Shortening Träd, Gräs och Stenar to Träden might look like a minor act of pruning. Trees, Grass and Stones becomes simply The Trees. Yet the removal changes the balance of the entire name. Grass spreads quickly and stones preserve the pressure of geological time, while trees remain visibly alive across generations, carrying old damage inside new growth. For this 2018 album, the name change allowed one of Sweden’s most enduring psychedelic organisms to acknowledge its history without pretending that history had remained motionless. The roots are unmistakable, but the musicians standing above them are creating another canopy.
The lineage behind this music is almost absurdly rich: Pärson Sound became International Harvester, then Harvester, then Träd, Gräs och Stenar, with reunions, losses and new participants continually altering the organism. Those changes were never merely cosmetic. Each name recorded a shift in personnel, intention and relation to the surrounding culture. Träden therefore does not feel like a new group purchasing the rights to an old mythology, nor like elderly survivors attempting to reproduce a vanished moment. It is another stage in a process that began when rock, minimalism, collective improvisation, environmental consciousness and Swedish folk memory were first allowed to grow together without anyone deciding which element should dominate.
Jakob Sjöholm provides the most direct living connection to the early Träd, Gräs och Stenar years, having joined the group in 1970. Beside him are Reine Fiske of Dungen and The Amazing, bassist Sigge Krantz of Archimedes Badkar, and Hanna Östergren of Hills, with former Träd, Gräs och Stenar drummer Nisse Törnqvist appearing on three pieces. Describing this as one original member accompanied by younger musicians would miss the actual chemistry. Fiske, Krantz and Östergren are not conservators carrying out instructions inside a protected historical building. They enter the music with their own histories, instincts and generations of listening, helping the group become a band again rather than a memorial organization.
The preceding album, Tack för kaffet, had served partly as a farewell to Torbjörn Abelli and Thomas Mera Gartz, foundational members who died in 2010 and 2012. Its title, approximately “Thanks for the coffee,” carried a beautifully ordinary Swedish manner of leaving after a long visit. Träden follows that farewell without trying to reverse it. The dead are not replaced, and the earlier band is not reconstructed. Instead, the surviving musical method is placed in the hands of a new combination of people. Mourning becomes continuity, not because loss is overcome, but because the living continue meeting in a room and discovering what remains possible.
The group recorded live to tape at its countryside workshop, Studio Svartsjölandet, between 2016 and 2018. That setting is essential to the album’s emotional scale. The performances feel sheltered from the machinery that usually forces music toward quick conclusions. A groove can continue until the musicians understand what kind of place it has created. A guitar can search without needing to convert every discovery into a formal solo. Silence, uncertainty and apparent wrong turns remain available. The countryside workshop is not audible through chirping birds or decorative field recordings alone. It is present as permission, the sense that nobody outside the room is hurrying the music toward usefulness.
“When the Lingonberries Ripen” begins by reaching farther backward than the Träd, Gräs och Stenar name itself. Thomas Tidholm’s song originally opened Harvester’s Hemåt, where its brief form resembled a faded summer photograph: colors, passing movement and the peculiar melancholy that enters when an ordinary day is remembered after its world has disappeared. Träden expands it to nearly twelve minutes. The old song is not simply covered. It is reopened, as though the photograph has become a doorway and the present musicians have stepped inside to examine everything beyond its original frame.
A low, revolving foundation establishes the track’s pace while the voices retain something of the earlier song’s communal plainness. Fiske and Sjöholm let their guitars drift around the vocal line rather than enclosing it. One guitar may burn slowly at the edge while another holds a rough repeated figure closer to the center. The improvisation does not erase the song. It enlarges the amount of weather surrounding it. What lasted a few minutes in 1969 now carries the distance separating two bands, several names and nearly half a century.
This opening establishes the album’s understanding of repetition. The musicians do not repeat because they have exhausted their supply of ideas. They repeat because an idea becomes useful only after ordinary attention has stopped demanding novelty from it. The groove must continue long enough to lose its status as a riff and become shared ground. Once that happens, every small adjustment gains meaning. A bass note leaning differently against the drums, a guitar entering at a rougher angle or a voice becoming more distant can alter the whole landscape without requiring a new section.
“Kung Karlsson” is lighter on its feet, driven by Krantz’s understated bass and a rhythm that shuffles rather than marches. Small keyboard gestures flutter through the arrangement while the guitars begin pulling loose strands from its cheerful surface. Träden’s music is often described as primitive, but primitive should not be mistaken for emotionally simple. A modest groove can contain humor, tenderness, nervousness and gathering intensity at the same time. The band does not separate those conditions into individually labeled passages. They let them coexist, which is closer to how an actual afternoon changes around a group of people.
The track also demonstrates how little interest the musicians have in establishing a hierarchy. Bass and drums are not merely supporting two guitarists waiting to ascend. Krantz and the drummers determine the physical world within which every other choice becomes possible. When the guitars start wandering farther outward, the rhythm section does not follow anxiously or attempt to dramatize the departure. It keeps the path visible. The resulting freedom is collective because nobody needs to seize control in order to prove that freedom exists.
“Tamburan” occupies another eleven minutes and introduces one of the album’s broadest open spaces. Its title suggests the sustaining resonance of a tambura, though the composition does not need to imitate that instrument literally. The idea of drone is enough. Repetition becomes a horizon, with guitars stretching across it in long streaks of fuzz and light. Nisse Törnqvist’s fluid drumming helps the piece breathe without fixing it inside a rigid pattern. The music can pause, surge and become almost motionless while retaining an internal current.
There is a special pleasure in hearing highly experienced musicians decline to advertise their experience. Nobody fills the track with technical proof. Fiske possesses a vast vocabulary of psychedelic guitar tone, but he uses that knowledge to make the ensemble stranger rather than to make himself larger. Sjöholm’s guitar has the weathered directness of someone who no longer needs to decorate every statement. The two players sometimes appear to exchange incomplete sentences, each leaving enough unspoken for the other to misunderstand productively.
That productive misunderstanding may be the real engine of improvisation. Perfect communication would produce exactly what everyone expects. Träden’s music depends upon small uncertainties: Was that phrase an invitation to intensify, withdraw or remain still? Should the rhythm follow the guitar’s turn, or should the guitar discover that it has left the rhythm behind? The musicians answer through action, and the composition grows from their accumulated answers. This is why the album’s long pieces feel inhabited rather than designed. Their structures emerge from social attention.
“Å nej” arrives with water, percussion and acoustic guitar, changing the record’s physical texture without abandoning its communal character. Its repeated “oh no” could announce disaster, but the performance sounds amused by the phrase’s inadequacy. The chorus is simple enough for anyone nearby to join, while electric guitar buzzes around the acoustic foundation like an insect with its own private complaint. After the expansive first three tracks, the song feels almost domestic, a crooked little gathering held beneath the same trees.
Humor is an essential part of this band’s freedom. Psychedelic music can become imprisoned by the solemnity of its own transcendence, as though opening consciousness requires everyone to speak in sacred tones and avoid ordinary foolishness. Träden understands that a strange communal chorus can change perception as effectively as a monumental guitar climax. Laughter, clumsiness and simple pleasure are not interruptions of the spiritual experience. They may be some of its least contaminated forms.
“Å nej” also prevents the album from becoming a uniform procession of noble jams. Its acoustic strumming, loose vocals and watery beginning restore the scale of people making music with available materials. The old Träd, Gräs och Stenar ideal was never merely to construct intimidating avant-garde monuments. It involved reducing the distance between performers and participants, treating music as something people could enter rather than expertise displayed above them. This song leaves the gate visibly open.
“OTO” moves into one of the album’s darkest regions. Distorted guitar establishes a slow, uneasy pressure while the drums proceed with enough restraint to make every strike feel structural. Another guitar begins illuminating the interior from different angles, sometimes shimmering and sometimes approaching a howl. The piece develops so gradually that its movement is easier to recognize afterward than while it is occurring. One looks back and discovers that the quiet opening has become an enormous room.
The title resists explanation, which is appropriate for an instrumental built from emotional information that never settles into language. “OTO” does not tell a story about darkness. It allows darkness to become a working musical environment. The band remains calm within it, refusing the familiar psychedelic requirement that every ominous passage must erupt into cathartic chaos. Intensity is generated through containment. The musicians keep carrying the pressure without granting it the relief of collapse.
This is where the album’s live-to-tape character becomes especially valuable. Digital editing can create enormous precision, but it can also remove the evidence that musicians had to live through the same duration the listener hears. “OTO” retains that duration. Every minute had to be inhabited in sequence, with no participant knowing exactly what the next one would contain. The recording preserves time as a shared physical commitment rather than a surface assembled afterward.
“Hoppas du förstår,” or “Hope You Understand,” returns the human voice with a gentleness that feels nearly exposed after “OTO.” Acoustic guitar provides a modest structure while Fiske’s esraj introduces a bowed, vocal-like ache around it. The instrument does not transform the track into a demonstration of borrowed exoticism. Its sustained tone occupies the uncertain region between accompaniment, human cry and surrounding air. It seems to say what the lyrics cannot safely carry alone.
The title can be heard as one of the simplest and most vulnerable statements a person can make. Hope you understand: not a demand for agreement, not a perfected explanation, only the wish that something private has crossed the distance between two minds without being destroyed. Träden’s entire musical method could be contained inside that phrase. The band offers a form, leaves space around it and trusts other people to enter according to their own understanding.
Compared with the surrounding improvisations, the track feels more tightly composed, but its emotional power still comes from openness. The voices are not polished into a single authoritative statement. Their slight roughness keeps the song social, the sound of people finding agreement without erasing individual grain. Sadness enters without theatrical enlargement. It is held among the instruments until it becomes bearable enough to share.
“Hymn” follows with no need for devotional language. The title names the music’s function rather than its subject. Sjöholm and Fiske weave arpeggios, broken melodic fragments and roughened chords around a slow foundation, creating reverence without specifying what must be revered. Buried environmental sounds and processing occasionally disturb the surface, preventing beauty from becoming sealed or decorative. The hymn remains connected to matter.
That material spirituality has followed the group through all its names. Their music repeatedly locates transcendence inside bodies, handmade equipment, food, weather, collective labor and the persistence of a repeated rhythm. It does not require leaving the world. It requires entering the world with enough attention that ordinary divisions begin weakening. Rock and folk, amateur and expert, audience and performer, composition and improvisation cease behaving as fortified categories.
The album closes with “Det finns blått,” or “There Is Blue,” a title that sounds at once obvious and mysterious. Blue exists in sky, water, distance, paint, electricity and the private emotional associations each listener carries toward the word. The composition does not identify which blue it means. It begins from the certainty that blue is present and allows the music to search for its location.
Over ten minutes, the guitars grow more storm-torn, the rhythm gathers force and the album’s earlier safety becomes less assured. Träden has offered warmth, humor, contemplation and communal patience, but the forest is not reduced to a comforting retreat. Weather changes inside it. Darkness is part of the ecology. The final piece allows distortion to acquire a larger physical scale while the band continues operating as a group rather than breaking into a contest of climactic gestures.
The ending matters because it denies the album an easy pastoral resolution. Träden’s countryside music is not an advertisement for escape into untouched nature. The forest contains decomposition, danger, old scars and organisms competing for light. Its beauty comes partly from that complexity. “Det finns blått” leaves the listener inside a landscape still moving after the record ends, with no final chord capable of placing everything safely in the past.
Across its seventy minutes, the album continually negotiates between inheritance and autonomy. The older band’s methods are present everywhere: extended repetition, collective playing, rough song forms, egalitarian musical space and the belief that a performance should remain open to transformation. Yet the exact sounds belong to this lineup. Fiske’s guitar language, Krantz’s bass weight, Östergren’s drumming and voice, Törnqvist’s contributions and the clearer countryside recording prevent the album from becoming an archaeological reenactment.
The participation of Hanna Östergren is particularly important to the sense that this is genuinely another band. As the only principal member who had not appeared on Tack för kaffet, she enters without being burdened by the exact same farewell. Her drumming can be firm, spacious or nearly tentative, responding to the guitars without becoming subordinate to them. She helps move the project from elegy toward renewed activity. The old rhythm cannot simply continue after the people who created it are gone; another body must discover its own relationship to the pulse.
Sigge Krantz performs a similarly quiet transformation. His bass rarely calls attention to itself through complexity, but it gives the long forms their confidence. Improvised rock can become weightless when every musician searches simultaneously. Krantz supplies gravity, allowing the others to wander without making the music sound indecisive. His lines often feel less like accompaniment than terrain, the ground accepting every footprint without dictating where the walkers must go.
Reine Fiske brings one of the most recognizable guitar sensibilities in modern Swedish psychedelia, yet the achievement is how naturally it is absorbed. His tones may shimmer, cry, grind or hover, but they remain in conversation with Sjöholm’s more weathered attack. The two guitars do not divide neatly into old and new, rhythm and lead, history and future. They cross those roles continuously, producing an intergenerational sound whose origin cannot always be assigned to one player.
Sjöholm’s presence prevents the album’s freedom from floating free of lived history. He is not presented as a ceremonial founder sitting above the younger musicians. His guitar and voice remain vulnerable to the same collective process as everyone else’s. The most convincing form of legacy may be this willingness to become one participant again, to let music associated with one’s own past be altered by people who entered it later.
The name change was therefore not an attempt to become modern by discarding inconvenient history. It was a way of preventing history from becoming a command. Calling the band Träden acknowledges continuity while leaving open what kind of trees these are, how many remain, what has grown between them and which branches no longer exist. A shorter name creates a larger imaginative space.
This also explains why the album can sound ancient and contemporary without making an argument about either condition. Its tape recording, long jams and folk-inflected vocals resist the compressed speed of modern listening, but the musicians do not behave as caretakers preserving an authentic 1970. Their world includes Dungen, Hills, The Amazing, Archimedes Badkar and decades of underground music influenced by the original group. The roots have grown back into the branches through listeners who became participants.
Subliminal Sounds is an especially fitting home for the record. The label helped return Pärson Sound and other endangered Swedish psychedelic recordings to circulation while also supporting newer artists who absorbed that history. Träden sits at the meeting point of those activities: neither a reissue nor a clean break, but living evidence that archival work can affect the future. A recovered recording enters new ears, those ears eventually produce musicians, and the musicians find themselves playing with someone heard on the recovered recording. The archive becomes a circuit rather than a cemetery.
The CD edition compresses this sprawling double-LP journey into one uninterrupted seventy-minute passage. On vinyl, the act of turning four sides introduces pauses and gives each sequence its own physical territory. On CD or through this rip, the album behaves more like one extended afternoon, with moods shifting while the listener remains inside the same broad duration. Neither form is neutral. Each produces a different forest from the same recordings.
What remains constant is the album’s refusal to force attention. Träden does not seize the room through volume, novelty or speed. The music establishes a modest pattern and continues working until the room has slowly reorganized itself around that pattern. A listener may initially hear casual jamming, then discover that breathing, walking and thought have adjusted to its pace. The record changes consciousness without loudly announcing that consciousness is being changed.
That may be the deepest continuity with the band’s earlier ideals. Freedom is not represented here by chaos or individual display. It is heard as room: room for a phrase to continue, room for another musician to misunderstand it, room for grief and humor to occupy the same gathering, room for old songs to become new experiences and room for listeners to enter without being told exactly what their participation should mean.
Träden is a record about survival that avoids the triumphal language usually attached to survival. The band did not endure unchanged. People died, names shifted, decades passed and cultural conditions became unrecognizable. Survival happened through alteration. The tree remained alive because it did not insist that every leaf resemble the first ones.
Anyone who saw this lineup during its 2018 tours, knows more about the Svartsjölandet workshop, recognizes the less obvious voices and instruments, or has compared the CD with the various double-vinyl pressings is invited to add another ring to the trunk. Music this collective should never have its history sealed by a single account.
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