Free/Slope - 2018 - Abracadabra

Sound Effect Records – SER 052

 Abracadabra is a useful title for music created from improvisation because the familiar magic word does not explain how anything happens. It marks the instant when ordinary materials appear to change condition. Daniel Fridlund Brandt begins with guitars, synthesizers, rhythm machines and effects inside a Gothenburg studio, then allows repetition and spontaneous decisions to turn them into landscapes. Nothing actually vanishes, yet familiar instruments become difficult to locate. A guitar resembles light across water, a synthesizer becomes weather, and a modest pulse creates the sensation of travelling much farther than the room in which it was recorded.

Free/Slope had appeared only a year earlier with Daydream Melodies, an album whose motorik movement and glowing guitar quickly carried the unknown solo project beyond its small initial pressing. Abracadabra retains that kosmische foundation while loosening the rhythmic machinery. The earlier record often suggested a vehicle moving steadily through changing scenery; this one spends more time floating above the road. Cluster, Harmonia, Ashra and Popol Vuh remain useful coordinates, but Brandt is not rebuilding a vanished German laboratory. The music carries the softer light, coastlines and domestic scale of western Sweden, where an improvised bedroom recording can open into an enormous internal geography.
“Universal (Deep Into Drift Mode)” provides the album’s longest and clearest transformation. Its title already combines total scale with surrender: the universal becomes accessible only after control enters drift mode. Pedal steel from Gideon Boley stretches across the arrangement while Bobby Lightfoot’s sitar introduces another vibrating horizon. Neither instrument is presented as an exotic solo attraction. They are absorbed into the current, bending the apparent distance between notes until the track feels suspended between country music, raga, space rock and a machine quietly dreaming about all three.
That openness gives the album its warmth. Many records associated with cosmic travel treat space as cold, technological or hostile. Free/Slope’s universe is hospitable. “Emerald Eyes” and “Magic Wand” use compact melodic shapes, bright electronics and relaxed movement to suggest discovery without danger. The magic is not a violent rupture in reality. It is the small perceptual shift through which an ordinary afternoon becomes newly dimensional. Brandt trusts melody enough to keep the record inviting, but he lets texture blur each tune before familiarity can make it harmless.
“Slottsberget” brings the journey back to Gothenburg. The name belongs to an elevated district on Hisingen whose wooden houses overlook the river and city, but the piece does not behave like literal landscape music. It captures the sensation of height more than a view: the ground remains nearby while thought lifts away from it. The track’s concise form also shows Brandt’s control over improvisation. These pieces may originate in spontaneous playing, but the finished album is not a collection of jams left at their natural length. Each environment has been shaped until it closes at the moment its particular spell is complete.
“Early Morning Raga / Berga Strand” joins time, musical form and place in three minutes. The pedal steel returns, sliding through a piece whose title imagines dawn touching a Swedish shore through the language of raga. The combination could have become decorative mysticism, but its brevity prevents spectacle. Brandt offers a glimpse rather than a grand spiritual statement. The track resembles waking with a fragment of music already present in the mind, then losing it as daylight becomes fully organized.
“Hologram” contains the album’s most explicit collaboration. Ramo Spatalovic adds guitar and Roy Söderqvist Brandt contributes synthesizer, creating a slightly denser social field inside a project otherwise governed by one person. A hologram is an image that appears dimensional despite being produced from encoded light, an appropriate symbol for Free/Slope’s recording method. Layers generated in a small studio create depth far larger than their physical source. The guest parts do not interrupt Brandt’s world; they supply additional angles from which the same imagined object can be seen.
“Interstellar Underground” contains another characteristic contradiction. Interstellar suggests immeasurable distance, while underground describes hidden activity beneath immediate ground. Free/Slope joins the two because independent music has always built private routes toward vastness. A limited record, a home studio and a few secondhand instruments can create a more convincing universe than an expensive production announcing its scale through spectacle. The track’s six minutes feel exploratory without becoming directionless, balancing forward motion with the pleasure of hovering beside whatever has just been discovered.
The closing “Future Age Nostalgia” names the emotional condition running through the entire album. Kosmische music has long carried a future imagined by the past: analogue machines, utopian travel and electronic sounds that once appeared to announce a coming age. Brandt does not reproduce that future innocently, because it has already become memory. His music feels nostalgic for possibilities rather than specific years, including futures that never arrived and may only have existed inside records. The final track looks backward and forward simultaneously until both directions become part of one dream.
Abracadabra was recorded between November 2017 and April 2018 at Brandt’s Golden Grape Studios in Kville. Its handmade scale is important. The album does not conceal the pleasure of one person experimenting with available sounds, discovering a pattern and following it before self-consciousness can interrupt. Mathias Engwall’s mastering gives the recordings clarity without removing their haze, while Karin Söderqvist and Brandt’s design extends the sense of altered proportion onto the physical record: white vinyl, reversed-board printing and unusually small seven-inch labels placed on a twelve-inch disc.
Those small labels are a perfect visual equivalent for the music. Familiar dimensions remain, but the center has changed, making the surrounding surface appear larger. Abracadabra performs the same illusion through sound. Its materials are recognizable, its melodies generous and its rhythms uncomplicated, yet the space around them keeps expanding. Brandt’s magic requires no hidden supernatural mechanism. It comes from patient repetition, productive accident and the willingness to hear a modest studio as the entrance to somewhere immeasurable.

Svenska Psykvänner - 2019 - The Hägersten Sessions

 

Drone Rock Records – DRR 027

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.

Svenska Psykvänner - 2022 - Böjda Toner

 

Drone Rock Records – DRR049

Böjda Toner means “Bent Tones,” an ideal title for a record that treats psychedelic rock less as a fixed style than as material capable of being pulled gently out of shape. Svenska Psykvänner returned three years after The Hägersten Sessions with a changed lineup and a broader palette. Peter Erikson replaced Charlotta Andersson, bringing synthesizers and drum machine alongside guitar, while Anders Broström, Mikael Tuominen and Mattias “Indy” Pettersson continued the collective method established by the debut. The result feels less like a sequel than the same friendship discovering another room in which to play.
“Ur Led” opens with electronic motion before the full group gradually gathers around it. The Swedish phrase can mean out of joint or dislocated, and it also recalls the familiar expression that time itself is out of joint. That instability suits the piece. Rhythm provides direction, but the guitars and synthesizers keep bending the apparent horizon. Rather than using motorik repetition as a rigid railway, Svenska Psykvänner allows it to wobble, accumulate haze and develop side passages. The track moves forward while its surroundings appear to slide sideways.
This is the group’s particular strength. The musicians come from Domboshawa, Fanatism, Eye Make the Horizon and Kungens Män, projects with overlapping interests in improvisation, drone and extended psychedelic form. Yet Böjda Toner never feels like a résumé written in sound. Nobody arrives to demonstrate the signature move of another band. Their experience is most audible in the patience with which they allow a simple pattern to remain simple. Confidence appears as the absence of hurry.
“Afrika 2” is more compact but no less open. Its title suggests a continuation whose first chapter may belong to another recording, rehearsal or private joke, leaving the listener to enter midway through the journey. The track’s six minutes provide enough room for a groove to establish itself and begin changing color without becoming a full side-long expedition. It is a reminder that improvisation does not require endlessness. A group can find the essential shape of an encounter, inhabit it fully and leave before discovery turns into routine.
The two balcony pieces give the album its most human scale. “På Balkongen” means “On the Balcony,” while “På Balkongen Igen” returns there at the end: “On the Balcony Again.” Between the larger cosmic movements, the balcony becomes a modest observation deck suspended between private interior and public world. One can remain at home while hearing traffic, voices, weather and other lives moving below. Psychedelic travel does not always require departure. Sometimes a few square feet of outdoor space are enough to make ordinary surroundings feel newly distant.
Placing one balcony track before the album’s longest piece and the other after it creates a loose departure-and-return structure. The first is a pause before deeper immersion; the second sounds like resurfacing. This framing also keeps the album from floating completely away from domestic reality. However far the central improvisations travel, someone eventually returns to the building, opens the door and stands outside again. The cosmos remains connected to apartments, neighborhoods and the everyday friendship from which the band began.
The sixteen-minute “Rökkpgausen” is the record’s center and its boldest change of language. Drone Rock Records identifies it as a dub symphony dedicated to Lee “Scratch” Perry. Rather than treating dub as a decorative studio effect applied to psychedelic rock, the group lets space become an active instrument. Repetition is opened from within; sounds appear, withdraw and leave echoes occupying the places they vacated. The track moves in a deliberately loose manner, as though its structure is being dismantled and rebuilt while still travelling.
Perry’s importance to music extends far beyond reggae because he demonstrated that a studio could behave like an instrument, memory machine and haunted architecture simultaneously. Echo could detach a sound from its original moment, bass could define physical space, and subtraction could become more powerful than accumulation. Svenska Psykvänner’s tribute recognizes that dub and psychedelic improvisation share a basic curiosity: both ask what happens when a familiar musical event is allowed to continue beyond its normal boundaries.
The piece also clarifies the meaning of the album title. Bent tones are not broken tones. They remain connected to their sources while pressure changes their shape. Guitar becomes atmosphere, percussion becomes distance, and synthesizer becomes a trace left by something no longer fully present. The band does not pursue a polished fusion of dub and space rock. Its slightly shambolic movement is part of the pleasure, preserving the feeling that four musicians are discovering how far the form can stretch without snapping.
Compared with The Hägersten Sessions, Böjda Toner feels more deliberately varied. The debut captured the accidental birth of a band during rehearsals for a Domboshawa performance. Here the musicians know that Svenska Psykvänner exists, but they avoid turning that knowledge into a formula. The electronic opening of “Ur Led,” the compact drift of “Afrika 2,” the balcony miniatures and the long Perry dedication each establish different proportions. Improvisation becomes not one sound but a way of organizing trust.
The revised lineup is central to that expansion. Erikson’s synthesizers and drum machine introduce another kind of repetition beside Pettersson’s live drumming, allowing human elasticity and electronic regularity to rub against each other. Broström and Tuominen also move beyond fixed assignments, contributing drums, bass, guitar and synthesizer across the album. Roles become available materials rather than permanent offices. The group’s name, “Swedish Psych Friends,” remains wonderfully accurate because friendship here means enough comfort to exchange functions without protecting territory.
Drone Rock Records pressed only 250 copies on transparent dark-green vinyl with heavy black spatter, a physical design that mirrors the music’s balance of visibility and obstruction. The base color can be seen through, but darker matter interrupts it. Böjda Toner works similarly: the groove remains perceptible while fuzz, echo and improvisation cloud its surface. The album rewards attention without demanding that every sound be identified.
The record ultimately feels like a study in elastic time. “Ur Led” slips the clock from its joint, “Rökkpgausen” stretches one environment across an entire side, and the two balcony pieces make departure and return nearly interchangeable. Svenska Psykvänner does not use repetition to trap the listener. The band bends it until another route becomes visible, then leaves enough room for everyone listening to decide where that route might lead.

Black Bug - 2013 - Reflecting the Light

HoZac Records – HZRCD-127

 Reflecting the Light lasts barely twenty-five minutes, but Black Bug makes that short span feel like an electrical emergency occurring in several rooms at once. The Swedish group, then based in Bordeaux, joins damaged synth punk to garage-rock impact without allowing either side to become decoration. Keyboards squeal, pulse and hover like malfunctioning security equipment; drums and bass keep the songs moving with blunt physical certainty; vocals arrive through enough distortion to sound transmitted rather than sung. The album does not patiently construct a futuristic world. It switches that world on at full voltage and leaves the listener to locate the exits.

“You Scream” begins with the title already functioning as instruction. The track is over almost as soon as its rhythm has registered, establishing the economy governing most of the record. Black Bug rarely needs more than two minutes because the songs are built around one strong collision: a primitive beat, a synthesizer figure, a shouted phrase and enough noise to make the whole arrangement appear unstable. Brevity is the practical result of refusing to explain an impact after it has landed.
The title track reveals how melodic the band can be beneath the abrasion. “Reflecting the Light” carries a sharp, memorable line through a surface that seems determined to corrode it. The title suggests illumination, but reflection means the source remains elsewhere. Light reaches the listener only after striking another surface, altered by distance and whatever damage it encounters. Black Bug’s production works the same way. Pop melody is present, yet heard through fuzz, cheap electronics and the grime of underground recording.
“Police Helicopter” converts surveillance into rhythm. The circling aircraft implied by the title becomes an ideal image for Black Bug’s repeating synthesizers: mechanical, persistent and impossible to ignore once noticed. The song contains punk excitement, but the atmosphere above it is colder. What might have been a simple garage-rock rush becomes a small urban panic, with the keyboard scanning the track while the rhythm section attempts to outrun it.
“TV-Screen” continues this fascination with machines that mediate reality. The screen is both source of information and barrier, producing closeness while maintaining distance. Black Bug does not write a long critique of electronic alienation; the compressed song already performs it. Voice, beat and synthesizer are flattened into the same narrow broadcast, as though the group has been trapped inside obsolete equipment and is kicking against the glass.
The record’s most revealing shift arrives with “Threads.” Here the garage attack recedes and the synthesizers are allowed to occupy a larger, bleaker space. The track approaches minimal wave and early electronic soundtrack music, repeating with the nervous inevitability of machinery continuing after human supervision has disappeared. Its importance lies in proving that Black Bug’s keyboards are not colorful additions to punk songs. They are capable of becoming the entire environment, changing the band from a fast physical unit into something more isolated and cinematic.
“Mask” and “Delta” pull the album back toward bodily impact, but the return is not reassuring. Black Bug’s rhythms are simple enough to become immediate, while the electronic textures prevent immediacy from feeling safe. “Mask” suggests identity converted into a hard surface, and the voice sounds suitably detached from an ordinary human face. “Delta,” named for a symbol of change or a branching geographic form, moves with the sensation of several possible routes narrowing into one unavoidable channel.
“Midnight” is especially effective because Black Bug understands night as more than gothic scenery. Night changes the function of ordinary technologies. Streetlights become signals, distant engines become threats, and electronic sounds acquire greater apparent distance. The song’s brief running time resembles a glimpse through a moving window: enough information to create a complete atmosphere, not enough to determine what has happened.
“Nightstick” makes authority physical. Unlike the distant helicopter, a nightstick belongs to close contact, turning institutional power into an object held by one person against another body. The track’s pounding movement carries that bluntness, while synthesizer noise keeps the surrounding city electrically alert. Black Bug repeatedly makes pressure audible without settling into slogans. Titles provide the coordinate; texture supplies the experience.
“Slay Them” pushes the aggression toward deliberate exaggeration. The command is so absolute that it begins sounding like something issued by a machine, movie villain or game rather than a psychologically complete person. This is where the band’s harshness retains an element of punk humor. The record is severe, but not trapped inside self-importance. Its dystopia is assembled from cheap equipment, short songs and an awareness that images of total destruction can be both frightening and ridiculous.
The closing “Önskestenen,” meaning “the wishing stone,” is the album’s longest piece and its strangest exit. After ten English-titled attacks, the Swedish word restores the group’s origin while introducing an object associated with desire, folklore and transformation. The song has more room to stretch, allowing the electronic side of Black Bug to gather around the rhythm instead of being forced immediately toward conclusion. Ending with a wish is unexpectedly tender, though the surrounding sound makes it impossible to know what has been requested or what price fulfillment might carry.
The album’s compact form is one of its greatest strengths. Eleven tracks pass before repetition can become formula, yet the sequence displays more range than its abrasive surface suggests. Skate-punk velocity, garage fuzz, minimal synth, post-punk distance and soundtrack unease occupy the same recording without being politely separated. Black Bug’s achievement is not fusion for its own sake. The band recognizes that these languages share a fascination with reduction: a hard beat, a repeated signal, a voice stripped of comfort and a few notes capable of reorganizing the room.
More than a decade later, the record retains its force because its idea of the future was never dependent upon fashionable technology. Black Bug’s future is built from machines already becoming obsolete, which makes it perpetually available. Surveillance, screens, distorted communication and bodies attempting to retain urgency inside electronic systems have only become more familiar. Reflecting the Light does not predict that condition from a clean laboratory. It reports from inside the faulty wiring, delivering eleven brief signals before somebody cuts the power.

Ball - 2017 - ST

 

Horny – HOR-666

Ball’s self-titled debut does not sound as though it was recorded in 2017 so much as excavated from a cellar where hard rock, occult theater, pornography, horror cinema and damaged amplifiers had been fermenting together since 1971. The Stockholm trio drags early heavy metal and acid rock through enough fuzz, sweat and bad intention to make the old machinery feel newly dangerous. Six songs fill roughly thirty-three minutes, but the album behaves like one continuous descent, each track opening another trapdoor beneath the previous one.
“Balling” begins without ceremony. Guitar, bass and drums arrive already filthy, while S. Yrék Ball’s voice sounds less like a singer entering a song than someone being expelled from it. The riff is simple, but simplicity becomes force when every instrument agrees to strike the same spot. Ball understands that primitive hard rock depended upon concentration: a few notes, a bodily rhythm and enough conviction to make repetition feel inevitable. The name Ball carries sexual suggestion, but in Swedish slang it can also mean something exciting or excellent, allowing one short word to become identity, joke and command.
“Speeding” tightens the album’s motion without cleaning it up. The drums keep a caveman groove while the guitar seems permanently close to electrical failure. Ball’s sleaze is not merely lyrical or visual; it is built into the sound. Notes smear against one another, vocals strain beyond respectable technique, and the whole recording appears coated in something unpleasant to touch. Yet underneath the grime is strong arrangement. The band knows when to repeat, when to break the pattern and when a keyboard or guitar color should briefly widen the room.
The nearly nine-minute “Satanas” is the album’s center of gravity. Its title could have produced a predictable exercise in occult-rock costume, but Ball uses it as permission to slow down and let atmosphere become physical. The riff advances with ritual certainty while the vocals hover between invocation and delirium. Ball enjoys the exaggerated language of Satanic hard rock, yet the music is too committed to collapse into parody. The joke and the spell strengthen one another.
Early Kiss, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Bathory, proto-metal obscurities and Italian exploitation soundtracks may all enter the bloodstream, but the record never sounds like musicians carefully reenacting a favorite year. The organ-like drama does not elevate the music into grandeur; it makes the basement filth feel ceremonial. A heavy riff becomes another object in a room where a séance and a cheap adult film may be occurring simultaneously.
“Fyre Balls” compresses the band’s philosophy into two and a half minutes. The spelling is juvenile, the title is ridiculous, and the performance is completely alive. Humor in heavy music often works by stepping outside the genre and pointing at its absurdities. Ball stays inside. The band laughs while still wanting the riff to crush the room. This is affectionate corruption rather than mockery, made by musicians who understand that rock and roll loses something when it becomes too dignified to make a filthy joke.
“Fyre” expands material first issued on the group’s earlier single. The album version gives the song enough space for its keyboard figures and heavy rhythm to become almost cinematic. PopMatters heard Gene Simmons and Deep Purple in it, but the track gradually becomes stranger than either comparison. Its groove feels soulful beneath the distortion, while the atmosphere suggests a forgotten film whose erotic scenes have been interrupted by supernatural disaster. Ball excels at combining seduction and threat. The music invites bodily movement while making the room feel unsafe.
The closing “Galaxy 666” takes the record’s grime into outer space without becoming cleaner or more futuristic. Ball’s galaxy resembles a low-budget set painted black, illuminated by red bulbs and occupied by creatures whose costumes are visibly handmade. That limitation becomes imaginative freedom. Bubbling, soundtrack-like details create a cosmic environment from the same battered materials heard throughout the album. Space is simply another cellar, only larger.
The trio’s chosen names reinforce the closed mythology: S. Yrék Ball on guitar and vocals, F.S. Ball on bass and M.F. Ball on drums. The aliases make the members resemble figures from one diseased family. Later interviews continued this refusal of explanation, describing three brothers raised on glue, hashish, blotter acid, beer and pinball. Whether every detail is literal matters less than the consistency of the world they maintain. Sound, sleeve art, stage identity and promotion all belong to the same disreputable organism.
Horny Records, distributed through Subliminal Sounds, was the ideal container for that organism. Even the catalog number HOR-666-LP1 announces that professional restraint has been declined. The original vinyl extended the performance beyond the grooves with explicit gatefold imagery, a poster and Satanic messages carved into the runout. Ball wants the record to feel less like a product selected from a menu than contraband passed between people who recognize its frequency.
The imagery should not distract from the musicianship. The bass gives the record much of its gut-level propulsion, the drums remain simple without becoming stiff, and the guitar tone is carefully ugly rather than merely uncontrolled. The vocals are equally deliberate in their extremity. S. Yrék Ball understands when a strangled cry communicates more than a polished melody, but leaves enough shape in the phrasing for each song to develop its own identity. Chaos is staged with a strong sense of timing.
The album’s greatest achievement is restoring danger to sounds that had already become historical vocabulary. By 2017, seventies occult rock, proto-metal and analogue sleaze had been revived so often that their symbols could function as reassuring retro décor. Ball refuses reassurance. The trio remembers that this music was supposed to suggest forbidden rooms, corrupt pleasure and forces that might not be controllable after being summoned.
Ball is funny, disgusting, catchy, theatrical and genuinely heavy, often within the same thirty seconds. It does not ask the listener to believe literally in its Satanic mythology, but it does demand belief in excess: amplifiers turned too high, jokes carried too far, riffs repeated until they become physical and a private aesthetic pursued without asking respectable culture to approve it. The album leaves behind no moral, only the sensation that something unclean has passed through the speakers and improved the room by making it less safe.

Lumpy And The Dumpers - (2017) ...Those Pickled Fuckers 12''

 Lumpy Records ‎– 087

Those Pickled Fuckers lasts only twelve minutes, but Lumpy and the Dumpers cram enough bad smells, broken toys, bodily anxieties and crooked hooks into it to make the record feel much larger than its running time. By 2017 the St. Louis group had already helped define a whole strain of Midwestern freak punk through Martin “Lumpy” Meyer’s records, drawings and label activity. This mini-album catches them at the point where the sound they helped inspire could have become a formula. Instead, they make the formula mutate. The guitars still scrape, the rhythm still lurches and Lumpy still sounds like a goblin arguing from inside a trash compactor, but horns, electronics, keyboards and percussion keep opening strange new compartments.
“Passing Glass” begins with a title built from a fart joke and music that refuses to behave like disposable comedy. The band enters through a narrow tunnel of no-wave abrasion, every instrument apparently coated in the same gray slime. The joke lowers the listener’s guard, then the arrangement reveals how carefully this ugliness has been organized. Lumpy and the Dumpers never confuse primitiveness with laziness. A riff may use only a few notes, but those notes are placed with the precision of rotten teeth in a hostile grin.
“Hair on the Inside” pushes the band’s body horror into one of its funniest forms. The idea is ridiculous, yet it touches a genuine unease: the body contains processes, textures and hidden regions we would rather not inspect too closely. Lumpy’s lyrics repeatedly turn ordinary flesh into an alien environment. Punk usually directs disgust outward toward society, authority or enemies. The Dumpers also direct it inward, toward pores, fluids, hair, digestion and the humiliating machinery required to remain alive.
“Attention” introduces malfunctioning electronic shrieks that resemble an arcade cabinet receiving dangerous voltage. The sound does not modernize the group or decorate the riff with fashionable synth punk. It behaves like another unruly member, interrupting the song and making its short duration feel unstable. This is where the record distinguishes itself from the many bands that absorbed Lumpy’s surface vocabulary. Slime, crudity and goblin graphics can be copied. The deeper method is harder to reproduce: every new sound must make the song stranger without making it less immediate.
“Clatter Song” is the record’s most revealing detour. Its percussion, spooky keyboard atmosphere and comparatively conversational vocal create a lopsided crawl rather than another headlong attack. The clanks suggest a kitchen, workshop, basement or children’s music room after ordinary supervision has disappeared. There is even a faint echo of the xylophone on the Stooges’ “Penetration,” though the Dumpers drag that idea into their own cluttered habitat. The track proves that slowing down does not make them cleaner. It merely gives the dirt time to reveal individual particles.
“Boiling River” returns to forward movement with a title that turns landscape into bodily threat. A river should cool, carry and connect, but this one cooks whatever enters it. The band’s world is full of familiar objects assigned the wrong physical properties. Hair grows inward, water boils, houses contain unseen visitors and food preservation becomes an identity. This wrongness gives the songs their childlike power. They resemble playground chants invented after someone found a medical textbook, a horror comic and an overflowing sewer in the same afternoon.
“Someone’s in the House” expands paranoia through blaring horns and ominous vocal space. The unseen intruder may be real, imagined or already part of the person doing the worrying. The music does not investigate. It stomps from room to room, turning a simple fear into a crooked parade. The horns are especially effective because they do not bring sophistication. They sound accusatory and slightly diseased, as though a marching band has arrived to announce that hiding is no longer possible.
The title track ends the record by making “pickled fuckers” sound like both an insult and a species. Pickling preserves something by transforming it, allowing food to survive through salt, acid and fermentation. That is close to what this record does with punk. Lumpy and the Dumpers preserve the crude speed, repetition and social ugliness of earlier forms by submerging them in their own corrosive solution. What emerges remains recognizable, but its texture, smell and aftertaste belong entirely to the band.
The record was issued in the United States through Lumpy Records and in Europe through La Vida Es Un Mus, accompanied by a reverse-board sleeve designed by Lumpy and a lyric insert. That physical presentation matters because Meyer’s drawings and label work helped make the surrounding scene feel like a complete folk culture rather than a loose pile of bands. The grotesque figures, cheap printed matter, recordings and jokes all belonged to one ecosystem in which musicians could create their own standards of beauty and circulate them without waiting for respectable institutions.
This post adds another handmade stage to that circulation. The audio offered here was personally transferred from the physical 12-inch rather than copied from an existing digital source. That distinction is worth keeping visible. A private vinyl rip carries the choices and conditions of a specific encounter: the particular pressing, stylus, playback chain, recording level, software and care of the person who decided the object should continue travelling. The clicks, surface character and tonal balance are not defects separating us from the record. They are evidence of the route this copy took.
Those Pickled Fuckers arrived near the end of the band’s original 2012–2018 run and now sounds like both culmination and escape attempt. The Dumpers had become influential enough that their ugliness risked becoming a recognizable genre package. These seven songs respond by bending the package out of shape, letting no wave, electronics, horns and slower horror atmospheres leak through the seams. The result remains filthy, funny and instantly physical, but it also reveals a band refusing to become the easiest version of itself.
The record’s greatest trick is making maturity sound like further contamination. Lumpy and the Dumpers do not grow by becoming polished, solemn or respectable. They grow additional deformities. In twelve minutes, they demonstrate that punk can evolve without washing its hands, and that a personal rip can preserve not only the music but one listener’s physical contact with the strange little object that carried it.

A Taste of Ra - 2007 - Morning of My Life

Häpna – H.36

Morning of My Life is presented as one forty-two-minute track, but it behaves less like a song stretched beyond reason than a whole day compressed into one unstable morning. Nicolai Dunger conceived it with Jari Haapalainen as six movements, then allowed Johan Berthling’s arrangements and a large ensemble to turn a private memory into something closer to a film without images. The recurring subject is simple: youth, waking beneath golden light, birds calling in the night, soil and warm breath. Yet memory refuses to remain simple once music begins touching it. Every return enlarges the scene until tenderness, confusion, grief and exhilaration are occupying the same meadow.
This was the third and final A Taste of Ra album, ending a trilogy through which Dunger had separated his most exploratory instincts from the more recognizable singer-songwriter work released under his own name. The first two records approached voice, instruments and recording as private experiments. Here he opens that private chamber to sixteen musicians. The result is not less personal. It is personal feeling multiplied until individual memory becomes communal weather. Horns, strings, piano, percussion and acoustic instruments do not merely accompany Dunger’s voice. They react to it, interrupt it and sometimes appear to carry emotions he can no longer contain alone.
The opening is almost alarmingly exposed. Piercing horn tones spread across the landscape before acoustic guitar establishes a dry recurring pattern. Accordion, violin, piano and loosely rolling drums gather gradually, creating warmth without domestic neatness. When Dunger begins singing, his voice sounds both physically close and emotionally far away, as though the adult singer is trying to reach the younger self preserved inside the scene. His delivery naturally invites comparisons with Tim Buckley and Van Morrison, but imitation is the least interesting part of the connection. What matters is his willingness to let the voice crack, swell and become excessive when ordinary phrasing would make the memory too manageable.
That first long movement contains much of the album’s beauty. The ensemble repeatedly approaches something resembling folk song, then lets free jazz and orchestral color pull the edges apart. This does not feel like experimentation added to prove sophistication. Memory itself is causing the instability. The guitar pattern attempts to hold the morning still while everything surrounding it continues changing. A horn enters too sharply, strings deepen the emotional temperature, percussion knocks the image sideways, and Dunger repeats the central lines as though another performance might finally recover the original sensation intact.
The album’s central string passage provides the clearest evidence that repetition has failed to restore the past. After the crowded warmth, the music opens into several minutes of exposed, aching strings. The absence of Dunger’s voice becomes almost physical. What had seemed like celebration now reveals its foundation in loss. Morning is not only the beginning of life; it is a beginning remembered from much later, when the people, places and version of the self belonging to it may no longer exist. The strings do not illustrate sadness politely. They suspend the listener inside it until the recollection becomes larger than the person recollecting.
Morning of My Life becomes rougher and less coherent in its second half, but that disorder belongs to the work’s emotional movement. Bass, percussion, electronic crackle and more forceful ensemble playing replace the pastoral openness with something resembling panic or jungle-funk assembled from broken parts. The film has moved beyond its beautiful establishing shots. Dunger’s memory is no longer an object he can admire from a safe distance; it has become a creature moving through the room. The recurring melody survives, but it returns damaged, surrounded by sounds that refuse to support nostalgia’s wish for a clean conclusion.
Some listeners may find this later section frustrating because the record stops rewarding them in the same way. The graceful themes become harder to locate, and the ensemble’s abundance can turn into congestion. Yet smoothing that passage would falsify the experience. A forty-two-minute memory piece that remained uniformly beautiful would resemble interior decoration. Dunger allows beauty to become exhausting, contradictory and occasionally embarrassing. His voice pushes too far because the feeling has pushed too far. The music loses direction because recollection has reached the area where direction was never preserved.
The enormous personnel list explains part of the record’s volatility. Dunger and Haapalainen are joined by Johan Berthling, Thomas Tjärnkvist, Santiago Jimenez, Bengt Berger, Mats Öberg, Daniel Bingert, Jean-Louis Huhta, Per “Texas” Johansson, Jonas Kullhammar, Johan Arrias, Andreas Berthling, Anna Rodell, Emma Lindhamre and Lars Warnstad. This is not a conventional backing band arranged around a central star. It is a temporary society of Swedish jazz, improvisation, folk and experimental musicians, each capable of changing the emotional meaning of the piece by entering for a few seconds. The recording feels crowded because the memory has invited everyone it knows.
Häpna issued the album as H.36, a single-track CD whose form asks the listener to surrender the usual ability to select highlights. There are six movements internally, but no separate track markers turning them into convenient destinations. One must enter the morning at its beginning and remain through its changes, including the moments when warmth gives way to disorientation. That design matters. The record is not a playlist of moods. It is one emotional event whose difficult passages alter the beauty heard earlier.
The title initially sounds optimistic, almost innocent, but by the end “the morning of my life” has acquired several meanings. It is youth, awakening, a remembered campsite, the first light of artistic identity and the painful recognition that beginnings can only be revisited through transformation. Dunger cannot return to that morning, so he builds another one from voices, strings, horns, drums and recording tape. The reconstruction is imperfect, unruly and alive. Its imperfections are what keep it from becoming a postcard.
Morning of My Life closes the A Taste of Ra trilogy not by resolving its experiments but by allowing them to overwhelm the song that began the process. Private folk music becomes free jazz, chamber music, fractured rock and something almost theatrical without settling permanently into any of them. The record’s deepest achievement is making memory audible as an active force rather than a preserved image. It bends time, recruits strangers, repeats itself, contradicts itself and occasionally destroys the very beauty it hoped to recover. Then, somewhere inside the wreckage, the original morning glows again.