Discreet Music – 07
Mitt Stora Nu sounds as though it was recorded in a home where every ordinary object has begun developing a private emotional life. A guitar drags itself across the floor. An organ stares through a window. Voices describe small events with the gravity of prophecies, while tape hiss, field recordings and cheap electronics turn the surrounding rooms faintly unreal. Treasury of Puppies never announces where songwriting ends and sound collage begins. The nine tracks move between spoken poetry, skeletal rock, damaged folk music, ambient drift and miniature radio theater as though these were all natural parts of the same domestic language.
Treasury of Puppies is the Gothenburg duo of Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson. Their 2020 debut had already established an unusual method: spoken and occasionally sung texts placed over indolent guitar, synthesizer, flute, clarinet, glockenspiel, field recordings and tape manipulation. Mitt Stora Nu retains that handmade vocabulary while giving it broader emotional and structural range. The earlier work often felt like fragments recovered from an eccentric private broadcast. This album still has that intimacy, but several pieces expand into slow, complete environments rather than stopping at the point of an intriguing sketch.
“Jag såg ditt ljus,” or “I Saw Your Light,” opens with less than two minutes of fragile illumination. A simple instrumental shape appears through soft noise while the voice remains calm and almost conversational. Nothing is pushed toward a dramatic conclusion. The track introduces the album by making attention itself feel important. A small light has been noticed, and noticing it is enough to sustain the song.
“Rotten Apples of Love” brings the duo’s peculiar rock-and-roll instincts closer to the surface. The title combines decay with romantic abundance, suggesting affection that has remained stored past the point of sweetness. Guitar moves slowly beneath the vocals, carrying the exhausted glamour of a song heard through the wall of an empty club. Treasury of Puppies understand that a rock gesture does not need force to remain recognizable. A chord, a posture and a few words can preserve the entire ghost of the form.
The duo’s delivery is crucial. Their voices rarely rise into conventional performance. Lines are spoken or sung with restrained expression, leaving the listener uncertain whether the subject is mundane, tragic, comic or all three. This flatness is not emotional absence. It allows words to remain unstable. A sentence might be an instruction, a memory, an accusation or a quotation removed from its original setting.
Throughout the album, Malmenholt and Karlsson paraphrase and rearrange language associated with writers including Mare Kandre, Edith Södergran and Edgar Allan Poe, while Britney Spears enters the same textual atmosphere without being treated as a joke. The contrast fits Treasury of Puppies perfectly. Canonical poetry and commercial pop are not arranged in a hierarchy. Both provide phrases that have entered human memory and can be detached, repeated and given another emotional temperature.
“Bränna, känna” turns the rhyming Swedish verbs for burning and feeling into a compact statement of the album’s method. Sensation and damage remain close together. The track develops through slowly repeated tones, voice and a dragging pulse that never becomes a full beat. Its restraint creates tension because every sound seems capable of vanishing before the thought has been completed.
“Skriv när du är hemma,” meaning “Write When You’re Home,” is the album’s longest piece and one of its most emotionally expansive. The phrase is ordinary, the kind of instruction sent after someone leaves at night, but it contains care, anxiety and the possibility that the message may never arrive. Treasury of Puppies stretch that small sentence into a wide, suspended landscape. Long tones and sparse instrumental movement make the familiar request feel almost monumental.
The duo often records with older machines designed for speech rather than music. That limitation becomes part of the album’s character. Voices and instruments occupy a narrow, imperfect space, carrying the grain of answering machines, cassette recorders and portable dictation devices. The sound does not aim to reproduce a room transparently. It preserves the machinery through which the room was remembered.
“Koka en vit orm,” or “Boil a White Snake,” returns to the duo’s gift for phrases that resemble instructions from an impossible household manual. The track is brief, playful and slightly alarming. Its imagery belongs to fairy tale, occult recipe and childish invention at once. Treasury of Puppies do not explain the white snake or why it must be boiled. The unexplained command becomes more vivid because it remains sealed.
“Dödens soffa,” the “Sofa of Death,” is the record’s crooked rockabilly miniature. A primitive pulse and skeletal guitar produce the image of a band reduced to a few stubborn bones. The track is funny without becoming novelty music. Its sofa is both a ridiculous piece of furniture and a plausible final destination, the place where exhaustion, television, boredom and mortality quietly merge.
That collision between humor and dread runs throughout Mitt Stora Nu. The record has been described as “life-affirming downer music,” a phrase that captures its refusal to separate melancholy from pleasure. The duo’s world is gloomy, but it is not hopeless. Making a song from a broken phrase, a slow chord or the sound of an old recorder is itself an act of attachment. The music continues paying attention even when what it observes is damaged.
“Vidriga simulerade ängel,” or “Disgusting Simulated Angel,” pushes artificial holiness into the album’s homemade technological environment. An angel is already an image of mediation, a messenger between different realms. Making it simulated introduces the possibility of counterfeit transcendence: light generated by a machine, grace reconstructed through electronics, a divine presence that may be only another recording.
The title track translates approximately as “My Great Now.” The phrase enlarges the present until it becomes almost architectural. Treasury of Puppies build the song patiently, allowing organ-like tones, guitar and voice to gather into one of the album’s fullest arrangements. Yet the grandeur remains peculiar and private. This is not a universal present announced to a crowd. It is one person’s enormous now, made from whatever thoughts, rooms, losses and objects happen to occupy it.
The title also describes the album’s relationship with time. Old recording devices, borrowed literary language and faded musical styles are pulled into a present that does not erase their age. Rockabilly, post-punk, radio drama, ambient music and sound poetry coexist without becoming retro exercises. They are materials still available now, carrying their histories like dust on furniture.
“En blick i blicken,” roughly “A Glance in the Gaze,” closes the album by folding vision back upon itself. Looking becomes something observed. The track feels small after the expansion of the title piece, but its modest scale is appropriate. Treasury of Puppies rarely resolve their environments. They leave behind an image, a tone or an unfinished line that continues moving after the recording stops.
The physical edition reinforces the album’s private-world quality. Released by Gothenburg’s Discreet Music, the LP came with an insert and was pressed in an edition of one thousand copies. Giuseppe Ielasi’s mastering preserves the lo-fi materials without flattening their depth. Hiss, room tone and rough recording textures remain audible, but the quieter layers retain enough separation to make the album feel carefully assembled rather than accidentally murky.
Mitt Stora Nu is experimental music without the stiffness of an experiment being demonstrated. Its oddness feels lived in. Malmenholt and Karlsson do not construct a laboratory around their sounds or insist that every unusual decision be admired. They make songs from the materials nearest at hand, then allow those songs to remain crooked.
The album’s nine tracks create a world where sadness can wear a leather jacket, poetry can emerge from a cheap voice recorder, and a sofa can acquire the authority of death. It is intimate without becoming confessional, playful without becoming weightless and carefully composed without losing the feeling that it might have been discovered by accident. Treasury of Puppies turn their great present into a small room, open the door and leave every object inside quietly humming.
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