Klas Trollius - 2021 - Sanger Till En Manniska

Discreet Music – 04

Sånger Till En Människa feels less like an album performed for an audience than a private route somebody has allowed us to walk. Klas Trollius places acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, flute, drum, voice, wind, birds and environmental sound inside the same living space, without establishing a firm border between music and location. A bird is not decoration behind the song, and the wind is not atmospheric wallpaper. They behave like additional musicians whose entrances cannot be completely controlled. The five pieces preserve the feeling that Trollius is listening to his surroundings at the same moment we are listening to him.
The opening “Över Ett Fält” began in an earlier form around 2010 and loosely interprets John Martyn’s “Over the Hill,” but Trollius does not treat the source as a composition to be faithfully covered. He reduces it to a remembered melodic gesture, a few quietly repeated words and the physical act of moving through a landscape with a guitar. The result resembles a song being recalled while walking rather than performed after rehearsal. Field recordings continually widen the frame, making the human voice seem small but not insignificant. Trollius is one body crossing a much larger field, briefly placing melody into an environment that will continue after he has passed through it.
The descriptive track titles reveal the album’s working method. “Gitarr, Klockspel, Delay, Sång: Två Stämmor” identifies guitar, glockenspiel, delay and two vocal parts as plainly as somebody might label the contents of a drawer. That plainness removes the usual pressure to transform modest materials into a grand artistic statement. Echo becomes especially important throughout the record. Trollius is known in Gothenburg as an eclectic DJ, and his affection for dub can be heard in the way sounds leave trails behind themselves. King Tubby’s presence in the album’s dedication therefore makes emotional and musical sense. Dub is not copied as a genre here; its understanding of space, absence and afterimage quietly enters acoustic folk music.
“Gitarr, Klockspel Och Isdemoner” moves further away from conventional song form. Guitar and small points of chiming sound coexist with an environment that seems capable of interrupting, swallowing or redirecting them. The repeated image of “ice demons” gains another possible meaning from the album’s dedication to Swedish poet Elsa Grave, whose work included the wonderfully titled För isdemoner är fan en snögubbe, roughly “To ice demons, the Devil is a snowman.” Whether or not Trollius intended a direct quotation, Grave’s mixture of nature, menace, dark humor and strange symbolic life belongs comfortably beside this music. The landscape is beautiful, but it is never reduced to a harmless pastoral postcard.
“Koltrast,” meaning blackbird, comes closest to a compact pop song. Trollius cited Razorcuts’ “Sorry to Embarrass You” and shoegaze as influences, and the track carries the fragile immediacy of independent pop remembered through distance. It does not abandon the album’s field-recording world so much as allow a recognizable song to materialize briefly inside it. The contrast makes its melody feel unusually precious. After the wandering structures around it, a three-minute song with a clearer center resembles a small house encountered in open country, its light visible before the path moves onward.
The closing “Isdemoner För Flöjt, Trumma Och Vind” gives wind equal billing with flute and drum. That title explains the album better than any genre category could. Trollius is not using nature to authenticate his music or prove some romantic purity. He is accepting that a location contributes rhythms, textures and accidents beyond the musician’s authorship. Parts of the album were also recorded in his apartment on Hisingen, so interior privacy and open landscape continually overlap. A room contains the outside through recordings; the outdoor pieces retain the closeness of someone working alone.
The record is dedicated to Trollius’s father, King Tubby and Elsa Grave, three presences that suggest family memory, spatial imagination and poetry without explaining how they connect. That unanswered relationship is part of the album’s beauty. Sånger Till En Människa, roughly Songs to a Human Being, does not address a market, scene or ideal listener. It sounds directed toward one unknown person at a time. Its world remains personal without becoming sealed, and experimental without requiring the listener to admire its cleverness. Trollius simply opens the door, points across the field and lets the human voice find its temporary place among everything already sounding there.

Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall - 2023 - Their Power Reached Across Space and Time - To Defy Them Was Death - Or Worse

 

Thrill Jockey – THRILL 577

Mats Gustafsson is often associated with the explosive possibilities of the saxophone, but Their Power Reached Across Space and Time begins by withholding that expected eruption. This is deliberately slow, low-dynamic music, built from breath, friction, electronics and carefully preserved empty space. Joachim Nordwall does not provide a conventional background for Gustafsson to attack. He constructs an unstable environment around the reeds, using analogue synthesis and processed sound to make the room itself feel active. Something always appears to be approaching, but the album rarely grants the release of a full collision.
That restraint makes every small sound unusually physical. Gustafsson’s saxophones, clarinet and flute can resemble distant calls, curling smoke, mechanical scraping or percussion produced by breath and keys. Nordwall answers with electrical vibration, low-frequency pressure and surfaces that seem to shift position around the horn. Acoustic and electronic sources gradually become difficult to separate. A rough saxophone tone may feel synthetic, while an oscillator begins to breathe like an organism. The record occupies the border where instruments stop behaving according to their official identities.
The pair describe the album as the result of decades of friendship and artistic respect, and its real subject may be the act of listening itself. Neither musician appears interested in conquering the available space. Gustafsson leaves openings for Nordwall’s electronics to alter the atmosphere; Nordwall allows the reeds to redirect the scale and density of his constructions. Their improvisation does not resemble a contest between two forceful personalities. It is a conversation in which each participant changes because the other has spoken. In an era filled with simultaneous voices trying to overpower one another, the patience here feels almost radical.
The elaborate titles deepen the album’s science-fiction atmosphere without explaining the music. The English phrases were drawn from Cordwainer Smith’s Space Lords, producing statements such as “There Are Some Worlds Where All Dreams Die,” “Their New Life Was Their Final Life” and “Oh, Said the Strange Mind, You Want Me to Think for You.” Swedish cartoonist Gunnar Lundkvist, creator of Klas Katt, supplied the brief Swedish phrases placed in parentheses. These are not translations. Cosmic declarations are paired with ordinary or uneasy responses such as “a happy moment,” “everyday life,” “panic,” “lost,” “boring,” “it never gets better” and finally “end.” The titles perform the same call and response as the musicians, placing vast imagined worlds beside small human conditions.
The contrast prevents the album’s darkness from becoming grandiose. Its science fiction does not depend on spaceships or cinematic spectacle. It comes from hearing familiar materials behave according to unfamiliar laws. Breath hangs in an artificial atmosphere; electronic hum acquires the weight of architecture; time stretches because there is no beat insisting that it advance normally. Even the longest piece, “There Are Some Worlds Where All Dreams Die,” feels less like a journey toward a destination than entry into a zone whose dimensions keep changing around the listener.
Their Power Reached Across Space and Time rewards the same kind of private listening that unfamiliar downloaded music can inspire. It does not supply a story so much as alter the conditions under which thought occurs. The slow pacing leaves room for associations to form, while its ambiguous textures keep the mind from settling on one secure interpretation. Gustafsson and Nordwall called it “organic sci-fi,” and that phrase captures its strange life perfectly. The album sounds futuristic without sounding clean, ancient without imitating ritual, and ominous without revealing what threat may be coming. It remains suspended beneath its black star, listening carefully to whatever answers from the other side.

Wau Wau Collectif - 2021 - Yaral Sa Doom

Sahel Sounds – SS-062

 Yaral Sa Doom begins with tiny sounds: whispered percussion, closely recorded strings, a voice entering softly and a rhythm that seems to assemble itself from objects being touched by hand. Then the music opens outward. Flutes, saxophone, synthesizer, percussion and call-and-response singing appear as if the walls of the recording have disappeared, revealing a much larger gathering behind them. Wau Wau Collectif’s debut is full of these expansions. Intimate details keep leading into communal space, while the communal music continually makes room for one vulnerable voice, one instrument or one child to step forward.

The project began in 2018 when Swedish musician and producer Karl Jonas Winqvist traveled to Toubab Dialaw, a former fishing village near Dakar that had become an important Senegalese arts community. Working with multi-instrumentalist and engineer Arouna Kane, he recorded improvisations with local musicians, percussionists, poets, singers and beat makers at Kane’s Ridial World Studio. Winqvist later returned to Sweden, where additional parts were recorded and files were exchanged with Kane through WhatsApp. That unusual construction can be heard in the album’s floating architecture. Sounds from different rooms, countries and years do not always sit together in conventional studio perspective, yet the slight dislocation becomes part of the beauty.
“Yaral Sa Doom” is a Wolof phrase meaning “educate the young,” and the album treats education as something larger than formal instruction. It includes teaching through music, memory, spiritual practice and participation. Children’s voices are not added merely to produce sweetness. On “Mouhamodou Lo and His Children,” the contrast between an older voice and a child’s voice makes knowledge feel physically passed between generations. Elsewhere, chants and responses suggest that learning occurs by joining the sound, repeating it and discovering where one’s own voice belongs inside the group.
The music draws from Senegalese traditions, Sufi praise songs, spiritual jazz, dub and electronic production without becoming a display cabinet of influences. “Thiante” centers Jango Diabaté’s xalam, whose bright, intricate lines are surrounded by flute and gentle keyboards. “Salamaleikoum” places Arouna Kane’s welcoming vocal against the curious breath of Winqvist’s Omnichord. “Riddim Rek Sa Niouy Mom” moves through bass, scratchy guitar and delayed voice with a dub producer’s attention to depth, while “Si Tu Savais Juste” introduces playful electronic tones around Ndongo Faye’s drums and Henry Moore Selder’s organ. These combinations feel exploratory rather than calculated. The musicians sound pleased by what happens when their materials meet.
That pleasure does not prevent the album from addressing serious subjects. Education, immigration and contemporary Senegalese social conditions run through the words, while “Gouné Yi” carries a darker, processional weight. Yet even the heaviest ideas are held inside music that remains generous. The album rarely pushes one singer or instrumentalist toward the role of commanding star. More than twenty contributors move through it, and the arrangements allow leadership to change from moment to moment. Sometimes a voice directs the piece, sometimes percussion, sometimes a flute line, and sometimes an electronic texture added thousands of miles from the original session.
“Legui Legui” closes the album by making this shared authorship especially clear. Ousmane Ba’s flute and Kane’s bass establish one relationship, then Annarella Sörlin’s flute and Lars Fredrik Swahn’s piano enter from the Swedish side of the project. The performance does not ask the listener to decide which country, tradition or production stage owns the finished music. Each contribution changes the others. Winqvist and Kane’s editing preserves that movement instead of forcing the sessions into one uniform style.
The album’s warmth comes partly from this refusal to make collaboration sound neat. Yaral Sa Doom remains a little dreamlike, with voices hanging in reverb, instruments appearing through mist and rhythms changing shape beneath them. But its softness is not vagueness. At the center is a clear belief that music can carry knowledge between people who are separated by geography, language and circumstance. A village session becomes a Stockholm overdub, which becomes a WhatsApp message, which returns to Senegal and eventually reaches another unknown listener. The title asks that the young be educated; the record demonstrates one possible method by allowing everyone involved to teach, answer, listen and add something of their own.

Hills - 2013 - Live

Cardinal Fuzz – CFUL011

 A live record suits Hills because their music does not depend upon songs remaining fixed. The Gothenburg group formed around groove, rhythm, sound and improvisation rather than conventional structures, using repetition to create a space in which small changes can acquire enormous weight. This 2013 release contains only two pieces, each occupying an entire side, but it never feels deprived of material. The music keeps turning the same objects in the light: bass cycles, metronomic drums, wah guitar, organ haze and occasional details that appear briefly before being swallowed by the central pulse.

“Frigörande Musik,” meaning “Liberating Music,” begins with the kind of riff that could theoretically continue forever. The rhythm section does not treat repetition as an absence of imagination. It uses constancy to free every other sound around it. Guitar phrases scrape against the groove, disappear and return in slightly altered forms, while the drums maintain forward motion without forcing the piece toward a conventional destination. After patiently deepening the pattern, the band lets it collapse into a quieter region of organ drone, scattered guitar and an uncertain wind-like sound before the rhythm reassembles with greater determination. The release comes not from abandoning the groove but from discovering that the groove had more rooms inside it than first appeared.
The second side is darker and heavier. “Kristallen Den Fina” takes its title from a traditional Swedish folk song whose history reaches deep into the country’s musical memory. Harvester had also arranged the song in 1970, providing an important link between folk melody, communal improvisation and the Swedish psychedelic underground that followed. Hills do not present their piece as a museum restoration. The familiar title becomes an entrance into a slower, doomier environment where distorted guitar and cycling bass gradually erase the distinction between ancient melody and amplified trance. Something associated with longing and romantic beauty is placed inside a much heavier body, as though the old crystal has been buried underground and is now glowing through several feet of soil.
The live setting matters even though the record is not crowded with applause or stage chatter. What is preserved is the physical negotiation between musicians: the moment somebody adds pressure, the instant another player withdraws, and the collective decision to remain with a pattern after a normal rock arrangement would have moved on. Hills’ improvisation is not a sequence of individuals taking turns to demonstrate ability. The band behaves as one listening organism. Bass and drums establish the terrain, guitar tests its boundaries, and keyboards widen the atmosphere until the performance seems larger than the room that contains it.
An earlier cassette edition of Hills Live appeared in 2012 with “Improvisation Till Joakim S” paired with “Kristallen Den Fina.” Cardinal Fuzz replaced that first piece with “Frigörande Musik” for the 2013 vinyl edition, turning the LP into a related but distinct object rather than a simple reissue. That small mutation feels appropriate for a band committed to music that changes through performance. Even the album itself refuses to possess one final form. The title remains the same while the contents move, preserving two different views of Hills during a period when their reputation was beginning to travel beyond Sweden.
There is something especially fitting about finding this record inside your SWEDEN folder. Hills create freedom from limited materials, cold space, prolonged attention and trust between people. The music does not demand constant novelty because it believes transformation can occur through staying with something long enough. A repeated rhythm becomes a landscape; a traditional title becomes a tunnel into the present; a live recording becomes evidence of several people creating an opening together. Hills do not explain where that opening leads. They simply keep the pulse alive until the walls begin to move.

Hills - 2011 - Master Sleeps

 

Transubstans Records – TRANS075

Where Hills Live captures a band discovering how long a groove can remain alive in public, Master Sleeps shows them shaping the same instincts into a carefully ordered studio album. The music still feels capable of wandering beyond its assigned boundaries, but each track has its own climate and purpose. Six pieces form two rising and falling arcs, with the shorter “Claras Vaggvisa” and “The Vessel” meeting near the center while the longer performances surround them. Hills are not merely recording jams and cutting them off when the tape runs out. They are arranging different states of motion, density and consciousness into an album that breathes as one object.
“Rise Again” enters through a heavy motorik pulse, but the rhythm does not feel cold or mechanically exact. Hanna’s drumming has swing inside its repetition, while layers of fuzz, bass, organ and buried vocals keep accumulating around her. The groove resembles a road that remains straight while weather continually changes above it. Hills clearly understand the propulsion of Neu! and Can, yet the guitars are thicker and less orderly, pushing the music toward space rock and shoegaze without abandoning its forward movement. The voice is mixed as another texture rather than a narrator standing in front of the band, making the song feel collectively dreamed rather than individually explained.
“Bring Me Sand” continues the movement but loosens the machinery. Its rhythm feels earthier, with guitars circling and scraping rather than simply piling upward. The title suggests dryness, burial or the desire to be covered, and the music carries a strange mixture of exhaustion and momentum. Hills repeatedly discover that heaviness need not come from speed or aggression. A bass figure held for long enough begins changing the listener’s sense of time, while a guitar phrase that initially seems decorative gradually becomes the center of attention. Repetition is not the destination. It is the tool that allows perception to move.
“Claras Vaggvisa,” or “Clara’s Lullaby,” gives the first side a small clearing. Xylophone-like tones, organ, percussion and distant voices replace the larger riffs with something fragile and suspended. The track is not a conventional lullaby so much as the memory of one heard through several walls. It demonstrates how much Hills can achieve when they reduce their volume. The quieter space makes every vibration feel exposed, and its placement prepares the listener for “The Vessel,” where organ and drums suddenly reignite the album. That piece begins as a compact rush, then seems to melt its own structure before gathering around a more peaceful guitar figure.
The nine-minute title track carries the album’s most relaxed confidence. A softly rolling beat supports guitars and keyboards that stretch outward without losing their physical groove. There is swagger in the performance, but little of the theatrical domination that usually accompanies psychedelic guitar music. The musicians sound less interested in displaying authority than in observing what the shared pattern will permit. The master may be sleeping because nobody is controlling the journey from above. Rhythm, repetition and group listening determine the direction, allowing the music to become disciplined without sounding governed.
“Death Shall Come” closes the record with drone, chant and a patient sense of approaching consequence. After several minutes of restrained preparation, the band gathers into a heavier ritual movement, but even here the expected grand explosion is withheld. Hills let the guitars intertwine, thicken and recede without turning death into melodrama. The album ends by joining two impulses that run throughout it: the desire to move forward and the desire to dissolve. Drums and bass provide a body, while organ, voice and guitar keep trying to escape it.
The trio responsible for the album’s core sound used a broad palette despite the apparent simplicity of the music: Hanna played drums, organ, xylophone and percussion; Kalle handled guitar, bass, organ, flute, vocals and keyboards; and Pelle played guitar. The record was written and produced by Hills, with Linus Andersson mastering the original release. That concentration of roles helps explain why instrumental identities constantly blur. Nobody is confined to supplying one permanent layer, so a rhythm can become atmosphere and a background texture can quietly seize control.
Master Sleeps feels fully awake to the possibilities inside limited material. It was made before Hills’ international reputation and before the later live performances stretched some of these pieces into even larger forms, but the group’s language is already complete. Cold Swedish space, warm analogue distortion, folk-like mystery and communal pulse coexist without being announced as separate influences. The album asks the listener to stay with each movement long enough for its internal doors to become visible. Once they do, six tracks begin to resemble an entire hidden landscape.

David Stackenäs - 2000 - The Guitar

Häpna – H.3

The Guitar is almost comically plain as an album title, but David Stackenäs uses that plainness as a challenge. There is one player, one familiar instrument and no ensemble available to disguise an empty idea. Instead of treating the acoustic guitar as a vehicle for songs, chord progressions or virtuoso display, he approaches it as a small wooden machine full of strings, surfaces, collisions and resonating air. Notes still matter, but so do the noises surrounding them: the scrape before a pitch settles, the knock of a hand against the body, the quick decay after a string is stopped and the silence that reveals how much sound has just disappeared.
The pieces were built from sketches, compositional ideas and improvisation, which explains why they feel shaped without becoming rigid. Stackenäs does not simply turn on the recorder and document whatever happens. Each track develops its own proportions, repetitions and exits, but retains the alertness of something being decided in the moment. “Plect-Plucked” opens with a title that points directly toward physical action, while longer pieces such as “Santa Coloma” and “Salbastia” allow small gestures to branch into more complicated structures. The music can be sharp and angular, yet it rarely feels hostile. Curiosity is stronger than severity.
Stackenäs often separates the guitar into several apparent voices. High notes dart or ring above lower strings that behave like a second player, producing counterlines, interrupted patterns and compact bursts of rhythm. At other moments he reduces the instrument to isolated tones or percussive contact, making its wooden body as important as its fretboard. These techniques could easily become a demonstration of unusual methods, but the record avoids that trap. The sounds remain connected by pacing and personality. Even when the guitar briefly stops resembling a guitar, it still feels guided by the same hands and listening mind.
That balance between raw sound and refined form is the album’s central pleasure. The recording does not smooth away the instrument’s resistant edges. Strings buzz, attacks land hard and pauses arrive without apology, but the sequence is controlled enough that the roughness never becomes random debris. Stackenäs moves at a generally brisk pace, giving most pieces forward momentum rather than the frozen solemnity sometimes associated with solo improvisation. He can stop suddenly, reverse direction or repeat a figure until its meaning changes, yet the record continues to feel conversational, as though the instrument has raised an objection and he has decided to hear it out.
The final “Zeromountain” strips the language down further, giving repetition and separated notes greater importance. After the denser movement of the earlier tracks, this reduction makes the closing piece feel less like a conclusion than a view of the basic materials left on the table. The mountain in the title may be zero, but the landscape is not empty. A single pitch contains attack, vibration, decay and the memory of the silence before it. Stackenäs has spent the album showing that the guitar’s supposed limitations are really matters of attention.
Released as the third title on the newly formed Häpna label, The Guitar also captures an important moment in Swedish improvised music. Mats Gustafsson recognized in Stackenäs a rock attitude joined to highly responsive technique and unusually open listening. That description remains useful because the album never behaves like polite academic experimentation. Its energy comes from play, stubbornness and a desire to make the world’s most familiar instrument speak in a personal accent. The title promises only a guitar. By the end, that modest object has become rhythm section, percussion box, miniature orchestra and landscape, while never ceasing to sound like wood, wire and one person discovering what else they can do together.