Svenska Psykvänner translates as “Swedish Psych Friends,” and The Hägersten Sessions sounds exactly like friendship becoming a recording before anyone has time to overthink it. The group was assembled in Stockholm in March 2019 when Domboshawa needed a live backing band for a Drone Rock Records event. Anders Broström was joined by Mikael Tuominen and Jonas Yrlid from Fanatism, Charlotta Andersson from CB3, and Mattias “Indy” Pettersson from Kungens Män. Rehearsals produced more than preparation for one concert. The musicians recognized that their loose instrumental chemistry had created another band worth preserving.
That origin explains why these four tracks feel discovered rather than manufactured. Nobody appears to be forcing the session toward a predetermined identity. Domboshawa’s drone-heavy psychedelic language provides some raw material, but the ensemble immediately changes its scale. Two guitars can blur into weather, bass can function as both anchor and current, and the two drummers heard across the sessions give the music different kinds of momentum. The album is not a supergroup showcase in which recognizable musicians wait for individual turns. Its personality comes from overlap.
“Tellus” opens with a drum roll and enters motion almost immediately. The title can mean Earth, but the track refuses to stay grounded. Bass establishes a broad, patient route while the guitars generate layers of fuzz, repetition and high drifting tone. One guitar seems to mark the path; the other keeps altering the landscape around it. The music becomes dense without losing direction. Even at its most saturated, every player appears to understand where the shared pulse is located.
The group’s connection with the wider Stockholm psychedelic network is audible here, but not as a checklist. Kungens Män’s improvised patience, Fanatism’s heavier edge, CB3’s exploratory guitar work and Domboshawa’s devotion to drone enter the room without remaining separate properties. Swedish psychedelic music has often been particularly good at making repetition feel communal rather than mechanical. A groove continues because the musicians are listening to how everyone else inhabits it, not because a machine has ordered another cycle.
“Tre Vänner,” or “Three Friends,” begins more cautiously. The musicians feel their way into the piece, leaving enough air for each gesture to suggest several directions. A lead guitar gradually becomes the brightest visible object, but it never turns the others into scenery. Bass and drums build a slow-moving enclosure around it, creating the sensation of being carried rather than pushed. The track’s nearly twelve minutes pass easily because development occurs through pressure, tone and relationship rather than obvious sectional changes.
The title is slightly funny for music performed by more than three people, but it suits the album’s informal social character. Friendship here is not sentimental decoration. It is a compositional method. Improvisation requires enough trust for one person to repeat a simple idea without fearing that simplicity will be mistaken for emptiness, and enough attention for someone else to recognize when that idea needs support rather than interruption. “Tre Vänner” sounds confident because nobody appears desperate to prove ownership of the moment.
“Landet” is the album’s longest and deepest excursion. The Swedish title can suggest the country, the land or the countryside, and the music develops with the scale of entering open terrain after leaving a more contained urban space. Its opening is patient, almost tentative, but the group gradually discovers a heavy rolling movement. The bass supplies gravity while guitar tones widen above it. What begins as a jam slowly acquires the emotional weight of a journey, even though no destination is announced.
At more than fifteen minutes, “Landet” demonstrates why duration matters. A shorter edit might preserve the strongest riff and most dramatic guitar moments, but it would remove the process through which those moments become meaningful. The listener hears the band approach, test and finally inhabit the central groove. Repetition transforms from musical information into environment. By the time the track reaches full density, the early uncertainty remains inside it as memory.
The album closes with “Svandammsparken,” named for a park in the Hägersten area. At under four minutes, it is far shorter than the other pieces and feels like a small clearing after the long movement of “Landet.” The guitars are gentler, the rhythm less urgent, and the group allows the session to end without manufacturing a final climax. The track resembles the walk home after an intense rehearsal, when the ears are still reorganizing ordinary street sounds into music.
Place names matter throughout the record. Hägersten is not used as exotic scenery but as the practical location where people met, rehearsed and accidentally formed a group. “Tellus,” “Landet” and “Svandammsparken” expand outward from planet to countryside to a neighborhood park, while the music performs the reverse movement, turning local rooms and friendships into large imagined space. Psychedelia here is not escape from place. It is what happens when attention makes one place reveal more dimensions.
The sessions were recorded and mixed in nearby Aspudden, preserving enough roughness for the performances to retain their rehearsal-room life. John McBain mastered the vinyl, giving the low end and guitar haze physical force without polishing away their uncertainty. Anders Broström supplied the artwork, Maria Häggqvist handled the graphic design, and Drone Rock Records issued the LP as DRR027 in only 250 copies: 150 on orange-and-black “Cornetto effect” vinyl and 100 on black.
That limited pressing matches the record’s accidental birth. The Hägersten Sessions was not created as the opening move in a planned campaign. It was evidence that one gathering had produced more than expected. The band did continue, eventually returning with Böjda Toner in 2022, but this first album retains the pleasure of the unrepeatable beginning, when nobody yet knows whether a rehearsal lineup or one-night collaboration has become something with a future.
The Hägersten Sessions succeeds because it never tries to make improvisation sound important by becoming solemn. The playing is serious, but the atmosphere remains generous. These musicians bring years of experience into the room, then use that experience to leave space for one another. Four tracks become forty minutes of shared navigation, with no captain standing above the deck. The record captures the instant when preparation turned into discovery and a backing band realized it had grown its own name.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.