Trappmusik translates as “staircase music,” a title that turns architecture into motion. A staircase is neither departure nor arrival. It is the structure connecting levels, experienced one repeated step at a time. Kungens Män builds this double album in the same way. Seven improvisations rise, pause, turn and occasionally descend without requiring a destination. The group calls it a chill-out album, but the calm is never empty. Every relaxed surface contains small negotiations among guitar, bass, drums, synthesizer, saxophone and the room itself.
The album came from an unusually productive three-day session at Silence Studio in Koppom during May 2019. Kungens Män normally recorded at home in Stockholm after work, carrying urban stress directly into long improvisations. Silence offered another rhythm. The musicians walked to the lake, played at a slower pace and recorded thirteen hours of music. Trappmusik and the heavier Hårt som ben emerged from the same reservoir, demonstrating how editing can reveal entirely different identities inside one extended act of collective playing.
“Fånge i universum,” or “Prisoner in the Universe,” opens with a beautifully impossible condition. Everyone is technically a prisoner of the universe because there is nowhere outside it to escape, yet the music makes confinement feel spacious. Guitar tones drift over an unhurried pulse while synthesizer creates depth rather than spectacle. The track does not attempt to break free. It discovers freedom through attention, finding additional room inside the boundaries that cannot be changed.
“Senvägen” means “the late way” or “the slow route,” and its patience feels deliberate. Kungens Män allows the rhythm to develop without forcing a dramatic entrance. Bass and drums establish a road while guitars move beside it, sometimes marking scenery and sometimes disappearing into haze. This is one of the band’s great gifts: no player has to become the central narrator. The composition remains a conversation in which silence, hesitation and repetition can be meaningful replies.
“Tricksen för transen,” roughly “the tricks for the trance,” brings the method close to the surface. The trick is not technical mystery. It is sustained listening. A phrase repeats until its original function changes, percussion enters without disturbing the atmosphere, and a guitar line that first seemed decorative becomes the object organizing everything around it. Trance is produced collectively, not imposed by a sequencer. Human timing introduces tiny irregularities that prevent repetition from becoming sterile.
The center of the album is “Främmande i tillvaron,” a phrase suggesting estrangement from existence or being a stranger in the world. The track is dedicated to Bo Hansson, whose recordings helped establish the imaginative possibilities associated with Silence Studio. Peter Erikson’s synthesizer and organ-like colors give the piece a warm, seventies glow, but Kungens Män avoids turning tribute into imitation. Hansson’s influence is honored through openness: modest keyboard phrases are permitted to suggest landscapes larger than the equipment producing them.
That dedication carries additional historical electricity. Silence was founded through the work of Hansson and engineer Anders Lind, who returned to rig the equipment for these sessions. Recording engineer Isak Sjöholm is the son of Jakob Sjöholm from Träd, Gräs och Stenar, another group central to the musical community surrounding the studio. Trappmusik therefore does not merely visit a famous room. Several generations of Swedish improvisation briefly occupy it at once.
“Vibbdirektivet,” or “the vibe directive,” reduces the music further. The title is funny because a directive suggests authority, while a vibe cannot be commanded without destroying it. The band resolves that contradiction by establishing only the conditions: a subdued beat, wide spaces and enough trust for very little to happen. The track becomes a lesson in beautifully maintained emptiness. Its calm contains multiple shades, including melancholy, uncertainty and the private unease that can surface after noise has stopped providing cover.
“Lastkajen,” meaning “the loading dock,” is the shortest piece and one of the album’s most physical. The title brings the cosmic drifting back to a practical place where objects arrive, wait and are moved elsewhere. At five minutes, it behaves like a landing between larger flights of stairs. The ensemble gathers itself, allows a compact groove to form and then moves on before the pattern becomes a complete room.
The title track occupies the final seventeen minutes and gives the album its most animated conclusion. Saxophone, guitars and rhythm section create a jazzier, more mobile environment, as though the slow ascent has reached a level where several corridors suddenly open. The improvisation remains patient, but the musicians test one another more actively. Lines cross, percussion becomes busier and the staircase begins to resemble a social structure: everyone moving independently while sharing the same limited passage.
Kungens Män’s six-player lineup makes that balance possible. Mattias Indy Pettersson’s drums and percussion provide motion without locking the group inside rigid meter. Magnus Öhrn’s bass gives the long forms gravity. Peter Erikson supplies synthesizer and drum machine, while Hans Hjelm, Mikael Tuominen and Gustav Nygren create a three-guitar field in which individual roles can blur. Nygren’s saxophone and twelve-string guitar add further routes, and Tuominen’s Bass VI, organ, percussion and voice make the ensemble’s internal borders even less stable.
Mikael Tuominen mixed the sessions, DJM mastered them, and Magnus Öhrn created the cover artwork. The editing deserves to be considered part of the composition. Thirteen hours of recorded improvisation did not naturally divide themselves into these seven tracks. Selection determined which atmospheres would survive, where each piece would begin and end, and how the album would move between levels. Trappmusik is spontaneous performance shaped afterward by patient architectural decisions.
Adansonia Records issued the album as AR035 on double vinyl, initially using yellow and orange discs with artwork by Öhrn, followed by later black and multicolored editions. The physical format suits music concerned with stages and transitions. Four sides require three interruptions, turning the listener into another participant who must stand, cross the room and begin the next level.
Trappmusik is not Kungens Män becoming less intense. It relocates intensity from volume and acceleration into attention. The woods around Silence Studio, the history inside its walls and the musicians’ willingness to stop competing with time allowed another side of the group to become audible. The album climbs without trying to reach heaven. Its pleasure lies in the stairs themselves, each repeated step producing a slightly different view of the same surrounding space.
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