I Dischi Del Barone – IDDB044
A diary normally promises sequence: a date, an event, a private thought entrusted to paper before another day begins. Treasury of Puppies take that familiar form and loosen every hinge. Lollos Dagbok, “Lollo’s Diary,” is divided across the two sides of a seven-inch, but the record does not behave like a story with a beginning and conclusion. It feels closer to finding two detached pages whose handwriting has begun producing its own weather. Voice, minimal electronics and damaged fragments of music surround one another without settling into the usual roles of narration and accompaniment. The diary is not merely being read. It is being entered, rearranged and made audible as a physical space.
These recordings were made in Gothenburg during February 2020, before Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson began the sessions that became Treasury of Puppies’ self-titled debut album. That chronology makes the single especially revealing. The duo’s working language is already present, but it has not yet been trained into recognizable songs or even into the slightly more elaborate sound collages of the LP. The two pieces retain the exposed quality of an initial experiment, when a voice, a small electronic gesture and an accidental noise can still carry equal importance. Nothing has been demoted to background. Every sound appears capable of interrupting the others.
Malmenholt and Karlsson emerged from a Gothenburg network in which home recording, visual art, noise, folk melody, spoken text and inexpensive electronic instruments continually cross-pollinate. Karlsson had already worked through projects including Facit and Fåglar I Bur, while Malmenholt had appeared within the connected worlds of Arv & Miljö and Monokultur. Treasury of Puppies gave them a place where those histories could become less identifiable. Their music does not sound like several genres carefully combined. It sounds as though the categories were left unattended overnight and fused together by morning.
The phrase “audio diary” is useful here because the recording preserves more than a composed object. It preserves proximity. Spoken language allows breath, hesitation, emphasis and the small distances between words to become musical information, even for listeners who do not understand Swedish. Meaning is carried twice: first through language and then through the physical behavior of the voice. A diary read silently remains internal, but once spoken and recorded it leaves the body, enters a machine and becomes available to strangers. Lollos Dagbok quietly explores that transformation without explaining who Lollo is or instructing us how literally the title should be taken.
The division into “part 1” and “part 2” is determined by vinyl as much as by composition. Each section lasts a little over four minutes, nearly filling one side of a 45-rpm single. Turning the record becomes an interval inside the diary. The listener must physically interrupt the voice, lift the disc, rotate it and search for the continuation. That pause creates a small uncertainty. Has time passed between the two entries? Are we hearing the same scene from another angle, or two pieces of material that have only been joined by the title? A digital copy removes the hand movement but cannot completely erase the structure. The two files still face one another like pages separated by a binding.
Treasury of Puppies refer to this music as both sound poetry and “broken music.” Broken does not mean unfinished or unsuccessfully played. It describes a method in which the familiar agreements holding a song together have been cracked open. Speech need not resolve into lyrics, an electronic tone need not become melody, and atmosphere does not have to remain behind the principal action. What might normally be edited away becomes connective material. Awkwardness, silence and domestic-scale sound are granted the expressive authority usually reserved for polished instrumental performance.
That approach places the duo near Sweden’s long history of text-sound composition, radio art and privately circulated experimental recording, but Lollos Dagbok wears no academic robes. Its scale is deliberately small, closer to a message left on an answering machine or a cassette recorded in a bedroom than to an institutional studio work. The intimacy is complicated by the duo’s humor and instability. Tenderness can become eerie without warning; a fragile arrangement can suddenly reveal the stubbornness of a primitive rock song buried beneath it. Their name carries the same double nature. A treasury suggests preserved valuables, puppies suggest softness and play, yet the band’s own description celebrates a little dog that can “fight like a demon.”
The sleeve extends this ambiguity through an image that initially appears almost aggressively harmless. A lavender field surrounds a decorative pastoral scene containing flowers, a cottage, water, birds and miniature rural figures. It resembles a mass-produced greeting card or a page from a child’s keepsake book, an object designed to communicate uncomplicated sweetness. Attached to the blank record sleeve, however, it begins to feel slightly displaced. Its prefabricated nostalgia becomes another found voice, as though the diary has selected its own improbable cover from a box of abandoned stationery. The image is not mocked. Treasury of Puppies understand that sentimentality can become mysterious when separated from its original owner.
That method was central to I Dischi Del Barone. Matthias Andersson’s label issued only seven-inch records, generally in editions of two hundred, using hand-stamped white labels, inserts and postcards or photographs attached to otherwise plain sleeves. Each release was a small manufactured object carrying visible evidence of somebody’s hands. IDDB044 follows that practice exactly: two hundred copies, no repress, a postcard affixed to the cover and an insert enclosed with the record. The label itself did not provide downloads, although Treasury of Puppies later made these recordings available digitally through their own Bandcamp page. The physical single and the artist’s files therefore belong to related but not identical routes of circulation.
That distinction becomes even richer here because more than one digital history now exists around the record. An earlier copy in this archive came from a purchased physical seven-inch and was personally transferred from vinyl. The files attached to this later post were downloaded elsewhere. One version carries the cartridge, turntable, recording level, software and listening decisions of a particular home transfer; the other carries an unknown chain that may originate from vinyl or from a digital source. Neither automatically cancels the other. They are separate encounters with the same small object, each preserving different information about how underground music travels once its original two hundred copies begin moving between owners.
Lollos Dagbok is easy to mistake for a miniature between two larger Treasury of Puppies statements, but its brevity is part of its force. These nine minutes contain the project before it had fully declared what it was. Voice is still deciding whether to become song, electronics are still deciding whether to become scenery, and the ordinary debris of recording is permitted to remain alive. The diary does not reveal a secret biography. It reveals the more elusive moment when private material changes state and becomes art, without losing the fingerprints, uncertainty and domestic strangeness of the life from which it came.
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