Kungens Män - 2020 - Trappmusik

 

Adansonia Records – AR035

Trappmusik translates as “staircase music,” a title that turns architecture into motion. A staircase is neither departure nor arrival. It is the structure connecting levels, experienced one repeated step at a time. Kungens Män builds this double album in the same way. Seven improvisations rise, pause, turn and occasionally descend without requiring a destination. The group calls it a chill-out album, but the calm is never empty. Every relaxed surface contains small negotiations among guitar, bass, drums, synthesizer, saxophone and the room itself.
The album came from an unusually productive three-day session at Silence Studio in Koppom during May 2019. Kungens Män normally recorded at home in Stockholm after work, carrying urban stress directly into long improvisations. Silence offered another rhythm. The musicians walked to the lake, played at a slower pace and recorded thirteen hours of music. Trappmusik and the heavier Hårt som ben emerged from the same reservoir, demonstrating how editing can reveal entirely different identities inside one extended act of collective playing.
“Fånge i universum,” or “Prisoner in the Universe,” opens with a beautifully impossible condition. Everyone is technically a prisoner of the universe because there is nowhere outside it to escape, yet the music makes confinement feel spacious. Guitar tones drift over an unhurried pulse while synthesizer creates depth rather than spectacle. The track does not attempt to break free. It discovers freedom through attention, finding additional room inside the boundaries that cannot be changed.
“Senvägen” means “the late way” or “the slow route,” and its patience feels deliberate. Kungens Män allows the rhythm to develop without forcing a dramatic entrance. Bass and drums establish a road while guitars move beside it, sometimes marking scenery and sometimes disappearing into haze. This is one of the band’s great gifts: no player has to become the central narrator. The composition remains a conversation in which silence, hesitation and repetition can be meaningful replies.
“Tricksen för transen,” roughly “the tricks for the trance,” brings the method close to the surface. The trick is not technical mystery. It is sustained listening. A phrase repeats until its original function changes, percussion enters without disturbing the atmosphere, and a guitar line that first seemed decorative becomes the object organizing everything around it. Trance is produced collectively, not imposed by a sequencer. Human timing introduces tiny irregularities that prevent repetition from becoming sterile.
The center of the album is “Främmande i tillvaron,” a phrase suggesting estrangement from existence or being a stranger in the world. The track is dedicated to Bo Hansson, whose recordings helped establish the imaginative possibilities associated with Silence Studio. Peter Erikson’s synthesizer and organ-like colors give the piece a warm, seventies glow, but Kungens Män avoids turning tribute into imitation. Hansson’s influence is honored through openness: modest keyboard phrases are permitted to suggest landscapes larger than the equipment producing them.
That dedication carries additional historical electricity. Silence was founded through the work of Hansson and engineer Anders Lind, who returned to rig the equipment for these sessions. Recording engineer Isak Sjöholm is the son of Jakob Sjöholm from Träd, Gräs och Stenar, another group central to the musical community surrounding the studio. Trappmusik therefore does not merely visit a famous room. Several generations of Swedish improvisation briefly occupy it at once.
“Vibbdirektivet,” or “the vibe directive,” reduces the music further. The title is funny because a directive suggests authority, while a vibe cannot be commanded without destroying it. The band resolves that contradiction by establishing only the conditions: a subdued beat, wide spaces and enough trust for very little to happen. The track becomes a lesson in beautifully maintained emptiness. Its calm contains multiple shades, including melancholy, uncertainty and the private unease that can surface after noise has stopped providing cover.
“Lastkajen,” meaning “the loading dock,” is the shortest piece and one of the album’s most physical. The title brings the cosmic drifting back to a practical place where objects arrive, wait and are moved elsewhere. At five minutes, it behaves like a landing between larger flights of stairs. The ensemble gathers itself, allows a compact groove to form and then moves on before the pattern becomes a complete room.
The title track occupies the final seventeen minutes and gives the album its most animated conclusion. Saxophone, guitars and rhythm section create a jazzier, more mobile environment, as though the slow ascent has reached a level where several corridors suddenly open. The improvisation remains patient, but the musicians test one another more actively. Lines cross, percussion becomes busier and the staircase begins to resemble a social structure: everyone moving independently while sharing the same limited passage.
Kungens Män’s six-player lineup makes that balance possible. Mattias Indy Pettersson’s drums and percussion provide motion without locking the group inside rigid meter. Magnus Öhrn’s bass gives the long forms gravity. Peter Erikson supplies synthesizer and drum machine, while Hans Hjelm, Mikael Tuominen and Gustav Nygren create a three-guitar field in which individual roles can blur. Nygren’s saxophone and twelve-string guitar add further routes, and Tuominen’s Bass VI, organ, percussion and voice make the ensemble’s internal borders even less stable.
Mikael Tuominen mixed the sessions, DJM mastered them, and Magnus Öhrn created the cover artwork. The editing deserves to be considered part of the composition. Thirteen hours of recorded improvisation did not naturally divide themselves into these seven tracks. Selection determined which atmospheres would survive, where each piece would begin and end, and how the album would move between levels. Trappmusik is spontaneous performance shaped afterward by patient architectural decisions.
Adansonia Records issued the album as AR035 on double vinyl, initially using yellow and orange discs with artwork by Öhrn, followed by later black and multicolored editions. The physical format suits music concerned with stages and transitions. Four sides require three interruptions, turning the listener into another participant who must stand, cross the room and begin the next level.
Trappmusik is not Kungens Män becoming less intense. It relocates intensity from volume and acceleration into attention. The woods around Silence Studio, the history inside its walls and the musicians’ willingness to stop competing with time allowed another side of the group to become audible. The album climbs without trying to reach heaven. Its pleasure lies in the stairs themselves, each repeated step producing a slightly different view of the same surrounding space.

DJINN - 2021 - Transmission

 

Rocket Recordings – LAUNCH232

Transmission begins with “Sun Ooze,” a title that turns light into something viscous. The track does not rise cleanly like sunrise; it seeps into the room through hand percussion, bass, saxophone and small ringing objects, gradually making the air feel warmer and less dependable. DJINN’s second full-length keeps the free and cosmic jazz foundation of the 2019 debut, but the playing is more spacious, more confidently arranged and more willing to let beauty remain visible before another sound bends it out of shape.
The Swedish collective still draws members from Hills and Goat, yet Transmission feels less like a side project connecting two recognizable bands than a complete musical organism. The debut established a room in which spiritual jazz, folk instruments, damaged humor and improvisation could coexist. Here the room has acquired doors. Each of the eight pieces enters a different psychic climate, from meditative drift to percussion-heavy celebration and saxophone convulsion, while the unusually clear production keeps every small object audible inside the larger ritual.
“Creator of Creation” opens one of the broadest spaces. Percussion does not merely accompany the piece; it seems to generate the environment from which the other instruments emerge. Bass and piano-like figures offer temporary ground while saxophone and voices move above them without agreeing upon a hierarchy. The title doubles the act of making, imagining a force capable of creating the creator itself. The music answers by refusing to identify an original source. Rhythm produces melody, melody reshapes rhythm, and the group becomes a circular system in which every participant seems both cause and consequence.
The title track is shorter and more suspended. Mellotron gives “Transmission” a pale, antique glow, recalling Popol Vuh without copying its devotional stillness. A transmission requires a sender, medium and receiver, but the piece leaves all three uncertain. The signal may be arriving from another person, another era or some interior region ordinary language cannot reach. DJINN does not dramatize the message with science-fiction effects. The fragile keyboard texture becomes evidence that something distant has survived the journey.
“Nights with Kurupi” brings myth into the record’s nocturnal center. Kurupi is a dangerous fertility figure from Guaraní mythology, but the band offers no folkloric explanation or musical illustration. The title functions as an unstable doorway. Percussion and winds create a humid, prowling atmosphere in which attraction and threat remain close together. DJINN repeatedly allows names from different spiritual and cultural worlds to disturb the music’s imagination without reducing them to tidy themes.
“Jaguar” is more grounded and physical. A firm bass line provides the animal’s body while saxophone moves with a smoother, elusive grace above it. The drumming interrupts any easy groove, making the track seem to stalk, pause and change direction. DJINN understands that rhythmic pleasure becomes more vivid when stability is never guaranteed. The musicians create movement strong enough to carry the listener, then loosen one bolt and let the construction sway.
That instability reaches its peak in “Urm the Mad.” The piece begins with bells, small percussion and a ceremonial hush, as though the ensemble is preparing a protected space. The protection fails. Drums accelerate, saxophone erupts and the arrangement becomes the album’s most feral passage. The title may nod toward the grotesque science-fiction world of Philippe Druillet’s Urm, but no external reference is needed to feel madness arriving through the music. Order is not replaced by random noise; it is pushed beyond its capacity to remain orderly.
The transition into “Love Divine” is especially effective. After the violence of “Urm the Mad,” voices and instruments gather with a softer devotional intensity. The track resembles Miles Davis’s electric-era density reduced to a more intimate scale, with multiple lines competing gently rather than trying to dominate. Love is divine here not because the music becomes pure or peaceful, but because separate presences continue making room for one another. The arrangement feels crowded like spring vegetation, each instrument reaching toward light without requiring the others to disappear.
“Orpheus” closes the album with another mythic name, this time attached to the musician who could move animals, stones and the dead through song. DJINN avoids a grand retelling of his descent into the underworld. The track feels more like the remaining atmosphere after such a journey, contemplative but not healed. Flute, percussion and other voices circle a quiet center. The ending does not resolve the record’s contradictions between calm and frenzy, sacred intention and comedy, European jazz memory and sounds drawn from wider musical worlds. It lets them continue resonating after the groove stops.
Rocket Recordings described Transmission through Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm and Organic Music Society, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Popol Vuh and the radical Swedish folk psychedelia of Arbete Och Fritid. Those references are useful because each treated music as a meeting place rather than a sealed genre. DJINN inherits that permission while avoiding reverence. The group’s humor, compact running time and abrupt changes prevent spiritual jazz from becoming an expensive robe worn for prestige.
The album followed the 2020 Avant De Servir cassette, which was included as a bonus download with the original limited vinyl. That detail makes Transmission feel like part of a continuous stream rather than an isolated statement. DJINN records quickly enough to preserve curiosity before it hardens into identity. The first album discovered the language, the cassette kept the channel open, and Transmission widened the signal.
The original orange-and-red swirl pressing was limited to four hundred copies, a small physical population for music concerned with communication across unknown distances. Yet the album’s real transmission is not scarcity. It occurs whenever these recordings leave one room and alter another. Their clear space allows saxophone, bass, drums, voices, mellotron, flutes and tiny percussion to retain individual bodies while participating in something nobody could create alone.
Transmission is stronger than its debut because it no longer needs to demonstrate how many worlds DJINN can enter. The musicians move among them without announcing every border crossing. A calm beginning can grow strange, a groove can become unstable, and a violent improvisation can open directly into tenderness. The album does not treat altered consciousness as escape from earthly conditions. It shows consciousness becoming more flexible through collective listening. The signal has no single message, but its movement is unmistakable: receive, transform and pass it onward.

VA - 2019 - Stages of Grief, Vol. 2 'Solace'

 

VAKNAR – VAK16

Stages of Grief Vol. 2: Solace is organized around a word easily mistaken for cure. Solace does not reverse loss or declare that grieving has completed its work. It is the smaller shelter found while the larger condition remains unchanged: a hand, a room, a repeated tone, enough quiet to continue through another hour. VAKNAR’s six-artist compilation understands that distinction. Its thirty-six minutes move from fragile illumination through deepening uncertainty, cross a dramatic rupture and reach one of the gentlest endings imaginable. The record does not tell grief to leave. It changes the air around it.
Rune Bagge’s “Lonely Cloud” begins with bright synthesizer resonances that seem almost too hopeful for the subject. The cloud is alone, but it is suspended in open space, carrying light around its edges. Bagge, known for harsher and more rhythmically forceful electronic work, reduces his language to a glowing chorus without a beat demanding forward motion. The piece suggests the first accidental moment of relief after prolonged sorrow, when beauty becomes perceptible again and immediately produces guilt because the world has dared to remain beautiful.
White Stains follows with “Colour at Night,” a title built from something visible under conditions that should obscure it. Its tones are dimmer and more private than Bagge’s opening, as though the first light has been carried indoors and watched through tired eyes. Solace repeatedly treats brightness as partial rather than triumphant. Colour survives, but it does not abolish night. The track feels like an afterimage, appearing long enough to confirm that perception has changed before fading into the larger sequence.
“Distant Care & Silver Crown” by Appropriate Savagery places tenderness at an uncertain remove. Care is present, but distant; the silver crown may suggest dignity, coldness, protection or ceremonial burden. The music holds these possibilities together through restrained layers that feel polished at the surface and quietly unstable beneath it. A person in grief can be surrounded by concern and still experience it as arriving from another country. Appropriate Savagery captures that gap without turning it into accusation.
Amethyst closes the cassette’s first side with “Calm Black Water,” the longest and deepest of its opening four pieces. Black water can be peaceful because its surface is still, yet stillness prevents us from seeing what lies below. The composition creates calm without guaranteeing safety. Sustained sound expands slowly, allowing darkness to become inhabitable rather than threatening. The sequence has moved from Bagge’s luminous cloud through night color and distant care into a body of water that reflects almost nothing. Consolation has become less radiant but more substantial.
J. Carter’s “The Collapse of the Cheekbone is the Death of the Comité de salut public” breaks that surface open. Even before it is heard, the title collides intimate anatomy with revolutionary authority. The cheekbone is part of a face, while the Comité de salut public, the Committee of Public Safety, belongs to the machinery of historical terror. Personal injury and institutional violence are forced into one sentence, making the body resemble a failed state.
Carter begins with solemn layers of keys that gather pressure before feedback tears through them and a muffled voice struggles beneath the sound. This is the compilation’s crisis point, where solace can no longer be confused with uninterrupted serenity. Grief is not a smooth passage through increasingly peaceful stages. It can return as panic, anger, physical memory or the collapse of whatever structure had briefly made endurance possible. The gentle electronic material becomes overloaded until it can no longer contain itself.
Isorinne’s “Händer Att Hålla,” meaning “Hands to Hold,” follows with nine minutes of extraordinary restraint. After Carter’s rupture, even a soft tone feels like contact. The composition does not rebuild the destroyed structure or answer the preceding voice. It remains nearby. Warm electronic layers drift with very little insistence, producing serenity that feels earned because the compilation has refused to pretend serenity is permanent.
The title brings the record’s abstraction back to the body. Solace may arrive through clouds, color, water and sound, but it is finally imagined as hands: ordinary human instruments for carrying, working, greeting and holding another person when language has become useless. Isorinne’s piece does not simulate an embrace through sentimental melody. It creates duration, the more difficult gift of staying present without forcing grief to perform improvement.
This ending prepares the third volume’s theme of acceptance without claiming that acceptance has already arrived. Acceptance is often misunderstood as approval or emotional completion. Here it appears only as a possible next stage glimpsed through calm. The hands do not pull the grieving person toward a conclusion. They make continued existence briefly less solitary.
Stages of Grief began in 2018 with Convalescence, continued here with Solace and eventually reached the two-part Acceptance in 2021. The sequence resists the familiar model in which mourning proceeds through standardized checkpoints. VAKNAR instead chose words describing states, supports and transitions, then invited different artists to respond personally. The result is less a theory of grief than a series of rooms through which no two listeners will travel identically.
The physical cassette reinforces that intimacy. Only fifty copies were made, each housed in an individually screen-printed J-card with artwork by O.R. The uniqueness of every cover suits a compilation built around an experience that may be universal but is never interchangeable. Grief repeats across human life, yet every instance forms around specific names, bodies, absences and unfinished conversations.
The dedication to Isak, Lee, Roland, Jasmin, Donatien and Gabrielle prevents the concept from becoming an elegant ambient exercise. These pieces are not merely six attractive variations on melancholy. They stand beside named people, even when the listener is not given the private histories connecting those names to the music. That withheld information is respectful. The album makes mourning shareable without making another person’s loss available for consumption.
Solace ultimately succeeds because it does not promise relief as a straight line. Its first half gathers light, color, care and stillness; its second permits everything to rupture before offering hands rather than answers. The compilation’s consoling power comes from accuracy. Grief can contain beauty without being healed, peace without certainty and companionship without explanation. Sometimes the most meaningful sound is not the one that changes the condition. It is the one that remains long enough to prove the condition does not have to be carried alone.

Incipientium - 2023 - Underg​å​ng

 

Happiest Place – HP16

Undergång means downfall, ruin or destruction, but Incipientium does not present collapse as one dramatic event. Gustav Danielsbacka builds it from pressure, repetition, damaged memory and sounds whose original identities have been partly erased. The album contains only two pieces, each occupying one side of the record, yet those thirty-nine minutes feel crowded with rooms, voices, machinery and emotional states. Acoustic instruments, radio, tape, sampler and effects are not arranged into a clean electronic composition. They seem to have been left together long enough to contaminate one another.
The first side is called “Belastning,” repeating the title of Incipientium’s 2022 LP. The Swedish word can mean load, strain, stress or burden, and its parenthetical sequence makes the psychological movement explicit: “Expression / Chaos / Control / Depression / Desperation.” Those terms do not describe five neatly separated movements. They resemble attempts to name changing conditions after the fact, as though one continuous pressure has been examined from several unstable angles.
The piece begins from the physical idea of weight. Low sound, crackle and magnetic roughness create an environment in which every added element appears to increase the strain upon the tape. Radio fragments and voice do not arrive as messages delivered intact. They enter already damaged by distance, recording and repetition. An acoustic source may retain evidence of touch while becoming impossible to identify precisely. Danielsbacka makes transmission audible: information passes through a machine, loses part of itself and returns carrying another emotional meaning.
This is why the recording’s murk never feels like a disguise for emptiness. Incipientium’s details are partially concealed, but they continue moving beneath the surface. A rumble changes depth, a fragment repeats long enough to detach from its original context, or a brief opening of clarity makes the surrounding obscurity feel heavier. The album asks for the attention normally given to an uncertain memory. What cannot be recovered becomes as important as what remains.
“Expression” may be the desire to externalize an inner condition, but expression immediately produces chaos because sound cannot preserve experience exactly. “Control” then appears as editing, looping and arrangement, the effort to impose order upon unstable material. Depression and desperation follow not as theatrical darkness but as the recognition that control has limits. The tape continues aging, the voice becomes another texture, and whatever entered the process cannot be restored to its untouched state.
The transition to “Undergång” feels less like beginning a second composition than crossing the point where strain becomes structural failure. Its subtitle moves through “Mind / Body / Sound / Soul / Blind Spot / Reminiscence,” widening the record from psychological burden toward the entire human apparatus that carries it. Mind and body are placed beside sound and soul, while the blind spot introduces the area every self-portrait excludes. Reminiscence arrives last, but memory offers no secure rescue. It may be another source of distortion.
Danielsbacka’s work often treats old or found sound as material with a previous life rather than neutral audio waiting to be composed. His related Limbo project called its method “ancient plunderphonics and plunderoptics for the modern age,” using field recordings, stolen sounds, tape, sampler and Dictaphone. Undergång feels connected to that practice even when its sources remain private. The record is full of apparent evidence, but evidence of what is never completely established.
Radio is especially powerful in this setting. It is designed to receive voices from elsewhere, yet reception always depends upon frequency, distance and interference. A clear signal can become noise through the smallest movement of a dial. Incipientium uses that instability as a model for consciousness. We receive the world imperfectly, preserve fragments unevenly and later mistake the surviving signal for the complete event.
The physical method strengthens this idea. Recorded during spring 2022 at Harmful Sound using a multitrack cassette machine, Undergång belongs to a process in which sound is impressed upon magnetic material, copied, layered and worn. Tape is often celebrated for warmth, but Danielsbacka is equally interested in its vulnerability. It can saturate, blur, hiss and remember previous contact. The medium does not merely store the composition. It participates in the downfall described by the title.
There is nevertheless a peculiar tenderness inside the damage. Danielsbacka does not attack his sources until nothing human remains. Voices continue appearing through the fog, and acoustic sounds preserve traces of breath, fingers, rooms and objects. Their partial survival gives the album its emotional power. Destruction matters because something was present to be destroyed; reminiscence hurts because contact once existed.
The handmade sleeve extends that logic into the object. Happiest Place pressed five hundred black records and placed them in individually assembled covers carrying “Mirror To The Soul” stickers and a poster designed by Incipientium. A mirror promises accurate reflection, but the record continually questions whether reflection can ever be complete. Tape, memory and mirrors all return versions of what stood before them. Each can reveal, reverse, discolor or omit.
Undergång also represents a dense moment in Danielsbacka’s active Gothenburg practice. After Belastning, he moved rapidly through cassettes, CDs, collaborations and the larger Limbo project, while remaining connected to the overlapping communities around Harmful, Happiest Place, Förlag För Fri Musik and iDEAL. This productivity suggests a person repeatedly approaching the same unstable border from different directions, testing how voice, found sound and obsolete machinery can make interior states physical.
The album ends without delivering recovery or total annihilation. Its final condition is reminiscence, an act performed by something that has survived but cannot return intact. That is more unsettling than a simple apocalypse. A complete ending would at least provide certainty. Incipientium leaves the signal active inside partial ruin, still transmitting fragments that may belong to the past, the present or an imagined reconstruction of both.
Undergång is therefore less a soundtrack for destruction than a study of how downfall becomes perceptible from within. No alarm announces the exact moment when the structure fails. Expression becomes chaos, control becomes desperation, mind becomes sound, and memory circles the blind spot it cannot illuminate. The record’s darkness comes from recognition: collapse may already be occurring while the machinery continues to run, the radio continues speaking and the tape continues recording its own deterioration.

UFO Över Lappland - 2022 - Spökraketer

Burnt Toast Vinyl – BTV127

 Spökraketer means “ghost rockets,” the name given to mysterious objects reported over Scandinavia during the 1940s. UFO Över Lappland does not turn those sightings into a theatrical concept album full of spoken reports and science-fiction effects. The title works more quietly. These four long instrumentals create the sensation of watching something cross an enormous northern sky without being able to determine whether it is machinery, weather, imagination or a message from somewhere outside the known map. The mystery remains useful because the music never tries to solve it.

UFO Över Lappland formed in Umeå after three members of the improvisational post-rock group The Magic Lantern decided to move toward krautrock, space rock and a more active live practice. Their self-titled debut grew largely from open-ended jams, but Spökraketer begins from written and arranged structures. The difference is audible without making the album feel rigid. Krister Mörtsell’s guitar, Christer Blomquist’s bass, Andreas Rejdvik’s drums and Peter Basun’s synthesizer know where each piece is headed, yet the exact route remains open enough for spontaneous weather to enter.
“I’m Rolling Like Thunder, I’m Something You Don’t Understand!” opens with a title that sounds like a challenge issued by the unidentified object itself. The music moves with corresponding weight. Bass and drums establish a broad motorik path while guitar gathers distortion above it, creating forward motion that feels heavier than simple speed. Mörtsell has said he prefers guitarists with personal styles who make strange sounds rather than merely play perfectly, and the track follows that principle. Guitar becomes turbulence, signal and friction instead of standing apart as a conventional solo voice.
The long title also captures the group’s humor. UFO Över Lappland takes atmosphere seriously without becoming solemn about its own cosmic importance. The music can suggest immense distances while retaining the practical energy of people playing together in a room. That balance keeps the album from becoming another polished exercise in retro-futurism. The spaceship may be crossing Lappland, but somebody still had to plug in the amplifiers, count the song in and keep the bass from swallowing the studio.
“Seventh Sun of Orion” moves farther from the ground. Synthesizer becomes more prominent as texture, supplying what the band describes as the extra sense of space around guitar, bass and drums. The title invents a celestial coordinate beyond ordinary astronomy, which suits music built from recognizable rock elements arranged into an unfamiliar environment. Repetition turns the rhythm section into a stable orbit while guitar phrases rise and dissolve before becoming complete declarations.
This is where the album’s relationship with Neu!, Faust, Hawkwind and early Kraftwerk becomes most apparent, but influence is not destination. UFO Över Lappland comes from northern Sweden, where distance, darkness, forest and long seasonal changes supply another emotional scale. The band’s space rock does not imagine escape from earthly landscape. It makes that landscape large enough to contain outer space. The sky above a sparsely populated region can feel more alien than any film set because its emptiness is physically real.
“Blå Vägen,” or “The Blue Road,” brings the cosmic journey back toward geography. Blue may describe sky, water, twilight or the emotional color of distance. The track travels with greater dynamic contrast, moving between relatively open passages and heavier surges without losing its steady underlying direction. The road is not a straight highway toward climax. It behaves like a northern route bending around terrain, repeatedly revealing another view of the same vast surroundings.
The title can also be heard as a description of the record’s method. Bass and drums create the road, guitar supplies weather and changing elevation, and synthesizer alters the color of the horizon. None of the instruments needs to dominate because each performs a different environmental task. The group’s live-in-the-studio approach preserves this cooperation. Most of the album was recorded together with only limited overdubbing, so every expansion remains connected to physical listening among the musicians.
“Fire of ’94” closes the album with the most immediate sense of momentum. The bass begins driving before guitar and synthesizer widen the frame, making the track feel like a memory that has suddenly regained physical heat. The title leaves the event unexplained, which allows 1994 to function as private history, cultural marker or imaginary disaster. Whatever burned then continues to send light into the present recording.
The piece also reveals how much tighter the band became without sacrificing fluidity. The debut’s jams could feel like landscapes being discovered as the tape moved. Spökraketer feels like a route previously surveyed but still vulnerable to unexpected conditions. Structure provides confidence, while improvisation prevents confidence from becoming repetition of a rehearsed result. The musicians know the destination, but not every object they will encounter on the way.
Frederik Lyxzén mixed the album at Parasit Studio in Gryssjön, keeping the rhythm section forceful while allowing guitar and synthesizer to retain their atmospheric edges. Stephen Roessner mastered the recordings, and Bob Weston cut the vinyl lacquers at Chicago Mastering Service. The green smoke pressing gives the record an unusually appropriate physical form: transparent material clouded by darker movement, visible but impossible to read completely from the surface.
Thomas Christensen’s aurora photographs extend that idea across the sleeve. The northern lights are fully natural, yet they can still appear technological, coded or extraterrestrial to anyone watching without explanation. They are a perfect visual companion to music concerned with mysterious objects above Lappland. The artwork does not illustrate a flying machine. It shows the sky itself behaving strangely enough that no machine is required.
The original ghost-rocket reports remain unresolved in the popular imagination because uncertainty creates more space than explanation. UFO Över Lappland understands the artistic value of that open area. The band does not ask listeners to believe visitors from another world crossed Sweden in the 1940s. It asks what the landscape, silence and strange evidence allow the imagination to construct.
Spökraketer is therefore a more focused album than the debut without becoming less mysterious. Four arranged compositions retain the physical freedom of live performance, and familiar krautrock machinery carries a distinctly northern atmosphere. The record moves like an unidentified object across the horizon: steady enough to follow, distant enough to resist identification, and vivid enough that those who witnessed it may continue disagreeing about what they heard long after it disappears.

VA - 2023 - VA - 2023 - Brown Acid The Sixteenth Trip (Heavy Rock From The Underground Comedown)

 

RidingEasy Records – EZRDR-151

Brown Acid: The Sixteenth Trip begins by breaking one of the series’ unwritten rules. The opening band is not anonymous. The Seeds already occupy garage-rock history through “Pushin’ Too Hard,” yet “Shuckin’ and Jivin’” sounds like a parallel version of the group stranded on the wrong side of 1972. Seven minutes of raw guitar, overheated vocals and loose psychedelic motion replace the compact sneer of their famous singles. Placing it beside nine genuinely obscure local records is useful rather than contradictory. Even a known band can contain a forgotten room, and Brown Acid exists to open rooms that official histories stopped checking.
The collection’s ten tracks come from the period RidingEasy calls the underground comedown, when late-sixties optimism had hardened into fuzz, impatience and the practical desire to make amplifiers sound larger than the rooms containing them. These bands were not necessarily trying to invent heavy metal. They were playing garage rock, blues, funk, boogie and psychedelia while turning every available control toward pressure. The genre names arrived later. The forty-five was the immediate event.
Nothing’s “Young Generation” follows with wah guitar, funk rhythm and a title that sounds like a declaration issued just after youth culture’s promised revolution had begun developing bills. The groove is playful, but the performance carries that early-seventies mixture of confidence and uncertainty: the younger generation knows it has arrived, though nobody has supplied instructions for what should happen next.
Macbeth’s “Freight Train” gives the record its first truly massive riff. The guitar and bass strike with Blue Cheer and Grand Funk weight, then stereo movement makes the recording feel briefly detached from its own center. The title is exact. This is not elegant transportation but momentum constructed from metal, smoke and repeated impact. A more melodic chorus appears without weakening the main figure, proving that heaviness and memorability had not yet been separated into opposing categories.
Canadian group Sarawest compresses an entire Saturday night into “Saturday (Hot & Heavy).” The song has the speed and confidence of musicians who understand that the weekend is a limited resource. Guitar leads flare, the singer pushes from the front, and the arrangement leaves no time for recovery. The parenthetical subtitle sounds like a promise printed on a bar flyer, but the record fulfills it.
Brotherhood of Peace’s “Feel the Heat (In the Driver’s Seat)” brings funk deeper into the compilation. Bass becomes the central engine while guitar and vocals turn driving into a condition of bodily control. The title contains the era’s complete fantasy of mobility: heat, speed, a vehicle and the belief that occupying the driver’s seat means nobody else determines the route. Brown Acid repeatedly shows how cars, weekends and attraction carried the emotional force later heavy metal would assign to demons and war.
Attack’s “Dreams” sounds as though fuzz has consumed nearly every frequency and the drums are fighting to remain physically present. The wall of distortion gives the track a beautiful imbalance. Rather than presenting studio control, it preserves musicians pushing a recording past its comfortable capacity. Dreams are not airy here. They arrive as electrical saturation, with the song trying to communicate through equipment already close to failure.
“Livin in the USA” by Travis is the record’s broadest statement of national identity, though the performance does not sound patriotic in any ceremonial sense. The phrase becomes a condition to be survived, enjoyed, complained about and shouted from inside. Guitar, rhythm and voice turn the country into a loud moving environment rather than an abstract ideal. Its position at the beginning of the second half makes it feel like the compilation pulling back from individual towns to inspect the larger system connecting them.
Lance’s “Marilyn” is the collection’s most immediately melodic song. The presumed Marilyn Monroe reference brings old Hollywood glamour into a local hard-rock single, but the voice and guitar keep the fantasy within reach of an ordinary band. Desire is aimed at an image already transformed into public mythology. The track’s relative sweetness provides contrast, reminding us that the underground comedown still contained pop instinct and singers who wanted a chorus to remain after the fuzz cleared.
Headstones’ “Snake Dance” removes the singer and lets organ, piano, guitar and sharply struck drums build a compact instrumental strut. The snake does not glide smoothly; it bounces through a room crowded with keyboards. Instrumentals like this reveal how local groups could absorb soul, garage rock and psychedelic novelty without deciding which market they belonged to. The track feels built for dancing, driving or accompanying a film scene that never existed.
Clinton closes with “Midnight in New York,” ending the trip in the city after starting with The Seeds in Los Angeles. Guitar leads cut through a direct hard-rock structure while the vocal bridge adds memorable “oohs,” a small pop detail surviving inside the louder machinery. Midnight becomes less a romantic hour than the point when the city’s lights, exhaustion and possibility have become impossible to separate. The song does not offer dawn. It leaves the listener moving through artificial light.
The Sixteenth Trip is effective because it does not pretend every buried single is an undiscovered masterpiece of equal historical importance. Its deeper value is the accumulation of evidence. Across Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Youngstown, Toronto, Charlotte and other local circuits, musicians were independently reaching similar conclusions about distortion, repetition and bodily force. Most had no album, major contract or durable archive. A privately financed forty-five might be the only proof that a band existed.
Lance Barresi and Daniel Hall’s curatorial method turns collecting into restitution. The series tracks down musicians and rights holders, licenses the songs and pays the artists rather than treating obscurity as permission to steal. That labor changes the meaning of rarity. An expensive original single may remain a collector’s object, but the music no longer has to remain trapped inside ownership. The compilation allows the sound to resume its original purpose: reaching people.
Sixteen volumes into the series, Brown Acid still makes rock history feel unfinished. The familiar narrative follows successful bands upward through albums, tours and influence. The Sixteenth Trip moves sideways, through singles pressed in small quantities by groups that may have existed for only a season. Those abandoned side roads contain enough noise, humor and desire to redraw the entire map. History was never quiet there. We simply lost the addresses.

Viagra Boys - 2021 - Welfare Jazz

Year0001 – YR012

 Welfare Jazz begins with a man explaining why nobody should expect kindness from him. “Ain’t Nice” is funny because Sebastian Murphy’s narrator treats selfishness as a personality worth advertising, but the song becomes more revealing as the bass and drums keep pushing beneath him. The swagger sounds less like power than a defense erected by someone who already suspects the room has stopped believing him. Viagra Boys’ second album takes the grotesque male characters from Street Worms and turns the camera inward. The loser is still boastful, intoxicated and absurd, but now he occasionally recognizes the damage left behind him.

That recognition never arrives in the language of sober confession. Viagra Boys understand that a man built from deflection, drugs and performance would probably apologize through another performance. “Toad” adopts the pose of a rootless old bluesman who needs no woman and belongs nowhere, while “Into the Sun” offers a grand romantic promise that feels sincere for several seconds before its clichés expose how little the speaker has changed. The record’s emotional intelligence lies in this gap. Wanting forgiveness and becoming forgivable are not the same accomplishment.
The brief interludes construct that unreliable mind. “Cold Play” passes like a thought through damaged circuitry. “This Old Dog” returns to the canine imagery that follows the band across its work, reducing the narrator to appetite, instinct and repetitive behavior. “Best in Show II” connects Welfare Jazz with the dog-show world of Street Worms, where status, breeding and masculine competition become indistinguishable from animals being paraded before judges. Dogs become more sympathetic than their handlers because instinct contains less hypocrisy.
“Creatures” changes the album’s physical temperature. Synthesizers create a cold, slow-moving environment while Murphy describes people existing beneath ordinary prosperity, scavenging metal and surviving in spaces society prefers not to inspect. The song is uneasy because empathy and caricature occupy the same frame. Murphy has spoken about writing from real defeat and addiction, yet the band’s comedy can make suffering resemble another costume. Viagra Boys are strongest when the listener cannot decide whether the narrator is observing exploitation, participating in it or using humor to prevent identification with it.
Instrumentally, the group is far more controlled than its collapsing public image suggests. Henrik Höckert’s bass supplies the heavy circular motion, Tor Sjödén’s drums make repetition feel bodily rather than programmed, and Oskar Carls uses saxophone as interruption, hook and emergency siren. Elias Jungqvist’s keyboards widen the album beyond post-punk, while Benjamin Vallé’s guitar appears across several of its most spacious and abrasive tracks. The band often resembles dance music performed by people suspicious of cleanliness: find a groove, damage its surface and continue until the room moves.
“6 Shooter” removes Murphy and lets that machinery speak directly. Saxophone, bass, drums, piano and electronic texture create a compact instrumental argument for the title Welfare Jazz. The name came from the band’s joking description of Stockholm free-jazz musicians making art that could not financially support them. It is self-mockery, scene humor and an acknowledgment that experimental music survives through public support, day jobs and friendships as much as heroic myths of independence.
“Secret Canine Agent” is one of the album’s strangest pleasures. A ridiculous espionage premise is carried by a bass line and synthesizer atmosphere serious enough to make the dog seem genuinely undercover. The band never winks so broadly that the music loses conviction. Shrimp, dogs, secret agents and male stupidity become recurring symbols because they are allowed to inhabit songs with the same production care as supposedly important subjects.
“I Feel Alive” brings the album’s self-reinvention fantasy into the open. The narrator announces renewal with the evangelical excitement of someone who may simply have exchanged one compulsion for another. The uplifting groove and unstable enthusiasm form a convincing portrait of early transformation. Feeling alive is not proof that a life has become sustainable. Sometimes it is only the first chemically bright morning after a long collapse.
“Girls & Boys” then converts gender, desire and resentment into a frantic disco-punk spiral. Matt Sweeney, Patrik Berger and the Raisen brothers were among the additional producers shaping the track, but its crowded arrangement still feels unmistakably like Viagra Boys. Saxophone scribbles across the beat while Murphy cycles through boys, girls, drugs, dogs and shrimp as though identity has become an inventory shouted during an evacuation. The song is both a dance floor and a nervous breakdown with excellent timing.
“To the Country” imagines escape through flute, clarinet, piano and a looser rural atmosphere. Like many escape fantasies, it reveals more about exhaustion than geography. The country becomes a place where the narrator might finally behave differently because his current surroundings contain too much evidence that he has not. Even the studio credits contain a perfect Viagra Boys detail: Oscar Ulfheden is credited with playing “door,” turning an ordinary object into percussion and making escape itself part of the instrumentation.
The closing cover of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” sung with Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers, supplies the answer the album’s narrator cannot write alone. Prine’s song celebrates affection between two deeply imperfect people without pretending their defects are charming in every circumstance. Murphy and Taylor exaggerate its country accents, balancing tribute with unruly comedy, yet the tenderness survives. After an album full of failed masculinity, addiction and escape plans, love appears not as purification but as recognition: I see the whole damaged creature and remain.
Welfare Jazz was recorded across several Stockholm studios and Electric Lady in New York, with Daniel Fagerström and Pelle Gunnerfeldt providing the production center while different collaborators expanded individual tracks. That dispersed process fits an album whose identity keeps changing between punk, synth-pop, free-jazz abrasion, country parody and bruised balladry. The songs form an unstable autobiography of somebody attempting to recognize himself through several masks.
Released in January 2021, the album also became one of the final major documents featuring founding guitarist Benjamin Vallé, who died later that year. His presence adds an unintended layer to music already preoccupied with damage, memory and attempted change. Welfare Jazz does not present redemption as a completed event. It preserves the messier moment when a person understands that the joke has consequences but still needs the joke to survive the understanding. That is why the record can be revolting, hilarious and unexpectedly moving without choosing one condition over the others.

Yellowcake - 2022 - Can You See The Future

Total Peace – TP008

 Can You See the Future? lasts a little over ten minutes, but Yellowcake makes those minutes feel like a warning siren trapped inside a concrete room. The Phoenix quartet takes the forward drive of Swedish d-beat, the blown-out abrasion of Japanese crasher punk and the blunt force of UK82, then records the collision clearly enough that every component remains dangerous. The riffs have shape, the drums strike with precision, and Genesis’s voice tears across the surface as though language has been forced through smoke.

The band name supplies the record’s first image. Yellowcake is uranium concentrate, material taken from mined ore before enrichment and conversion into nuclear fuel. It is neither the explosion nor the reactor, but an intermediate substance inside the system that makes both imaginable. These songs occupy the stage where political fear, military planning and industrial production have not yet become one final catastrophe, but every necessary ingredient is already being prepared.
The opening title track asks a question without suggesting that the future is difficult to predict. The answer appears visible everywhere: accelerated drums, guitar noise spreading like contamination and a vocal delivered from inside the approaching damage. Raul’s guitar carries a thick central riff while a harsher layer burns around it, letting the listener follow the song even as the sound attempts to erase its own edges.
“Bastard Reality” reduces that future to one minute of present-tense impact. Catastrophe is not approaching from another era or country; it has already entered ordinary reality and acquired institutional protection. Yellowcake does not describe every mechanism involved. The compression is the argument. A few seconds of introduction, violent forward movement and an ending arriving before the body has adjusted reproduce the feeling of receiving one unbearable fact after another.
Mike’s drumming is the propulsion system. His work in Extended Hell and Urchin had already demonstrated how d-beat can remain rigid enough to feel inevitable while fills and bass-drum accents keep it alive. Here he gives each short song a physical identity. Small hesitations, sudden pushes and sharply timed transitions make the whole band sound as though it is repeatedly catching itself at the edge of collapse.
“Eradicated Peace” contains the EP’s central contradiction. Peace is usually discussed as something lost, broken or postponed; eradication suggests a deliberate campaign to remove every surviving trace. Zach’s bass supplies weight beneath the guitar’s scorched upper frequencies, keeping the attack from becoming a thin cloud of treble. Peace disappears, but the song remains frighteningly organized.
“Indiscriminate Shelling” identifies a form of violence whose defining feature is the refusal to distinguish among human beings. Yellowcake answers with music that sounds indiscriminate from a distance but becomes highly discriminating under attention. Every pause, fill and guitar entrance lands exactly where it can create the most damage. Raw punk may represent social breakdown, but producing it convincingly requires intense cooperation.
Genesis’s delay-soaked howl deepens that paradox. The voice seems to arrive from several positions at once, the original cry followed by electronic shadows. Delay turns one person into a small crowd, but it also makes communication feel damaged. Words repeat after their moment has passed, like emergency broadcasts bouncing through abandoned infrastructure. The vocals carry desperation without becoming theatrical because they remain embedded in the band’s physical movement.
“Visage of the Flame” briefly gives the imagery a face. Fire can illuminate, destroy or transform, but a visage suggests that the flame is looking back. The song bends the familiar attack into a more hallucinatory shape, moving from reporting destruction toward imagining the consciousness produced by it. Yellowcake’s noise is most effective when it becomes atmosphere, surrounding the riffs with the psychic residue of the world they describe.
“Weaponized Mania” contains one of the record’s finest structural moments, a tiny hesitation before the breakdown that increases the impact far beyond its duration. The pause proves how much thought exists inside the assault. Mania may seem uncontrollable, but once weaponized it has been directed, funded and placed into use. The song performs the same transformation musically. Frenzy is organized into a device, then activated.
“Insensate Power” closes the EP with its longest track, barely crossing two minutes but large enough to feel monumental beside the preceding bursts. The title names power without sensation, authority unable or unwilling to feel the bodies beneath its decisions. Yellowcake lets the final song accumulate more weight, allowing the central riff and rhythm section to remain in place long enough for anger to become something colder. It ends because the warning has completed one full transmission.
Jay Paz’s recording, mix and master at 16 Studios are essential to the result. Can You See the Future? is raw without sounding accidentally weak. The bass drum has physical presence, the bass remains audible, and the central guitar retains enough definition for Raul’s riffs to cut through the corrosive layer surrounding them. The clarity is what keeps the wall of noise from becoming scenery.
Total Peace first gave the recording physical form in November 2022 as fifty bright-yellow high-bias cassettes with photocopied inserts on pale-yellow stock. Alec LoCurzio created the cover art and Mike McAllister handled the interior artwork, extending the nuclear-war atmosphere into a small handmade object. Not For The Weak and Suicide of a Species later brought it to seven-inch vinyl in 2023, confirming that this brief local detonation had travelled well beyond Phoenix.
The desert setting matters without needing to become mythology. Heat, military infrastructure, urban expansion and enormous open distance give the phrase “Can you see the future?” another scale in Arizona. Yellowcake sounds sun-blasted rather than frozen, taking a musical language associated with Sweden, Finland and Japan and forcing it through the Sonoran environment. The result belongs to an international raw-punk tradition while retaining the pressure of its own location.
What makes this debut exceptional is not simply speed, distortion or historical fluency. Yellowcake understands that the future is most frightening when its violence is already procedural. Uranium is processed, shells are manufactured, mania is weaponized and power becomes incapable of sensation. The band converts that system into seven disciplined explosions whose noise never conceals the human coordination producing it. The answer is not prophecy. It is the machinery already running around us.

Circle Of Ouroborus - 2015 - Alttarimyllyt

 

Kuunpalvelus – none

Alttarimyllyt can be translated roughly as “altar mills,” a compound that sounds both sacred and mechanical. An altar is where offerings are transformed through ritual; a mill is where material is crushed and altered through repetition. Circle of Ouroborus places those two structures together and creates an image for the album’s sound: devotion entering machinery, melody being worked until it becomes abrasion, and human feeling passing through a process that leaves it damaged but recognizable.
The record was released in 2015, yet the sleeve states that it was recorded at Elemental Cavern in 2011. That four-year delay is appropriate for a band whose catalog rarely behaves like a straight timeline. Circle of Ouroborus has often released music out of recording order, allowing different versions of the duo to surface when the material finds its proper physical form. Alttarimyllyt therefore arrived not simply as their newest statement, but as a sealed chamber from an earlier point in their development.
Atvar performs every instrument while Antti Klemi supplies the voice and Finnish lyrics. The division appears simple, but their music depends upon how completely those roles stain one another. The guitars do not merely accompany a singer, and Klemi’s vocals do not sit above an instrumental foundation. His cries become another rough frequency inside Atvar’s construction, sometimes carrying words and sometimes functioning as the exposed human nerve running through the mix. The result is black metal deprived of its usual theatrical distance.
“Langennut ritari,” the fallen knight, opens the album across eight minutes. The title suggests a figure whose ideals, authority or spiritual protection have failed, but the music does not offer the heroic drama of a battlefield. Its force feels more private, as though the armor has become weight and the journey continues after the reason for wearing it has disappeared. The length permits repetition to do the emotional work. Riffs return not as victorious themes but as thoughts that cannot be dismissed.
“Puutarha,” the garden, follows with one of the album’s central contradictions. Gardens imply cultivation, shelter and seasonal renewal, while the production makes every surface feel weathered and exposed. Beauty is present, but it does not bloom cleanly. The guitars create narrow melodic openings inside the distortion, and the rhythm section keeps moving as though tending something that may never become visible. Nature is neither comforting scenery nor an enemy. It is a process that absorbs decay without explaining it.
“Perillä” means having arrived or being at the destination. Positioned at the end of the first side, the title appears to promise completion, yet Circle of Ouroborus distrusts endings that behave like answers. Arrival may only reveal that the expected destination was another threshold. The music’s forward pressure and blurred edges make the listener feel simultaneously carried and stranded. Motion has occurred, but certainty has not accompanied it.
Side two begins with “Loputon,” the endless. The word could describe infinity, punishment, devotion or the circular figure contained in the band’s name. The ouroboros consumes itself without reaching a final disappearance, making destruction and continuity the same act. Alttarimyllyt repeatedly finds that shape in music. A riff is worn down through return, but the wearing-down is what allows it to continue. Repetition becomes both millstone and prayer wheel.
“Eksynyt,” the lost one, brings the album’s emotional condition into a single word. Being lost is different from wandering freely. It implies that orientation once existed, or was believed to exist, and has since failed. Klemi’s delivery gives that failure a bodily presence. His voice can sound less like a character performing despair than a person attempting to send language through a wall. The lo-fi recording does not hide the message so much as demonstrate the distance it must cross.
“Kaksi patsasta,” two statues, introduces an image of frozen companionship. Two figures may stand together for centuries and still remain incapable of touching, speaking or changing one another. That possibility suits the duo’s music, where instruments and voice occupy the same enclosed atmosphere while retaining their loneliness. The guitars can feel monumental without becoming grandiose, and the drums provide movement around forms condemned to stillness.
The closing “Maasta olet tullut” translates as “from earth you have come,” part of the funeral formulation that continues with a return to earth. It gives the album’s final movement a liturgical gravity without requiring conventional religious certainty. Soil is origin, destination and the material through which every garden grows. The phrase joins the fallen knight, garden, arrival, endlessness, loss and statues into one cycle. Bodies become earth; earth supports new bodies; remembrance forms monuments; monuments weather back into matter.
This sequence makes Alttarimyllyt feel less like seven separate songs than seven stations inside one grinding ritual. The album does not build toward a spectacular climax. It deepens through recurrence, allowing its melodies to become familiar enough that small deviations acquire enormous emotional weight. Atvar’s playing can be crude, but crudity here means direct contact rather than lack of purpose. The riffs do not require virtuoso decoration because their power lies in the duration for which they are held and repeated.
Circle of Ouroborus has always resisted the idea that a band must refine one recognizable product. Their catalog moves through acoustic folk, post-punk, ambient haze, raw black metal and combinations that make those labels collapse into one another. Alttarimyllyt occupies the more forceful end of that range, yet traces of the gentler records remain inside its melodic instincts. The aggression does not erase vulnerability. It protects it badly, which is far more affecting.
Kuunpalvelus, the label operated by Atvar, issued the album as a vinyl LP with a painting by B.F. The arrangement kept the work close to its makers, outside the explanatory machinery that often surrounds metal releases. A first CD edition did not appear until 2025, ten years after the LP and fourteen years after the recording itself. The album has therefore moved through time in stages, repeatedly arriving after the moment in which it was created.
That delayed life strengthens its central image. The altar receives what people cannot keep; the mill continues turning after the hands that loaded it have withdrawn. Alttarimyllyt transforms fallen ideals, cultivated earth, failed destinations and mortal bodies into repetitive sound. It offers no rescue from the cycle. Its strange consolation is that nothing entering the machinery disappears completely. It returns as pressure, melody, memory and another revolution of the wheel.

Circle Of Ouroborus - 2018 - Vangin Laulu

 

Final Agony – none

Vangin laulu means “the prisoner’s song,” but Circle of Ouroborus does not build the album around walls, chains or a clearly identified cell. Confinement appears as atmosphere. Guitars move in slow, blurred circles, drums keep time without offering escape, and Antti Klemi’s voice sounds suspended somewhere behind the instruments, close enough to feel human but distant enough to seem unreachable. After the harsher physical pressure of Alttarimyllyt and the sprawling double album Ruumistähdet, this record softens the attack while making the enclosure more intimate.
“Kaikkeuden kanssa,” or “With the Universe,” opens in barely three minutes. The title suggests communion with everything, yet the music does not sound triumphant or cosmically liberated. It resembles someone pressing an ear against an immense surface and receiving only vibration. Atvar’s guitars form a hazy field rather than a conventional metal riff, and Klemi enters as one more signal inside it. Being with the universe may be the largest imaginable freedom, but it can also mean being unable to stand outside existence long enough to understand it.
“Haaskana,” meaning “as carrion,” brings the body into that vastness. Carrion is no longer a person but not yet nothing. It has become material for weather, insects, animals and soil. Circle of Ouroborus has always been drawn to states where one identity is being converted into another, and the music mirrors that process. Fuzz erodes the edges of the guitar while melody continues glowing inside it, neither destroyed nor completely preserved.
This is one of the album’s defining achievements. The production is lo-fi, but not merely obscure. Its softness changes the emotional meaning of distortion. On Alttarimyllyt the rough sound could feel like machinery grinding against the listener. Here it behaves more like fog caught in cloth. The guitars retain enough shape to guide the songs, but their outlines feather into the vocals, cymbals and room noise until the whole record appears to be remembering itself while it plays.
“Jäljetön, jäinen aava” translates roughly as “Traceless, Icy Expanse.” It is an exact description of the landscape the album creates. A frozen open space can preserve marks, but this one has none. No path confirms that anyone crossed it before, and no landmark promises a destination. Atvar’s rhythm suggests movement while the higher guitar tones produce the sensation of cold distance. The music advances without making progress measurable.
“Välissä,” or “In Between,” closes the first side by naming the album’s natural habitat. Circle of Ouroborus rarely settles completely inside black metal, post-punk, folk, shoegaze or dark rock. The duo works in the areas where those forms overlap and lose authority. On this record, blast-beat ancestry survives as pressure rather than speed, post-punk appears through bass movement and emotional vacancy, and shoegaze is present not as lush beauty but as sound used to blur the border between protection and disappearance.
“Liukuma” begins the second side with a word meaning a slide, drift or slippage. Its motion is gradual enough that the point of change cannot be identified. This resembles the experience of becoming trapped. The cell may not arrive all at once. A person drifts through habit, memory, obligation or fear until the limits become visible only after they have hardened. The song’s repetitions do not slam a door. They reveal that the door has already been closed for some time.
The title track stretches beyond six minutes and gives the album its emotional center. “Vangin laulu” is not delivered as a public protest or heroic escape song. Klemi’s reverb-heavy voice sounds like singing preserved inside the prison rather than sent beyond it. His clean and rougher tones seem less like separate techniques than changing levels of visibility. At moments the words approach the surface; at others they sink into the guitars and become pure human pressure.
That treatment of the voice is crucial to the duo’s identity. Atvar performs every instrument, constructing the physical and atmospheric world, while Klemi enters it through voice and Finnish text. He is not simply the narrator standing above the arrangement. He sounds subject to the same weather as everything else. His lyrics had become more stripped and exact during this period, a development he later described as using fewer words so that each would carry greater weight. The album behaves similarly. Its structures are concise, but each repeated image opens slowly.
“Revitty viimeiseen hetkeen,” translated as “Ripped into the Final Moment,” contains the record’s most vivid surviving lyric imagery. A rotting birch falls, blind swans arrive, frost catches clothing, and icy apples form a necklace around a strangled neck. The speaker retreats inward, scratches warmth into the skin and gnaws frozen flesh. Nature does not decorate suffering here. It becomes the language through which bodily and spiritual extremity can be seen.
The song also clarifies why the album’s apparent gentleness is deceptive. Its guitar haze may recall dream pop or the blurred edges of 1990s alternative rock, but the interior remains severe. Beauty has not replaced black metal. It has become the medium through which black metal’s isolation, death-awareness and spiritual pressure are carried. The softer surface allows the images to move closer before their violence is recognized.
“Palokärki, puumuuri,” “Black Woodpecker, Wooden Wall,” ends the album with two physical presences: a bird adapted to striking wood and a barrier made from the same material. The image can be heard as persistence against confinement. The woodpecker does not destroy the forest through one magnificent blow. It repeats a small bodily action until the surface opens. Circle of Ouroborus builds music according to a related logic. Repetition is not stagnation. It is pressure applied patiently enough to discover what the wall contains.
Antti Klemi also created the cover art, making the album’s visual and verbal worlds part of the same hand. Final Agony issued the original LP in the United States at the end of 2018, an unusual destination for such inward Finnish music, and the record remained vinyl-only until New Era Productions released a digipak CD in 2025. That delayed second life suits a band whose albums often seem less published than uncovered.
Vangin laulu is one of Circle of Ouroborus’ clearest demonstrations that heaviness does not depend upon force alone. The prison is built from distance, recurrence and the inability to separate oneself from the landscape. Yet singing still occurs inside it. The record does not promise that art opens every cell, but it proves that confinement can produce a signal, and that someone far away may eventually receive it.

Clandestine Blaze - 2015 - New Golgotha Rising

 

Northern Heritage – none

New Golgotha Rising opens beneath a starlit sky, but Clandestine Blaze does not use the heavens to provide beauty or escape. “Evocation Under Starlit Sky” turns the open night into a roof over ritual, its guitar figure advancing with a cold steadiness while drums and voice strip away any romantic distance. The stars remain remote, indifferent points above an act carried out on the ground. Across seven songs, Mikko Aspa constructs black metal that is severe without becoming shapeless, primitive without sounding accidental, and repetitive without surrendering its internal movement.
The album followed the denser, more processed Harmony of Struggle by taking an opposite approach. Echo and atmospheric padding were reduced, leaving a thin, piercing recording in which guitar, bass, drums and voice stand exposed. Northern Heritage later described it as one of the clearest and most compact Clandestine Blaze recordings, “razor sharp” and hiding nothing. That description reaches beyond production. The songs remove ornamental darkness and rely upon riffs, tempo changes and the pressure produced when one person performs every part of a hostile ensemble.
“Evocation Under Starlit Sky” establishes the record’s ceremonial scale across six minutes. Its opening movement feels less like an introduction than the drawing of a boundary. Once the rhythm begins, the track repeatedly tightens and releases without abandoning its central direction. Aspa’s voice does not float in reverb as a supernatural presence. It rasps close to the instruments, another abrasive physical object inside the room. The lack of concealment makes the performance more confrontational because the listener can hear the machinery producing the atmosphere.
“Fractured Skull” brings the language abruptly down to bone. The riffing is more compact and the title rejects metaphorical elegance, yet the song’s construction remains carefully proportioned. Clandestine Blaze often works through the tension between blunt subject matter and unexpectedly memorable guitar movement. Violence is not represented by random speed. It becomes a repeating shape that the rhythm section can strike from several angles.
“Consumed by Flames” alters that physical destruction into transformation. Fire eliminates distinctions between surface and interior, reducing objects to heat, smoke and residue. The guitar lines possess a scorched melodic quality, recognizable even as the dry production denies them warmth. Aspa’s drumming avoids decorative complexity, but the small changes in emphasis matter. Each acceleration makes the riff appear less stable, as though the structure has begun burning from within.
The title track supplies the album’s governing image. Golgotha, the place of the skull and the site of crucifixion, is already a landscape of public execution, sacrifice and disputed salvation. A new Golgotha suggests that the old hill has been rebuilt inside modern life. The song does not offer a clear theological argument. It creates a place where martyrdom, punishment and the creation of belief become inseparable. Its concise form is important: the title sounds monumental, while the music refuses spectacle and proceeds with the efficiency of an institution performing a familiar task.
“Culling Species” carries the record into its most openly selective language. Culling converts killing into administration, a decision supposedly made on behalf of a population, ecosystem or future order. The song’s disciplined repetitions make that bureaucratic coldness audible. Nothing sounds ecstatic. The music advances with the grim certainty of a procedure already authorized. This is one reason the album’s stripped production is so effective. A grander sound might turn eradication into fantasy; the dry recording makes it feel organized, local and possible.
“Passage to New Creed” begins from the ruins left by the preceding tracks. A creed is not merely an opinion but a statement repeated until it becomes a structure for action. The song contains some of the album’s most slippery riffing, guitar phrases seeming straightforward until an altered accent or turn changes their direction. Repetition functions as conversion. A figure returns often enough that the ear begins accepting it as law, then the composition shifts and reveals how unstable that law always was.
The nine-minute “Final Hours of Sacrifice” closes the record by enlarging time. Earlier songs deliver destruction in concentrated forms; the finale waits inside the period before completion. Its length allows the central ideas to circle rather than simply conclude. Sacrifice requires an observer or belief system capable of assigning meaning to loss. Without that structure, it is only death. The music keeps testing the border between those conditions, alternating force, repetition and bleak melodic openings while refusing a triumphant resolution.
As a one-person recording, New Golgotha Rising has an unusually complete internal logic. The drums do not react to the guitar in the spontaneous manner of separate musicians because both parts originate from the same imagination. Instead, every instrument seems to know the exact amount of space the others will require. That unity can feel claustrophobic. There is no second personality inside the arrangement to soften, challenge or misunderstand the central intent.
Yet the album never resembles a sterile construction assembled one layer at a time. Aspa’s performances preserve friction, slight instability and the sense that the songs are being forced into existence rather than displayed after perfection. The guitar tone cuts without expanding into a wall. Bass darkens the lower edge without competing for attention. Drums provide a hard human framework, and the voice arrives as abrasion rather than commentary. The sound is narrow, but the narrowness concentrates impact.
Recorded in February 2015 and released only weeks later, the album captures a rapid conversion from impulse into finished object. That speed suits music built around conviction rather than revision. The original CD, digital, cassette and heavyweight white-vinyl editions presented the same severe work with little explanatory material. Northern Heritage’s 2019 vinyl repress received a moderate remaster, but the label emphasized that the album’s identity remained its rejection of compression, echo and unnecessary processing.
New Golgotha Rising stands at a revealing point in the Clandestine Blaze catalog. It came after Harmony of Struggle’s suffocating density and before City of Slaughter’s further examination of organized human violence. Here the sound has been cleared so that nothing protects the listener from the riffs or the ideas attached to them. The record does not ask darkness to appear mysterious. It shows darkness becoming a method: invoke, fracture, burn, construct a sacred execution site, select, convert and sacrifice.
Its power lies in how little it needs to complete that sequence. Seven tracks, one musician and thirty-nine minutes are enough to build a closed moral climate. The album’s clarity does not make its world easier to enter. It makes the boundaries visible. New Golgotha Rising is black metal reduced to load-bearing parts, each riff another stone in a hill where punishment and belief continue manufacturing one another.

Clandestine Blaze - 2017 - City Of Slaughter

Northern Heritage – none

 City of Slaughter begins after destruction has already occurred. “Remembrance of a Ruin” does not describe the building while it falls; it enters later, when broken architecture has become memory and memory has begun acquiring authority. Guitar arrives as a dense, corroded surface, drums push harder than on New Golgotha Rising, and Mikko Aspa’s voice sounds less like distant proclamation than direct physical accusation. The album’s city is not merely a geographic place. It is a structure assembled from violence, inherited stories and the repeated human decision to make devastation meaningful.

Clandestine Blaze recorded the album in 2016 and released it as Northern Heritage’s hundredth catalog title in February 2017. A milestone release might normally invite retrospection or ceremonial self-congratulation. City of Slaughter refuses that posture. Instead of presenting nearly two decades of underground work as a completed monument, Aspa made one of the project’s most aggressive records, returning the guitars to the maximum-distortion dirt of its earlier years while increasing the force of the vocals and slightly accelerating the drums.
“Remembrance of a Ruin” demonstrates how carefully that aggression is arranged. The opening attack does not remain at one temperature. Its later move toward a heavier mid-tempo rhythm changes everything before it, as though the listener has crossed the rubble and reached the event still echoing beneath it. A brass-like or organ-colored tone appears against the guitars, giving the ruin a ceremonial dimension. Memory becomes a mechanism capable of rebuilding the emotional conditions that produced the damage.
“The Voice of Our Mythical Past” expands that mechanism. The title distinguishes myth from documented history, but myth may exert greater force precisely because it cannot be checked against ordinary evidence. The song drives forward for several minutes before slowing and exposing a colder melodic figure inside the distortion. Later organ tones widen the arrangement, suggesting that the past is not one voice speaking clearly. It is a choir assembled by the present, each generation adding another instrument to what it wants ancestry to demand.
This is where City of Slaughter differs from simple revivalism. The music uses recognizable black-metal materials without treating the past as a museum. Earlier forms return degraded, intensified and forced into new relationships. Aspa’s production lets the guitar become dirtier while the arrangements become more legible. The record sounds primitive at the surface, yet its tempo changes reveal a composer willing to break from predictable templates.
“Circle of Vultures” turns observation into appetite. Vultures gather where death has already occurred, but they also consume what would otherwise remain. The circle suggests repetition, enclosure and a social order built around remains. Bass rumbles beneath the guitar while the drums maintain an ugly forward momentum, making the song feel less like an animal image than a model of human organization. Everyone waits for collapse, then calls participation survival.
“Prelude of Slaughter” is the album’s shortest piece and its hinge. By calling itself a prelude after three fully developed songs, it implies that everything heard so far has merely prepared the actual event. The composition concentrates the record’s hostility into a compact threshold, stripping away the idea that violence begins only when the first blow lands. Preparation, mythology, remembrance and spectatorship are already part of slaughter before the body enters the room.
“Return into the City of Slaughter” occupies nearly nine minutes and acts as the album’s central chamber. The word “return” matters. This is not the discovery of an unknown place but a deliberate re-entry into something previously experienced, escaped or inherited. The song alternates savage motion with slower, crawling passages, allowing the city to appear from several distances. At speed it becomes machinery; at slower tempos it becomes architecture, a place whose streets and institutions can be inspected while still operating.
The title track’s extended form also exposes the unity of a one-person recording. Guitar, bass, drums and voice do not negotiate among separate personalities. Every instrument belongs to the same intelligence and therefore anticipates the others with claustrophobic precision. Yet the performance retains enough abrasion to avoid sounding programmed. The drums hammer, the guitar scrapes at its own outlines, and the voice pushes against the mix as though one creator has divided himself into hostile departments.
“Archeopsychic Fear” moves from the public city into older layers of the mind. The invented compound suggests fear that is ancient, foundational or buried beneath ordinary consciousness. Its riffing has the starkness associated with early northern black metal, but the song uses that language to make psychological time audible. Some fears do not feel learned because they arrive before explanation. They seem inherited from bodies, stories and environments that preceded the individual.
“Century of Fire” closes the album by enlarging destruction from one city into an age. Fire can mean purification, punishment, revelation or material ruin, but here its duration is the disturbing element. A century of fire is no sudden apocalypse. It is a condition long enough for people to be born inside it, mistake it for normal life and develop institutions adapted to continued burning. The final track gathers the record’s remaining speed and melodic severity without offering an exit beyond the flames.
The sequence from ruin to myth, vultures, prelude, return, primordial fear and prolonged fire creates a circular history. Destruction produces ruins; ruins become memories; memories become myths; myths help prepare another slaughter. The city rises again because its inhabitants continue carrying the old structure inside themselves. City of Slaughter is less concerned with one violent event than with the cultural machinery that repeatedly makes violence imaginable.
The album also marks a meeting between band and label. Northern Heritage’s hundredth release could only have been Clandestine Blaze without becoming an external celebration, because Aspa operates both projects. The catalog number documents a private infrastructure of recording, manufacturing and distribution rather than a conventional career milestone. The album appeared on LP and CD with a lyric insert, then remained available through later pressings rather than being frozen as an anniversary object.
City of Slaughter is harsher than New Golgotha Rising, but its achievement is not simply increased aggression. The greater distortion, stronger vocal attack and faster drumming support songs containing more internal movement. Ferocity and structure sharpen one another. The result is a city built from seven connected districts, each examining how people remember destruction, inherit fear and return to systems they already know will consume them. Nothing announces that the cycle has ended. The final fire is still providing light for the next ruin.

Clandestine Blaze - 2018 - Tranquility Of Death

Northern Heritage – none

 Tranquility of Death begins with a crucifix standing at the intersection of belief and execution. “God on the Cross” is short by Clandestine Blaze standards, but its compressed form makes the opening feel like a wound cut directly into the record. Guitar enters with a sharp melodic figure, drums drive without decoration, and Mikko Aspa’s voice sounds as though the song has begun in the middle of an argument that will occupy the remaining forty minutes. The cross is not presented as an object of comfort. It is a machine through which suffering becomes doctrine, spectacle and authority.

Released one year after City of Slaughter, the album does not continue that record by simply increasing its violence. City of Slaughter imagined organized brutality as architecture, a place built from inherited myths and repeated destruction. Tranquility of Death moves inward and slows the machinery enough for its psychological effects to become visible. Northern Heritage described the material as ranging from some of the most aggressive to some of the most atmospheric in the project’s history. The slower passages often feel more severe because they leave the listener inside each riff for longer.
“Tragedy of Humanization” occupies more than eight minutes and introduces the album’s central suspicion: that becoming civilized, enlightened or socially acceptable may also mean becoming controlled. Its title reverses the usual story in which humanization is an unquestioned good. The music moves between deliberate mid-tempo weight and faster pressure, making the conflict physical. A stern riff establishes order, another part breaks against it, and the composition asks whether discipline protects human potential or domesticates it.
Clandestine Blaze still relies upon tremolo guitar, forceful drumming, bass reinforcement and a single harsh voice, yet the longer structures no longer feel like rows of interchangeable riffs. Transitions carry emotional consequences. A faster section may sound not like escalation but an attempt to flee what the preceding slower passage has revealed. When the tempo drops again, the unresolved thought is still waiting.
“Blood of the Enlightenment” sharpens the contradiction. Enlightenment promises reason, freedom from superstition and the extension of knowledge, but blood reminds us that historical ideals often acquire bodies beneath them. The track moves quickly while a stumbling, almost fingerpicked guitar shape cuts across the velocity. Despair and perseverance appear simultaneously: the rhythm continues forward, but the melodic line seems to hesitate at every step. Historical momentum and individual consciousness grind against one another.
The production is clearer than the phrase “raw black metal” might suggest, but clarity never becomes cleanliness. The guitar retains an abrasive edge, the drums sound physical rather than perfected, and the voice remains a bodily event. Music and instruments were written and recorded in 2017, while the lyrics and vocals followed in 2018. The instrumental world therefore existed before the words entered it, making the vocals feel like a later witness moving through completed ruins.
“Tamed Hearts” begins the second side by returning the album’s political and spiritual concerns to the body. A tamed heart still beats, but according to boundaries established by another force. The title is more disturbing than simple defeat because taming requires continued life. The conquered subject is preserved, trained and made useful. The music advances with grim patience, allowing repeated figures to become a demonstration of habit. Control is most successful when its rhythm no longer feels externally imposed.
Aspa’s one-person method intensifies that closed atmosphere. Guitar, bass, drums and voice arise from the same source and operate like departments within one institution, each anticipating the others. Yet the recording avoids sterile unity through friction. Cymbals spread into the guitar, the vocal pushes against the mix, and the songs retain the sensation of being performed rather than diagrammed.
The title track is the album’s great opening of space. Acoustic fingerpicking introduces “Tranquility of Death” with an exhausted, processional sadness. Death is imagined not only as terror or obliteration but as the cessation of struggle, the calm that becomes imaginable after every other form of peace has failed. That idea can be comforting, dangerous or both, and the composition refuses to settle the question. Choir-like keyboards and a mournful guitar line enlarge the atmosphere without turning it into sentimental release.
When the heavier instruments return, the acoustic figure is not erased. It survives inside the faster movement, making the final passages feel as though serenity and violence have been layered rather than reconciled. Tranquility may belong to the dead, to the person approaching death, or to a society that becomes peaceful only after suppressing every living contradiction. The music permits all three meanings to remain active.
“Triumphant Empire” closes the record with an upward-moving riff that initially resembles victory. After the title track’s funeral gravity, the change can feel almost bright, but the brightness is unstable. Empires describe themselves as triumphant precisely when they need history to forget the cost. The song moves with renewed speed, transforming the preceding meditation into public force. Private resignation becomes collective certainty, and the cycle from cross to civilization, enlightenment, taming, death and empire is completed.
That sequence gives the album a tighter conceptual architecture than its severe presentation first reveals. Institutions transform pain into sacred meaning, transform people into manageable subjects, then name the resulting order progress. Death becomes peaceful because struggle has ended, and empire calls the silence victory. Six songs and repeated riffs are enough because repetition itself is one of the record’s subjects. Ideas become powerful through return.
Tranquility of Death was the project’s tenth full-length and appeared twenty years after the first Clandestine Blaze demo. Rather than marking the anniversary with an archive or imitation of early work, Aspa used the established language to make one of the project’s most reflective albums. Aggression remains essential, but melancholy and slower pacing expose dimensions that speed could have hidden. The record sounds like conviction after the excitement of conviction has passed, when only consequences and the long work of continuing remain.
Its most memorable quality is not rawness alone but thought under pressure. The songs make reflection feel like standing inside a narrowing structure, yet the structure contains melodic beauty, especially when acoustic guitar, mournful leads and restrained keyboards enter the distortion. Tranquility of Death finds no innocence in beauty and no simple liberation in truth. It leaves both inside the same severe room, still facing one another after the final empire has announced its victory.