Swans - 2019 - Leaving Meaning

 

Young God Records – YG63

Leaving Meaning begins with “Hums,” two minutes of voices suspended in air, as though Swans has returned without yet deciding which body it will inhabit. That uncertainty is the album’s central fact. After ending the fixed 2010–2017 lineup that made The Seer, To Be Kind and The Glowing Man, Michael Gira rebuilt Swans as a revolving assembly chosen song by song. The result is neither a retreat from those records nor another attempt to outgrow them through greater volume. It is a change in architecture. Instead of one band repeatedly transforming its own accumulated force, thirty-two musicians enter and leave according to the atmosphere each composition requires.
“Annaline” makes the new openness immediately audible. Acoustic guitar, soft percussion and layered voices create something close to a hymn, but Gira’s singing prevents comfort from becoming secure. His voice carries gratitude and apprehension simultaneously, as if beauty itself might disappear when named too directly. The song demonstrates that Swans does not require physical punishment to feel severe. A quiet arrangement can become enormous when every sound appears to be holding back an unknowable consequence.
“The Hanging Man” restores the body through an obsessive bass figure, drums and repeated vocal commands. The title invokes suspension, execution and the inverted figure of the tarot card, but the music refuses a single symbolic solution. Rhythm becomes a mechanism that keeps turning while Gira’s voice pushes against it. This is the older Swans principle of repetition as ordeal, rebuilt with more air between the parts. The pressure comes not from a solid wall but from hearing separate forces lock together until escape seems structurally impossible.
“Amnesia” returns to a song first released during Swans’ early-1990s period, but the new version is not nostalgic self-covering. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff’s voices gather around Gira, while Phil Puleo’s hammered dulcimer and the expanded arrangement move the song from private accusation toward ritual remembrance. Amnesia is not simple forgetting here. It is the active rearrangement of the past, the way an old statement changes because the person repeating it is no longer the person who first spoke it.
The title track belongs to The Necks, whose piano, bass and drums build one of their characteristic slowly evolving environments beneath Gira’s minimal direction. “Leaving Meaning” does not abandon meaning in favor of emptiness. It suggests leaving behind the demand that meaning become fixed. Tony Buck, Lloyd Swanton and Chris Abrahams create a musical surface whose relationships keep changing depending upon where attention settles. Gira’s words enter like objects placed within a current, temporarily visible before the improvisation alters their apparent weight.
“Sunfucker” is the album’s great violent contradiction. Its title is deliberately crude, while the music reaches toward devotion through an enormous cyclical rise. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff’s voices intensify the ritual atmosphere, and the repeated phrase becomes accusation, prayer and ecstatic self-erasure in turn. Swans has always understood that sacred and obscene language are neighboring tools, both capable of breaking ordinary speech. The track does not resolve that opposition. It keeps turning until disgust and worship begin using the same breath.
“Cathedrals of Heaven” follows with a slower procession. Percussion, lap steel and choral voices construct a building without walls, one made from recurrence and resonance rather than stone. Gira’s cathedral is not a safe religious institution. It is an imagined scale against which the individual briefly recognizes how small and strange consciousness is. The piece contains grandeur, but its grandeur never becomes decorative. Every beautiful layer carries the possibility of disappearance.
Baby Dee sings “The Nub,” which Gira wrote specifically for her after imagining her floating through the universe in diapers and drinking milk from the stars. The premise sounds ridiculous, yet the performance becomes one of the record’s most moving departures. The Necks again provide the foundation, allowing Dee’s voice to inhabit a cosmic nursery somewhere between cabaret, lullaby and metaphysical comedy. Her presence proves the value of Gira’s revolving-cast method: the song could not have reached this peculiar emotional territory through his voice alone.
“It’s Coming It’s Real” is the album’s most direct prophecy. Acoustic strumming, swelling choir and measured percussion create the sensation of an approaching event whose nature remains unnamed. Anna and Maria von Hausswolff turn the refrain into a public warning heard from a great distance. What is coming might be death, revelation, ecological consequence, political collapse or simply the next moment. The song’s power comes from refusing to choose. Anticipation becomes the actual subject.
The remaining pieces prevent the album from closing around one interpretation. “Some New Things,” included on CD and digital editions but omitted from the vinyl sequence, moves with a harsher electronic pulse. “What Is This?” asks its childlike question over an arrangement that makes wonder and terror nearly indistinguishable. “My Phantom Limb” closes through fractured voices and unstable repetition, treating identity as something felt after part of it has already vanished. The album ends not with a declaration but with the body attempting to understand its own absence.
The recording process was geographically scattered, with principal sessions in Berlin and additional work in Reykjavik, Brooklyn and Albuquerque. That dispersed construction suits an album made from different eras of Gira’s musical life. Kristof Hahn, Larry Mullins and Yoyo Röhm form its principal working core; former Swans members return; Ben Frost contributes guitar and electronics; A Hawk and a Hacksaw add strings; Jennifer Gira and numerous singers expand the human field. Swans becomes less a band than a method for organizing encounters.
The CD and digital version lasts more than ninety minutes, includes “Some New Things,” and preserves longer mixes than the vinyl edition. This matters because Leaving Meaning depends upon duration. Its repetitions need time to stop behaving like musical devices and begin altering the room. The shorter vinyl sequence is another valid construction, but the expanded version reveals the album as a complete threshold between the monumental touring band of the previous decade and the changing ensembles that followed.
Leaving Meaning is ultimately about continuation without pretending that continuity means remaining the same. Gira ended a powerful lineup because its possibilities had been exhausted, then invited old collaborators and new voices into the vacant space. What emerged is gentler in places, but not less demanding. The album asks whether identity can survive its own reconstruction, whether memory can change without becoming false, and whether meaning remains alive only while it is being left, found and left again.

Smote - 2021 - Drommon

 

Rocket Recordings – none

Drommon begins in a clearing, but Smote does not let the listener mistake stillness for safety. Birdsong and a low drone create the impression of open air before percussion begins gathering beneath them, at first distant and then increasingly physical. Guitar, bass and sustained tones accumulate without a conventional verse or chorus arriving to explain their purpose. Daniel Foggin builds the piece through repetition until the clearing seems to have closed around us. Nature has not become peaceful background; it has become the entrance to a ritual whose rules were established before we arrived.
Smote began as Foggin’s solitary recording project during the first pandemic year, when he was working in bedrooms and rehearsal rooms with limited equipment and little expectation that the music would travel far. Drommon preserves that homemade concentration. Foggin performs everything on the studio recording, but the result never feels like one person carefully stacking parts to impersonate a band. The instruments behave like separate forces discovered inside one imagination: hand percussion pushing from below, strings and guitars widening the horizon, organ holding dark weather in place, and occasional winds appearing like voices beyond the visible circle.
The two long title pieces were originally released together as a roughly half-hour cassette through Base Materialism. Rocket Recordings expanded them into a four-part album by placing “Hauberk” and “Poleyn” between them. That restructuring changes the music significantly. Instead of two facing monoliths, Drommon becomes a passage through chambers. The title invocation begins, the listener crosses two shorter spaces named after pieces of medieval armor, and the larger ritual resumes on the other side.
“Drommon (Part 1)” depends upon the strange emotional power of a pattern that refuses to satisfy our expectation of arrival. Its percussion and bass imply that something enormous is approaching, while the guitar builds a mountainous surface above them. Smote repeatedly approaches the explosive release familiar from heavy psychedelic rock, then chooses sustained pressure instead. The climax is not a doorway into another section. It is the discovery that we have already been standing inside the event.
This is repetition used as altered perspective. A riff heard once is information; heard for several minutes, it becomes landscape. Small changes matter because the larger structure remains fixed. A drum accent shifts the apparent ground, a higher tone changes the imagined height of the room, or a guitar layer thickens until the same pattern suddenly feels dangerous. Foggin trusts the listener to remain long enough for attention to become one of the instruments.
“Hauberk” is named for a coat of chain mail, armor made from hundreds of small linked rings. The title offers a useful image for the music. Hand drums, flute and string-like sounds interlock into a surface that is flexible despite being constructed from repetition. No single gesture carries the full weight. Strength comes from the way many small actions connect. The track feels brighter and more mobile than the title pieces, but its buoyancy retains an edge, as though a procession has begun moving faster than intended.
“Poleyn,” named for armor protecting the knee, is lower, slower and more enclosed. A persistent bass figure and basement-prog organ create the album’s clearest sense of underground architecture. Where “Hauberk” moves through air, “Poleyn” seems to descend by torchlight. The rhythm becomes physical almost immediately, but keyboard haze prevents the groove from settling into uncomplicated rock pleasure. Smote allows enjoyment and foreboding to occupy the same pulse.
The medieval titles suit music that feels ancient without reproducing an identifiable historical tradition. Drommon contains acid folk, raga-like drone, krautrock repetition and heavy psychedelic guitar, yet those references are treated as working materials rather than costumes. Foggin has identified Pärson Sound, Träd, Gräs och Stenar, International Harvester, Irish traditional music and various drone practices among the project’s foundations. What he takes from them is permission to let repetition become communal, physical and mysterious.
“Drommon (Part 2)” returns with greater heaviness, as though the two central tracks have equipped the listener before reentry. The tonic drone bears down upon the arrangement while fragments step forward and sink back into it. Jazz-like cries briefly lift above the mass, but the piece repeatedly absorbs them. Individual expression is permitted, then returned to the larger body. This gives the track its ritual character: the purpose is not to reveal a heroic soloist but to maintain collective force.
That collective quality is especially intriguing because Drommon was made alone. The record imagines a gathering before Smote had become a live band. Foggin later assembled musicians to translate the material for the stage, where the songs became louder and more communal, but this version preserves the original private summoning. One person repeats enough gestures to create the impression of many bodies moving together. Solitude manufactures its own congregation.
Foggin has described the early Smote albums as embracing intentional imperfection rather than obsessing over drum compression, equalization or technical correction. Drommon benefits from that decision. The percussion breathes unevenly, layers blur, and the recording retains evidence that a human being had to continue playing through the duration we hear. The roughness does not imitate an antique artifact. It protects the music from becoming a clean simulation of ritual.
The album also resists the modern expectation that meditation should be comfortable. Drommon can produce trance, but its trance is muddy, muscular and intimidating. Staying with one idea longer than convenience allows can expose impatience before it produces calm. Foggin makes that resistance part of the experience. The listener may wait for the change, become frustrated, stop waiting and finally hear that the sound has been changing all along.
Rocket issued the expanded album as LAUNCH247 on green-and-black splatter vinyl, giving physical form to music whose textures already resemble vegetation, stone and smoke entangled with electrical current. Yet its deepest effect does not depend upon the collectible object. It begins whenever the first birds and drone enter a room and ordinary time starts losing authority.
Drommon established Smote’s central method with remarkable completeness: pastoral space becoming heavy, repetition turning into movement, and fantasy functioning not as escape but as a way of intensifying the physical world. The record does not describe an ancient ceremony. It constructs the conditions under which one might be imagined. By the end, the listener has not reached a destination or received a revelation. The circle has simply held long enough for the room outside it to feel less certain.

That's Why - 2012 - The Best Of That's Why

 

Jazzman – JMANCD 051

The Best of That’s Why opens with a question that reached across centuries before the band ever answered it. “Children of the Future Age” sets words by William Blake inside breezy acoustic rhythm, flute, organ and communal vocals, allowing an eighteenth-century visionary to walk directly into an Oslo chapel in 1970. The result immediately explains why That’s Why remains difficult to file. This is Christian music, but it is also folk jazz, psychedelic rock, poetry recital and an attempt to remake worship for young people who had already heard what the outside world was doing with rhythm, electricity and altered consciousness.
The band grew from Forum Experimentale, founded in Oslo by priest and hymn writer Olaf Hillestad as the established church struggled to retain young people drawn toward rock, jazz and counterculture. Hillestad’s answer was not to forbid those sounds but to invite them into the sanctuary. Jan Simonsen and Per Arne Løvold became involved in the organization’s jazz masses, then gathered musicians from other Christian centers to record two albums in 1970 and 1971. The music preserves a rare moment when institutional religion briefly admitted that renewal might require genuine risk rather than familiar hymns dressed in fashionable clothes.
That risk is audible in the group’s refusal to settle upon one emotional temperature. “Vem Kan Segla,” based on the Swedish folk song “Vem kan segla förutan vind?,” carries the fragility of a melody passed between generations. Its image of sailing without wind and parting without tears fits naturally beside Christian ideas of faith, absence and endurance, but the performance never becomes a lesson. Voices, flute and restrained accompaniment leave the song open enough for homesickness, earthly love and spiritual longing to coexist.
“Tiden,” meaning “Time,” moves with greater rhythmic urgency. Acoustic guitar does not provide gentle pastoral scenery; it presses the song forward while jazz instrumentation loosens the edges. That’s Why often sounds as though several musical futures are being considered simultaneously. One route leads toward Norwegian folk revival, another toward soul jazz, another toward progressive rock, and another back into the chapel. The musicians never choose completely, which gives the recordings their searching quality.
“Mattheus 25” brings scripture into the album without pretending that biblical narration must remain musically obedient. The chapter contains parables of readiness, judgment and responsibility toward the vulnerable, themes that gain force when spoken or sung over restless modern rhythm. Rather than creating background music for a reading, the ensemble makes the text encounter another social world. Jazz improvisation and rock-inflected momentum prevent the words from sitting safely behind stained glass.
The compilation’s second half moves deeper into the peculiar emotional mixture created by That’s Why. “Den Oppstandne,” “Dyp av Nåde” and “Udødelig” announce resurrection, grace and immortality, yet the performances remain human-sized. Female and male voices can sound solemn, radiant or almost uncertain, while flute, organ and rhythm section keep shifting the ground beneath them. Faith is not presented as a polished state achieved before recording begins. It sounds like something being tested through breath, ensemble playing and repeated return.
“Udødelig” became the group’s best-known rediscovery after Jazzman included it on Spiritual Jazz 3: Europe. Its piano-led stillness shows why That’s Why belongs within spiritual jazz even though the group emerged from a specifically Christian environment. The important connection is not theology but function. Music becomes a place where devotion, improvisation and concentrated listening can alter ordinary time. The piece does not require the listener to share the musicians’ belief before entering its atmosphere.
“Gud, Skylden Er Vår Alene,” approximately “God, the guilt is ours alone,” brings a harsher moral gravity. The title refuses the comforting habit of assigning responsibility to a distant evil while preserving the innocence of the congregation. That idea feels especially potent inside music created to prevent Christianity from becoming culturally sealed. Renewal begins with recognition that institutions and believers may have helped produce the estrangement they condemn.
“Noe Annet,” or “Something Else,” is the collection’s darkest chamber. Church organ and ominous space gradually give way to forceful saxophone, transforming uncertainty into an almost apocalyptic uplift. The piece demonstrates how naturally sacred architecture can contain psychedelic unease. An organ already carries centuries of ritual association; That’s Why merely allows those associations to become unstable. The church can be shelter, mystery, authority and haunted building at the same time.
The closing “Kristus, Du Gjør Allting Nytt” translates as “Christ, You Make Everything New,” making it an appropriate conclusion to a band formed around renewal. The song’s choral energy does not erase the tensions heard before it. Instead, renewal sounds communal and unfinished, something made through the awkward cooperation of voices, inherited texts and contemporary instruments. That’s Why does not solve the conflict between Protestant restraint and ecstatic expression. The band makes that conflict audible and discovers beauty inside it.
Jazzman’s 2012 compilation rescues ten selections from the group’s scarce original records without turning them into curiosities from a quaint Christian subculture. Heard decades later, the music remains striking because its musicians did not treat youth culture as a disguise to be worn for recruitment. They genuinely entered the musical questions of their time. Psychedelia, jazz and folk were not bait placed outside the chapel door. They changed what could happen inside.
The Best of That’s Why therefore documents more than an obscure Norwegian group. It preserves an experiment in communication between generations, institutions and artistic languages. A priest recognized that prohibition had failed, young musicians discovered that belief could survive contact with improvisation, and poems from Norway, Sweden and England entered records that eventually travelled far beyond their original congregation. The music’s innocence and sophistication remain inseparable. That’s Why sounds accomplished because the players were capable, and moving because nobody knew whether this unusual bridge would hold.

VA - 2021 - Sahel Sounds Label Sampler 3

 

Sahel Sounds – none

Sahel Sounds Label Sampler 3 does not behave like a label advertisement assembled to prove consistency. Its twelve tracks move between wedding-band guitar, spiritual jazz, electronic street-party music, archival Tuareg song, solo acoustic playing, film-score improvisation and synthesizer music without pretending these sounds belong to one genre. What holds the collection together is circulation: recordings travelling through phones, cassettes, studios, WhatsApp messages, local celebrations, international collaborations and a Portland label trying to keep those routes visible rather than sanding them into one idea of “African music.”
Etran de L’Aïr opens with “Etran Hymne,” six minutes of guitars speaking over one another while drums keep the structure in joyous motion. The Agadez group’s three-guitar approach creates a weave instead of a conventional division between rhythm and lead. One phrase flashes, another answers, and a third keeps the ground shimmering. The track immediately rejects desert solemnity. This is bright, social music built to move bodies, carrying the practical energy of a working wedding band rather than the distant grandeur often projected onto Saharan guitar from outside.
Wau Wau Collectif’s “Salamaleikoum” changes the scale completely. The Senegalese-Swedish collaboration surrounds a greeting with soft electronics, percussion and voices that drift into existence. The title means peace be upon you, and the track feels genuinely welcoming without becoming decorative. Its long-distance construction is audible as openness: instruments do not crowd toward one center, leaving different musical histories room to participate without disappearing.
“Akokass” by Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou carries the authority of an earlier generation of Tuareg guitar. His music emerged from political struggle and exile, but the song is not reduced to historical testimony. The guitar remains melodic, forceful and alive in the present. Placing him after Wau Wau Collectif quietly shows how the catalog refuses a simple timeline in which tradition is replaced by modern experimentation. Older recordings and current collaborations coexist because each continues producing meaning now.
DJ Balani’s “Bala” then detonates the sequence. Chopped balafon samples, pounding electronic rhythm and rapid vocal energy turn the sampler into a street party. Balani Show music developed through Bamako’s sound-system culture, where laptops, wireless microphones and local percussion became one restless format. The track’s digital roughness is not incomplete modernization. It is musicians using available technology aggressively, creating overload specific to the city and its social life.
Fatou Seidi Ghali’s “Migrid Noulhawan” creates the sharpest contrast. Acoustic guitar, handclaps, laughter and conversational ease reduce the arrangement to a few human gestures. Ghali’s playing is cyclical but never mechanical; each return contains tiny differences in touch and timing. After DJ Balani’s electronic density, the song does not feel like a retreat into purity. Both are contemporary recordings shaped by different environments. The sampler allows them to correct any listener expecting the Sahel to possess one proper sound.
Ahmoudou Madassane’s “Toumast” comes from the soundtrack to Zerzura, a Saharan acid Western in which he also appeared. His nearly solitary electric guitar leaves wide space around every note. Echo and sustain turn the instrument into landscape without requiring additional cinematic decoration. The track feels like someone thinking aloud while watching an immense horizon, its pauses carrying as much information as its phrases.
Luka Productions’ “Nèguè” returns the sequence to urban electronic construction. Luka Guindo treats hip-hop, sampling and Malian musical memory as flexible materials rather than separate categories. The beat feels handmade and futuristic at once. Sahel Sounds is especially valuable when documenting music that older ethnographic expectations might overlook because it sounds too recent, synthetic or connected to global technology.
“Loubss” by Jeich Ould Badu and Ahmedou Ahmed Lewla changes the temperature again through Mauritanian guitar and voice. The performance is compact, but its melodic turns suggest a larger practice surrounding the recording. “Gonmo” by Lingo Seini et son groupe follows with rough ensemble momentum captured in motion rather than arranged for export. These songs remind us that a sampler inevitably offers fragments. Each artist belongs to local histories, languages and audiences larger than the few minutes selected here.
Mamman Sani’s “Gosi” is one of the collection’s strangest pieces. His keyboard music grew from work in Nigerien radio and television, where electronic instruments became tools for interstitials and instrumental composition in a country without a conventional record industry. The synthesizer carries intimacy and mystery, not because it is technologically primitive, but because it developed outside the familiar commercial narrative through which electronic-music history is usually told.
Tidiane Thiam’s “N’Dianguene Demngal Men” replaces keyboard with fingerpicked acoustic guitar. From Podor in northern Senegal, Thiam treats the instrument as a repository of regional melody and personal memory. His playing is exact but unshowy, allowing rhythm and tune to unfold together. The track resembles an entry from a musical notebook, complete enough to open a world but modest enough to leave much of that world unspoken.
Amaria Hamadalher closes the sampler with “Bahouche,” returning to Tuareg guitar without providing a neat circular ending. By this point, the listener has encountered multiple nations, generations, recording methods and social functions. Guitar music no longer represents one stable tradition; it can belong to weddings, rebellion, film, private performance or international touring. The apparent return reveals how much the ear has changed across forty-six minutes.
Released as a name-your-price download in February 2021, Label Sampler 3 combines recent material, older catalog selections, compilation tracks and a preview of music still to come. Its generosity is not simply the low barrier to entry. The sampler offers an alternative map of the Sahel based upon active musicians and moving files rather than a frozen image of timeless desert culture. Cell phones, digital production and international exchange appear beside acoustic instruments without creating a hierarchy of authenticity.
The collection’s real subject may be the route between people. A recording made for a local audience enters a phone, archive, compilation, blog post or hard drive and reaches another room thousands of miles away. Something is always lost in that movement, especially language and social context, but something can also be gained when the music remains connected to named artists rather than dissolved into anonymous atmosphere. Sahel Sounds Label Sampler 3 is not a complete portrait of a region too large and varied for completion. It is twelve open doors, each leading toward a musician whose world deserves further listening.

Villa Åbo - 2016 - Magnetic Moves

 

Funeral Fog Records – funeral031

Magnetic Moves begins with a contradiction: music made from machines that never sounds fully mechanical. Jan Svensson’s drum patterns strike with club precision, acid lines repeat like programmed instructions, and synthesizers lock into small circuits, yet every track carries the abrasion of hands turning knobs in real time. Under the Villa Åbo name, Svensson does not polish techno into a sealed futuristic surface. He leaves fingerprints on the circuitry. The machines hesitate, lean and sometimes appear to enjoy their own imperfections.
“Again Again” states the album’s philosophy in its title. Repetition is not a lack of development but the place where development becomes audible. A clipped rhythm returns, a bass figure shifts its weight, and an acid line gradually changes from decoration into the track’s nervous system. Svensson understands how a loop can remain recognizable while its emotional function mutates. What begins as propulsion can become pressure, comedy or menace without requiring a conventional breakdown to announce the change.
Villa Åbo first appeared on two Börft releases in 1997, then disappeared for seventeen years until Paul du Lac’s Bio Rhythm label encouraged Svensson to revive the project for A Ruff Swing Below. That long pause gives the alias a peculiar identity. Villa Åbo became a room Svensson could leave locked until a particular combination of deep techno, acid and private eccentricity required reopening. Magnetic Moves was the project’s first album, originally issued in 2016 as only sixty-five hand-numbered cassettes by Funeral Fog.
“The Tiny One” condenses the method into less than four minutes. A compact rhythm-machine pattern becomes a chassis for acidic details and tiny tonal disturbances. The title may refer to duration, equipment or some private joke, yet the music demonstrates how much personality can inhabit a narrow space. Svensson never treats minimal means as an excuse for neutrality. Every sound has a slightly crooked posture.
“Doortest” is appropriately functional, as though created to determine whether an opening mechanism still works. Its beat presses forward while synth tones probe the edges of the room, repeatedly testing what the groove can admit without losing structural integrity. This practical naming belongs to Svensson’s electronic world, where tracks can feel like workshop objects rather than expressions surrounded by glamorous mythology. The humor makes the music more human without making it less serious.
“Dreams of Italy, Assiduous Dreams” stretches toward a warmer, more fluid atmosphere. The title joins travel fantasy with persistent labor: Italy as imagined light and movement, assiduousness as the repeated work required to keep dreaming. The track carries echoes of Detroit techno’s emotional machinery, especially the way a simple sequence can suggest longing without voices. Svensson does not imitate Derrick May or Underground Resistance cleanly. His version arrives through Karlskrona, with rougher edges and a stubborn regional personality.
The album’s center is “Massive Duometer (Raw Mix),” more than nine minutes of accumulated force. “Raw Mix” is not a warning that the track is unfinished. Rawness is the final condition, preserving transitions, pressure and the sensation that the machinery remains physically accessible. The rhythm develops patiently, allowing each new layer to alter the apparent size of the whole. By full density, the listener has been moved through several rooms without noticing a doorway.
“Bianco Festival” interrupts the seriousness with a shorter, almost mischievous burst. The name suggests an imagined Italian gathering, but the music behaves like an unruly machine smuggled into an elegant space. Svensson’s electronic work benefits from this refusal of prestige. He understands dance music deeply, yet approaches it with the punk independence that shaped Frak and Börft. Correctness matters less than whether the equipment produces a compelling disturbance.
“Water Galaxy (Version D)” is the album’s most expansive title and one of its most fluid compositions. Water and galaxies belong to radically different scales, but both are organized through movement, gravity and repeated forms. The track’s nearly nine minutes allow small electronic currents to widen until the groove feels suspended inside a larger field. Calling it “Version D” also leaves invisible siblings behind it, reminding us that the released track is one selected state among other possible arrangements.
The closing “Short Relaxing End” delivers exactly what it promises, though relaxation in Villa Åbo’s world remains slightly unstable. After the long rhythmic constructions, ninety-four seconds of reduced pressure feel almost luxurious. The title reads like a studio note left in place because improving it would destroy its usefulness. The album exits without a dramatic resolution, simply allowing the machines to cool.
Svensson recorded the album at Studio Styrka in Karlskrona and credited it to J.B.S., another layer of identity inside a career already containing Frak, Studio SS and Alvars Orkestra. That multiplicity does not suggest a producer hiding behind disguises so much as a maker building different workbenches for different problems. Villa Åbo is where techno can be deep, playful and physically rough without being forced to carry Börft’s entire history.
That history remains important. Svensson founded Börft with Frak in 1987, long before Swedish electronic music gained broad international attention. The label’s commitment to cassettes, homemade presentation, experimental noise, acid and dance records created a parallel infrastructure that ignored fashion long enough for fashion eventually to notice it. Magnetic Moves carries that patience. Its original cassette edition was another small object placed into circulation because the music existed and deserved a form.
Dark Entries gave the album a second physical life in 2018, spreading its eight tracks across four vinyl sides at 45 RPM and asking George Horn to remaster them at Fantasy Studios. Eloise Leigh’s jacket uses a photograph of Svensson’s mother’s house, the actual Villa Åbo behind the name. This domestic image suits music that turns private, practical activity into something capable of filling clubs far beyond Karlskrona. The future is built at home, then mailed outward.
Magnetic Moves succeeds because it never separates function from personality. These tracks can work as DJ tools, but they also retain humor, memory, regional history and the evidence of one person’s touch. The album does not ask machines to imitate humanity. It lets them become companions in a workshop where repetition generates character. Again becomes different because somebody keeps listening closely enough to notice.

VA - 2018 - Brown Acid The Seventh Trip (Heavy Rock From The Underground Comedown)

 

RidingEasy Records – EZRDR-096

Brown Acid: The Seventh Trip opens with ten bands that once existed mostly as rumors attached to impossibly scarce singles. These were not famous groups whose neglected B-sides required critical rehabilitation. Most operated briefly inside local circuits, recorded one or two songs, pressed a tiny number of copies and disappeared before a larger audience knew there was anything to miss. The compilation gathers those isolated electrical events into a convincing alternate history of heavy rock, one in which proto-metal did not descend neatly from a handful of universally recognized albums but erupted simultaneously in basements, high schools, small studios and rural towns.
Pegasus begins the trip with “The Sorcerer,” recorded in Baltimore in 1972. The riff carries enough Sabbath weight to sound immediately familiar, but the performance remains too impatient and local to become imitation. Bass pushes beneath a vocal full of homemade authority, while the guitar repeatedly discovers that one strong figure can support an entire mythology. The resemblance between its riff and Black Flag’s later “No Values” is probably coincidence, yet the comparison demonstrates how these forgotten singles can redraw musical family trees. A sound assumed to belong to one later scene may already have been circulating in another form years earlier.
Nobody’s Children’s “Good Times” follows with laughter, poverty, cheap wine and a stove apparently leaking gas into the room. The title becomes an act of grim comedy. Rather than delivering the heroic escape promised by much early hard rock, the song describes life from inside shabby conditions and then responds with loose guitar solos bursting through every opening. Its humor is not a retreat from desperation. Laughing becomes one more available instrument when dignity and money are in short supply.
Blue Amber’s “We Got Love” was recorded in Youngstown, Ohio in 1971, and it contains the primitive economy that makes so many Brown Acid discoveries irresistible. Two blunt riffs, heavily delayed vocals and a rhythm section moving with caveman certainty become enough to create a complete world. Youngstown repeatedly appears throughout this series because industrial cities could generate enormous quantities of hard local music without leaving much national evidence. A privately pressed single may therefore preserve a scene more accurately than the era’s official histories.
Negative Space supplies the compilation’s only track taken from an LP. “The Calm After the Storm” stretches beyond six minutes, making it the record’s longest performance and giving its fuzz enough time to become environmental. The title promises aftermath, but the music sounds as though the storm has discovered another gear. Guitar distortion spreads while the band maintains a hard repetitive foundation, proving that heaviness did not always require speed. Before adopting the Negative Space name, leader Rob Russen recorded as Snow, linking this seventh volume back to a track on the first Brown Acid compilation and revealing the hidden continuity beneath apparently isolated artifacts.
Swedish group Zane’s “Damage” arrives like equipment being thrown down a stairwell without being switched off. Recorded in 1976, it replaces bluesy heaviness with obnoxiously loud drums, primitive synthesizer and a vocal attitude already leaning toward punk. Most Brown Acid tracks sound like missing steps between late-sixties psychedelia and heavy metal. “Damage” opens a side corridor toward synth punk and industrial rock, demonstrating that the underground comedown was producing several futures at once.
Blizzard begins the second side with “Peace of Mind,” recorded in Oklahoma in 1973 by a high-school band. Nothing in the performance sounds cautious or juvenile. Drums attack with startling confidence, guitar pushes toward Hendrix and the MC5, and the title’s promise of tranquility is thoroughly violated. The fact that teenagers could produce something this fierce, press it on a tiny local label and then nearly vanish from history exposes how much musical ability existed outside professional channels. Talent was never rare. Durable documentation and distribution were.
Third World’s “End of Time,” also from Oklahoma, turns a distorted two-note figure into apocalyptic propulsion. The riff is almost absurdly simple, yet the vocal and rhythm section enlarge it until the track resembles Grand Funk broadcasting from the final functioning radio tower. Brown Acid repeatedly demonstrates that proto-metal’s power came partly from musicians not yet knowing which rules would later define metal. Blues, garage rock, psychedelia and local dance-band instincts remained tangled together, producing music rougher and less standardized than many later revivalists could comfortably imitate.
Sweet Wine’s “Things You Told Me” travelled from Virginia, Minnesota, a town cold enough to make the record’s heat feel defiant. The guitar cuts with garage-band directness while the chorus retains traces of melodic pop, creating the kind of accidental balance that develops before a group has learned to choose between commercial accessibility and total amplifier damage. The compilation also preserves something of musician Calvin Haluptzok’s story. The curators contacted him before his death, allowing the song to reappear with a named human history rather than as anonymous collector bait.
C.T. Pilferhogg wins the collection’s band-name contest before “You Haul” even begins. The song was released privately in 1973 by a group advertised as Southwest Virginia’s finest boogie band, but its organ-heavy attack moves beyond ordinary barroom shuffle. Deep Purple and Uriah Heep provide useful reference points, while Echoplex-treated demonic laughter makes the track sound as though the band’s equipment has developed a private sense of humor. The performance is excessive without becoming polished, retaining the lovely danger of musicians discovering that every control can be turned farther.
Summit closes the trip with “The Darkness,” recorded in a Kansas City basement in 1969 when its lead guitarist was sixteen. A bell rings, fuzz enters and the song immediately generates an atmosphere far larger than its modest circumstances. Summit came from a rural Missouri town, performed only one impromptu show and pressed just 125 copies of its sole single. That tiny physical population explains its collector value, but scarcity alone cannot create the feeling preserved here. The song sounds haunted because the musicians found the right combination of repetition, distortion and empty space, not because the surviving vinyl became expensive.
The Brown Acid project matters because it turns obsessive collecting into restoration of social memory. Lance Barresi of Permanent Records and Daniel Hall of RidingEasy did not simply copy rare singles and hide behind the romance of bootlegging. The tracks were licensed, musicians were located and paid, and analog sources were used. Each volume therefore reconnects sound with people who may have assumed that the evidence of their youthful bands had disappeared permanently.
The Seventh Trip is especially cohesive because its variety never weakens its physical momentum. Sabbath-shaped riffing, poor-man’s boogie, damaged synthesizer punk, rural psychedelia and teenage fuzz all belong together without becoming interchangeable. These bands were not consciously inventing “proto-metal” for future historians. They were trying to make the heaviest, strangest or most exciting record possible with whatever equipment, money and local opportunity existed.
The compilation ultimately transforms ten near-disappearances into one loud survival story. A single once heard by a few hundred people can return fifty years later and enter rooms its makers never imagined. Brown Acid does not correct rock history by replacing famous bands with obscure ones. It makes the history larger, messier and more democratic, restoring all the basement doors that the official story left closed.

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.