Centralstödet / The Myrrors - 2017 - Ljudkamrater

 

Cardinal Fuzz – CF068

Many split records behave like neighboring apartments: two bands occupy the same structure but rarely enter one another’s rooms. Ljudkamrater feels different. Its Swedish title joins “sound” with “companions” or “comrades,” and the music lives up to that sense of fellowship. Centralstödet and The Myrrors do not attempt to resemble each other, yet both understand psychedelic music as a collective activity rather than a decorative style. Repetition becomes a shared language, improvisation becomes a form of trust, and the record’s two sides feel less like competing demonstrations than messages exchanged between Gothenburg and Tucson.

The relationship had already begun in physical space. Centralstödet’s Hjärndimma documented the Swedish group playing in Gothenburg while supporting The Myrrors, linking them with Nik Rayne and Sky Lantern Records before this studio split appeared. That history gives Ljudkamrater an unusually natural foundation. The record was not assembled because two vaguely compatible bands happened to fit a marketing category. It grew from musicians hearing one another, sharing a room, and recognizing that their different methods could occupy the same psychic territory. One group approaches through scorched amplifiers and unstable riffs; the other arrives through desert spaciousness, drone and slowly circulating ensemble color.

Centralstödet begins with “I E,” a ten-minute piece that seems to construct its own weather system from bass, drums and two guitars. The rhythm section establishes a heavy but flexible floor while the guitars keep testing the boundaries above it, sometimes answering one another, sometimes producing enough friction to make the entire structure appear unstable. The band’s older attraction to Sabbath-sized weight remains present, but the riffs are no longer walls. They become movable objects. A phrase is repeated, displaced, partially dismantled and returned with a different pressure behind it. The performance continually suggests an approaching eruption, yet the suspense is more important than the explosion. Centralstödet understands that heaviness can be created by withholding impact as effectively as by delivering it.

“Yttre Hybriderna” compresses that process into four minutes. The bass carries a crooked, almost jazz-funk movement while the guitars scratch, shimmer and flare around it. Nothing settles into a conventional solo hierarchy. The players sound as though they are investigating the same unfamiliar object from separate angles, reporting their findings simultaneously. This is where the Swedish progg inheritance becomes especially useful. The music is progressive not because it displays complicated technique as a trophy, but because the band treats the group itself as a thinking mechanism. Each player can redirect the whole piece, and the music’s intelligence emerges from the collisions.

“Vega’s Bodega” pushes further into abrasion. The title has the playful quality of a hand-painted storefront sign, but the music inside is all slanted shelving and flickering electricity. Guitar signals ricochet through rapid tape delay while the rhythm section keeps the room from flying apart. There are traces of Can’s discipline and the electric Miles Davis bands’ ability to make groove feel dangerous, but Centralstödet does not polish those references into tasteful homage. The sound remains hairy, local and slightly overloaded. Vintage amplification is not used to recreate an approved historical tone. It allows the instruments to press against the limits of the recording until texture becomes an active participant.

The Myrrors enter with the piece identified on different editions as either “Rayuela” or “Khalivera.” The uncertainty is oddly appropriate. The music itself seems to avoid a permanent name or fixed location. Bass and drums establish an unhurried circular motion while guitar, viola, flute, saxophone and tape-treated sounds gather around it. The ensemble does not rush to reveal a central theme. It lets the listener gradually discover that several apparently independent currents are already moving together. The effect is spacious without becoming passive. Every sustained tone contains grain, and every quiet interval feels occupied by the pressure of something continuing just beyond the audible edge.

“Night Flower Codex” grows directly from that first movement, but the sense of forward travel begins to dissolve. The pulse becomes heavier and slower, viola tones lengthen, and the whole band seems to descend into the groove rather than advance across it. The title suggests a book whose information can only be read after daylight has withdrawn. That is how the piece behaves. Meaning is carried through shadow, duration and minute changes in density. A bowed tone becomes darker without clearly changing note. A drum strike seems to alter the scale of the surrounding space. Guitar and saxophone hover at the horizon until it is difficult to distinguish instrumental sound from electronic residue.

The Myrrors’ four musicians on this recording, Nik Rayne, Grant Beyschau, Miguel Urbina and Kellen Fortier, create a remarkable balance between arrangement and surrender. The piece has enough architecture to feel inevitable, but never so much that its internal life becomes predictable. Their earlier music had already drawn from raga, minimalism, spiritual jazz and the long-form possibilities of German experimental rock. Here those influences stop appearing as separate references. They become an ecology. A sustained viola note may function as drone, harmony and environmental sound at once; a bass pattern may be rhythm, melody and navigation system. The music does not move through a sequence of influences. It creates conditions in which they can coexist.

The physical LP extends this idea with a locked groove at the end of The Myrrors’ side. “Night Flower Codex” therefore does not truly conclude unless the listener lifts the stylus. This is not merely a pressing novelty. The mechanism completes the composition by transferring responsibility from band to listener. The musicians provide a state that can continue indefinitely; the person beside the turntable decides when to leave it. A digital copy must make another decision, because an audio file cannot remain in one groove forever. Somewhere in the transfer, infinity receives an endpoint. That difference makes the rip its own interpretation of the record, preserving the music while quietly changing its final philosophical instruction.

Nik Rayne’s sleeve design also works through connections rather than explanation. An enormous eye is joined to patterned fabric, a plugged cable, coiled forms and grainy photographic fragments, all printed in earthen black and cream beneath glowing orange lettering. It resembles a communications device assembled from domestic material, human perception and obsolete machinery. The eye listens, the cable appears organic, and the textile pattern behaves like encoded information. Sweden and Arizona are not represented through obvious landscapes. Instead, the cover suggests that distance can be crossed by constructing a temporary nervous system between people.

Cardinal Fuzz and Sky Lantern made that nervous system material through a transatlantic co-release. The labels did more than place logos on the sleeve. They connected a Swedish improvisational rock group, an Arizona desert ensemble and listeners scattered far beyond either local scene. This is one reason Ljudkamrater remains more satisfying than the average split. Its format is also its subject. Two sides, two countries, two labels and two distinct musical vocabularies become one object without surrendering their differences.

The record ends, or refuses to end, with a lesson contained in its title. Musical companionship does not require agreement, imitation or even proximity. It requires sustained attention. Centralstödet listens outward through distortion, angular rhythm and amplifier pressure; The Myrrors listen inward through drone, spacious repetition and slowly changing color. Put together, the two approaches reveal a common belief that a band can discover more than any member planned beforehand. Anyone who witnessed the Gothenburg show that helped begin this relationship, owns a pressing with the locked groove, or knows how “Rayuela” became “Khalivera” may hold another piece of the record’s history. Ljudkamrater already sounds like an invitation for those pieces to keep gathering.