - 2021 - Missväxt LP

 

Grapefruit Records – GY11-5

Missväxt means a poor harvest or crop failure, but the word reaches beyond agriculture. It suggests growth that has gone wrong: seed planted in unsuitable ground, a season turning hostile, nourishment failing to arrive, or a living thing emerging in a form nobody expected. Gustaf Dicksson builds the album inside that wider meaning. Its melodies appear to have grown from Swedish folk, church music, medieval imagery, family memory and regional melancholy, yet they rarely develop according to the respectable rules attached to any of those traditions. They lean, wobble, repeat themselves imperfectly and occasionally bloom with such strange intensity that failure begins resembling another kind of fertility.

Blod means blood, an ideal name for music concerned with inheritance without treating inheritance as purity. Blood carries ancestry, illness, kinship, violence and life itself, but it never remains untouched by the present body containing it. Dicksson approaches Swedish cultural memory in much the same way. He does not preserve old forms behind museum glass or recreate an imaginary village where everybody knows the correct dance steps. He allows tradition to circulate through damaged recording methods, private humor, synthesizer, amateur enthusiasm, religious song, psychedelic rock and the loose social network surrounding Gothenburg’s experimental underground.

The result is neither an authentic medieval recording nor a modern rock album wearing medieval clothing. Missväxt sounds more like an invented tradition whose participants have forgotten which elements are inherited and which were made yesterday. Flutes may carry something recognizably archaic, but their surroundings remain unstable. Drums can suggest procession, communal dance or somebody striking available objects in a small room. Voices arrive with the directness of people singing because a song exists and ought to be sung, not because every note has first been approved by a conservatory.

This quality connects Blod to Enhet För Fri Musik, Oroskällan and the wider community around labels and groups including Förlag För Fri Musik, Discreet Music, Loopsel, Monokultur and Neutral. These projects do not share one dependable genre. What they share is permission: permission for folk song to become collage, for domestic recording to carry serious emotional weight, for technical roughness to remain expressive and for several people to contribute without sanding away their individual awkwardness. The community behaves less like a scene organized around a recognizable sound than a village whose residents keep borrowing one another’s instruments, rooms and memories.

Dicksson began Blod by returning to home recordings made years earlier, discovering that private musical experiments he had once considered unusable still contained a living impulse. That origin remains important on Missväxt. Even with guest musicians and Joakim Karlsson helping shape the production, the album never loses the sensation of music being assembled close to everyday life. It does not sound removed from the rooms, limitations and personal relationships that produced it. The studio has not been used to erase circumstance. Circumstance is one of the instruments.

“Brudmarsch Från Mölndal” opens with a wedding march from Mölndal, Dicksson’s part of the Gothenburg region. A brudmarsch traditionally accompanies the movement surrounding a marriage ceremony, guiding a wedding party toward or away from the church and helping transform several individuals into a temporary public body. Calling this particular composition a local wedding march immediately gives it the authority of custom, even though Dicksson is constructing his own crooked version of custom.

That is one of the album’s recurring jokes and one of its deeper truths. Tradition often presents itself as though it has always existed, when every traditional song was once somebody’s new tune. A musician composed or altered it, another person remembered it incorrectly, a village adopted it, and repetition gradually converted an individual invention into common property. “Brudmarsch Från Mölndal” compresses that process. Dicksson writes a piece that sounds as though it might have been carried through generations, then names it according to the same geographic system used for older folk melodies. A new root is inserted into old soil.

The marriage implied by the title also introduces an album filled with unions that do not become smooth. Acoustic instruments meet synthesizer. Sweden meets Denmark. Christianity meets pagan-looking forest imagery. Folk melody meets acid rock. Private recording becomes collective performance. The partners remain visibly different, and their incompatibility generates much of the record’s life. Missväxt is not seeking perfect fusion. It prefers the moment when two materials are still deciding whether they can inhabit the same household.

“Arbejdet Måste Flyde På” roughly suggests that the work must continue or keep flowing. Even its wording moves between neighboring Scandinavian languages, fitting an album whose later tracks increasingly open toward Danish song through Astrid Øster Mortensen. The title can sound like encouragement, resignation or an instruction issued by somebody who will not be doing the labor personally. Whatever the season brings, work continues because bodies require food, institutions require obedience and songs require somebody to repeat them.

The phrase also describes Dicksson’s prolific practice. Blod releases do not appear as monumental statements separated by years of silence. They form a continuing stream of cassettes, LPs, organ recordings, hymns, experiments and provisional identities. The work flows onward, but not according to industrial ideas of efficiency. It meanders, doubles back and allows apparently minor fascinations to occupy an entire release. Productivity becomes less about finishing products than maintaining contact with the impulse to make them.

“Gryningstid,” or dawn time, and “Den Morgonen,” that morning, bring the album through a small cycle of expectation. Dawn ordinarily promises renewal. Morning suggests that whatever remained hidden during darkness can now be seen and acted upon. Placed immediately before the title track, however, these pieces acquire uncertainty. Light reveals the field, but it may reveal that the crop has failed. A new day does not guarantee a new beginning. Sometimes it merely provides enough visibility to measure what has been lost.

Dicksson’s melodies are especially effective in this region between innocence and foreknowledge. They often sound simple enough to have been learned in childhood, yet their repetition gradually creates doubt. A phrase returns once and feels comforting. It returns again and begins sounding compulsive. One small tonal shift can turn warmth into sadness without changing the melody’s outward posture. The songs understand that childhood forms may continue carrying emotions acquired much later.

The title piece pushes the album toward acid rock, allowing amplified repetition and distortion to overtake the more delicate folk framework. “Missväxt” does not sound like a documentary representation of crop failure. It expresses the mental climate surrounding it: effort already spent, patterns interrupted, the natural world refusing the agreement people believed they had made with it. Rhythm keeps moving, but the promised result has not appeared.

Historically, failed harvests were not picturesque rural disappointments. They meant hunger, displacement, debt, illness and the collapse of confidence in both earthly and divine order. A community might have performed every required task, observed the calendar, prayed, planted and waited, only to discover that obedience offered no protection. The bad harvest therefore becomes a spiritual problem as much as an agricultural one. What does faith mean when the expected evidence of care does not grow?

Blod’s later work would move more explicitly into Swedish parish culture, hymns, free churches, religious authority, loneliness and belief. Missväxt already contains the seeds of that direction. Sacred and secular material are not separated into different rooms. A wedding march, a working song, a failed crop, an Easter hymn and a Danish liberation song form one emotional landscape. Religion appears not as settled doctrine but as part of ordinary cultural memory, tangled with seasons, family, fear and music learned before its words were fully understood.

The title can also describe a person who believes they have developed incorrectly. Modern life is filled with measurements of proper growth: education, work, relationships, income, health, taste, social usefulness. Anyone who fails to bloom according to schedule may begin imagining themselves as the bad harvest. Dicksson’s music offers another interpretation. A malformed plant may simply be responding honestly to strange soil. Its crookedness records the conditions under which it had to survive.

This is where the album’s humor becomes essential. Without humor, Swedish misery, failed crops and medieval atmosphere could harden into an expensive cloak of solemnity. Dicksson continually punctures that danger. The performances retain the pleasure of people discovering sounds together, and the intentionally ordinary presentation refuses to advertise every musical event as ancient wisdom. Missväxt can be bleak, but it is never impressed with its own bleakness.

“Förrädaren,” the traitor, makes flute the center of a short medieval-looking drama. A traitor is somebody whose closeness made betrayal possible. An enemy outside the walls may be feared, but the traitor already understands the language, customs and secret entrances. This makes betrayal one of the darkest themes available to communal music. Songs establish trust through shared rhythm and melody; the traitor knows the song and breaks the community from within.

Magnus Jäverling’s flute, recorder and percussion are particularly valuable here because they give the music historical suggestion without pretending to deliver historical accuracy. A wooden wind instrument immediately changes the apparent age of a recording, but breath remains completely contemporary. The air entering the flute belongs to a living person in the twenty-first century. What sounds ancient is being created now.

The distinction is important. Folk revival sometimes treats old instruments as time machines capable of returning listeners to a more authentic world. Missväxt knows that no return is possible. The past arrives through fragments, fantasies, recordings, inherited melodies and modern desires. Dicksson is not reconstructing ancient Sweden. He is examining the strange ancient Sweden that modern people carry in their imaginations.

That imaginary nation can be beautiful, comic and dangerous. Ideas of traditional culture are easily recruited into stories of national purity, especially when forests, villages and old songs are treated as evidence that one population naturally belongs to a landscape more than another. Missväxt quietly disrupts that sealed image by allowing Danish language and Danish musical memory to enter its second half. The record’s north is not divided into clean national compartments. Voices, hymns and histories move across the water.

“En Dejlig Tid På Året” means a lovely time of year. Coming after “The Traitor” and “Poor Harvest,” the title may be sincere, ironic or both. Seasonal beauty does not cancel the possibility of failure. Spring can be beautiful while carrying anxiety about whether anything planted will survive. Summer can produce abundance while exhausting the people responsible for gathering it. Winter can create communal closeness while placing the vulnerable in danger.

The phrase’s Danish language brings Astrid Øster Mortensen’s presence more clearly into the album. Born in Denmark and newly connected to Gothenburg’s Discreet Music community during this period, she entered the project when Dicksson was seeking a Danish voice. Her singing and flute do more than add another guest color. They gradually redirect the record’s cultural geography, making the final tracks feel like correspondence between neighboring countries rather than a self-contained Swedish folk fantasy.

Mortensen’s voice is particularly suited to the material because it carries intimacy without conventional polish. She does not arrive as a featured singer placed above Dicksson’s eccentric arrangements. Her presence feels embedded in the same handmade world, allowing tenderness to remain slightly unstable. The human imperfections do not interrupt the spell. They are what make the spell human.

“Dina Händer Är Fulla Av Blommor,” “Your Hands Are Full of Flowers,” carries a deeper history than its beautiful title initially reveals. It is a Swedish Easter hymn adapted during the 1970s from Marcello Giombini’s Italian song “Le tue mani.” The hymn uses a question-and-answer structure, traditionally allowing different singers or groups to address one another before joining together. Its flowers belong to the story of resurrection, recognition and the attempt to understand how death has been crossed.

The song therefore places successful growth immediately after the album’s failed harvest. Hands are full of flowers, but the flowers are connected to a body that has passed through death. Growth has not been restored to innocence. It now carries knowledge of loss. In the Christian imagination, resurrection does not pretend that suffering never occurred; the returned body still bears its wounds. Missväxt makes that idea musical. Beauty arrives, but it remains surrounded by rough recording surfaces and voices that sound vulnerable enough to be harmed.

The hymn’s call-and-response form also gathers several of the album’s concerns. A question requires another person. Faith requires a community capable of answering, even when the answer is partial or sung from uncertainty. Dicksson’s music repeatedly values this ramshackle togetherness over technical perfection. The participants do not sound like a professional choir representing institutional certainty. They sound like people trying to hold the song between them.

There is a lovely historical loop in the hymn’s journey. An Italian religious song enters Sweden, receives new words, becomes part of Swedish congregational life and later appears inside an experimental folk album where a Danish singer helps carry it again. What listeners may experience as a deeply Swedish piece is already the result of translation and migration. Tradition has never been as stationary as nationalist mythology wants it to be.

“Danmark Frit” closes the record by turning fully toward Denmark. The title recalls the Danish liberation song also known as “En lærke letted,” written around the end of the German occupation in 1945. Its celebrated image of spring and a free Denmark holds public joy beside grief for those who did not survive to witness liberation. Freedom arrives, but it arrives among absences.

This is an extraordinary destination for an album beginning with a local Swedish wedding march. The record moves from union to labor, dawn, morning, crop failure, betrayal, seasonal beauty, resurrection and national liberation. Yet the sequence never behaves like a formal historical pageant. These themes are carried by short, rough, intimate recordings whose apparent modesty keeps their symbolism from becoming pompous.

The Danish closing also changes the meaning of “Missväxt.” A failed harvest can describe not only crops but entire political systems that cultivate obedience, fear and exclusion. Liberation becomes the possibility that something else may grow after the destructive system has been removed. But the new growth is not guaranteed. Freedom must be planted, remembered and maintained by people who understand how easily another bad season can begin.

The record’s thirty-one-minute length helps preserve this density. None of the pieces is asked to become the definitive statement on its title. Each opens a little chamber, permits a melody, image or ritual to occur, then closes before explanation can exhaust it. The listener is left with connections rather than conclusions.

This brevity belongs to home recording as much as to folk tradition. A tune does not need ten minutes merely because tape is available. A private recording may preserve only the portion that mattered to the maker that afternoon. The rough edge at the beginning or end can remind us that music existed before the recorder was switched on and may have continued after it stopped.

The LP edition extended this world through an optional cassette of Svensk Orgelmusik, experimental Swedish organ music. That companion object now seems prophetic. The church organ would become increasingly important to Dicksson’s exploration of belief, community and spiritual unease. Here it functions almost like another building located beyond the main album’s field. The LP contains the songs sung outdoors; the cassette opens the church door.

Grapefruit Records was an especially fitting international home. Founded by Simon Joyner and Ben Goldberg, the label has consistently treated the experimental underground not as one genre but as a network of distinctive personal practices. Issuing this deeply Scandinavian record from Omaha creates another route across geography, allowing Dicksson’s intentionally local references to travel without being translated into generic international indie music.

The pressing of five hundred copies also occupies an interesting middle ground. Missväxt is not a secret tape passed among ten friends, but neither was it manufactured for unlimited availability. Its physical scarcity helped make the album feel like an object discovered from another system of circulation, even though the music was new. The Internet then allowed the songs to continue moving after the original copies disappeared, repeating the old folk process through digital means: one person receives the song, copies it and carries it elsewhere.

That process suits Dicksson’s approach because Missväxt is ultimately less concerned with ownership than transmission. Melodies borrow from tradition. An Italian hymn becomes Swedish. A Danish song enters a Swedish solo project. Friends contribute drums, flute, voice and synthesizer. A Gothenburg recording is pressed in connection with an American label and later shared through private archives. Every stage alters the object while helping it survive.

The album’s apparent antiquity is therefore inseparable from modern circulation. Nothing here was simply waiting in a forest for microphones to arrive. The ancient atmosphere is assembled through choices made by musicians with access to decades of folk revival, psychedelia, underground cassette culture and experimental recording. Missväxt is powerful because it does not conceal that construction. Its medieval clearing has cables running through it.

Fairport Convention is an understandable comparison because that group demonstrated how traditional song could inhabit electric rock without becoming a novelty hybrid. Yet Blod’s relationship to folk is less polished and less theatrical. Dicksson does not establish a clear modern rhythm section beneath a faithfully delivered traditional melody. The categories leak into one another. The old song may already sound damaged; the synthesizer may feel strangely pastoral; an awkward vocal entry may carry more historical atmosphere than an expertly played antique instrument.

The album also belongs near the stranger branches of Swedish progg, not progressive rock in the technical sense but the broad anti-commercial movement that allowed politics, folk, communal improvisation, amateurism and experimentation to coexist. Groups such as Träd, Gräs och Stenar understood that a repeated rock figure could become social rather than spectacular, and that technical modesty could create room for participation. Dicksson inherits that ethos while shrinking it into a more private and psychologically crooked form.

Missväxt does not ask whether Swedish tradition is alive or dead. It treats tradition as something living badly, beautifully and unpredictably. It may be underfed, mistranslated, politically manipulated or half forgotten. It may sprout in an apartment, record shop, church, basement or foreign country rather than the field assigned to it. Its survival may not look healthy according to official standards.

That is the album’s quiet argument for the malformed. Correct development is not the only evidence of life. A crooked voice can carry a hymn. A damaged recording can preserve closeness. A failed crop can force people to recognize the conditions governing their survival. An invented wedding march may one day become somebody else’s tradition.

The poor harvest is real, but it is not the end of growth. By the final track, Swedish and Danish voices, local memory, Easter flowers and liberation have become tangled together. Something has grown after all, only not where the authorities expected to find it.