Ball - 2017 - ST

 

Horny – HOR-666

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

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

 Lumpy Records ‎– 087

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

A Taste of Ra - 2007 - Morning of My Life

Häpna – H.36

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

Centrum - 2019 - For Meditation

Rocket Recordings – SPA011

 För Meditation is named with admirable directness. Centrum does not disguise the record as a collection of songs that might accidentally calm the listener. These four pieces were built as a vehicle for stopping, resting and reflecting, yet the album avoids the soft-focus comfort often sold under the language of meditation. Its drones have weight, its percussion advances with ritual patience, and its voices sometimes seem less soothing than summoned. The music does not remove difficulty from consciousness. It creates enough space for difficulty to be observed without immediately being obeyed.

“Vid Floden,” or “By the River,” begins with field recordings made during the musicians’ travels in India. Traffic, horns, voices and street activity place the listener inside ordinary public density before the sustained tones begin opening another interior distance. Centrum does not present India as a magical world separate from modern life. The recording starts amid congestion, machinery and human movement, then discovers meditation within that environment rather than pretending meditation requires its disappearance. The drone rises like another current beneath the traffic, gradually carrying attention away from identifying individual sounds.
The transition is central to the album’s method. A bell, harmonium-like tone or repeated drum pattern does not command the listener to enter a sacred state. It keeps returning until the distinction between foreground and background becomes less stable. The street can become music; the music can begin resembling weather; a simple pulse can become large enough to contain passing thoughts without needing to resolve them. When “Vid Floden” ends abruptly after eleven minutes, the cut feels almost physical because Centrum has made duration resemble a place.
“Sjön,” meaning “The Lake,” begins with reversed or obscured voices and develops through slow percussion, strings and a buzzing, sitar-like electronic texture. Rivers imply movement, while lakes gather and hold. The track accordingly feels more enclosed than the opener, as though sound is circulating within one body of water rather than travelling toward an unseen destination. Small instrumental details appear at the surface, remain briefly visible and then sink back into the larger drone.
Centrum’s heaviness becomes especially clear here. The group wanted to create something heavy and meditative without relying upon metal’s usual vocabulary of volume, distortion and aggression. Weight instead comes from persistence. A tone becomes heavy because it remains present long enough to alter the shape of the room. A drumbeat becomes heavy because it arrives with no interest in hurrying toward a chorus. The album demonstrates that slowness is not the absence of force. It is force distributed across a longer period.
“Stjärnor,” or “Stars,” is the shortest piece and the album’s most immediately radiant passage. Violin and a wah-treated guitar line move above the continuing ritual foundation, introducing something close to melody without allowing it to become an ordinary lead performance. The stars of the title do not sparkle decoratively. They appear as distant points through darkness, visible but unreachable, providing orientation rather than destination. The track’s compact form also prevents the album from becoming one continuous undifferentiated trance. Meditation contains changes of concentration, sudden images and brief openings of light.
The closing “Som En Spegel,” meaning “Like a Mirror,” gathers the record’s ideas into its longest final movement. Flutes, chanting, percussion and drone proceed with ceremonial gravity, but the mirror in the title suggests that the music’s ultimate subject is not the musicians’ imagined landscape. It is the person listening. A mirror supplies no image without someone standing before it. Centrum similarly offers a framework of repetition and resonance within which private memories, anxieties and associations become newly visible.
This helps explain why the record can affect different listeners so differently while retaining such a strong identity. Centrum does not narrate a specific spiritual revelation. Its Swedish titles name broad elemental objects: river, lake, stars and mirror. Each is both physically simple and symbolically inexhaustible. Water moves or reflects; stars provide distance; mirrors return whatever approaches them. The album’s imagery remains open enough for listeners to bring their own inner material without being instructed what that material should mean.
The group consisted of Kalle on harmonium, guitar, bass, bouzouki, flutes, recorder, vocals and tape delay; Simon on drums, tambourine, vocals, flute and percussion; Axel on violin; and Baba on flute. Kalle’s connections with Hills and Weary Nous may explain part of the album’s familiarity with repetition and psychedelic expansion, but Centrum narrows those instincts into something more devotional. The musicians do not jam toward ecstatic release. They use improvisation and arrangement to hold a condition steady.
Their influences stretch from Pandit Pran Nath and both John and Alice Coltrane to Träd, Gräs och Stenar, International Harvester, the Velvet Underground, Popol Vuh, Scientist and Black Sabbath. That list seems impossibly broad until the album reveals the shared principle underneath it. Each of those artists understood, in different ways, that repetition can become a complete world. A sustained pitch, a dub echo, a folk-rock pulse, a heavy riff or a spiritual-jazz vamp can change consciousness when it is allowed to continue beyond ordinary expectation.
The field recordings, tape delay and homemade recording method prevent the record from becoming polished spiritual décor. Centrum’s devotional music retains dust, interruption and human unevenness. The musicians described the project as a homage to impermanence and a celebration of life and death. That idea is audible in every fading tone. A sound must disappear for the next moment to become perceptible, yet delay and repetition allow part of it to survive in altered form.
Released jointly by Rocket Recordings and Svensk Psych Aften, För Meditation appeared in red- and black-vinyl editions, with a very small band edition adding handmade inserts and incense. Those physical details complement the ritual character, but the record does not require special objects or correct surroundings to work. Its real instrument is sustained attention. Played through speakers in an ordinary room, the drones begin interacting with the building, outside traffic and the listener’s breathing until everyday space becomes part of the recording.
För Meditation succeeds because it facilitates rather than directs. It does not promise enlightenment, wellness or escape from the world. It asks the listener to remain beside four slowly changing structures long enough for habitual thought to lose some authority. By the end, silence feels different, not because Centrum has filled it with an answer, but because the record has made silence newly audible. The river moves, the lake holds, the stars remain distant, and the mirror continues waiting for whoever stands before it.

Vusi Mahlasela, Norman Zulu, Jive Connection - 2023 - Face To Face

 

Strut – STRUT211

Face To Face arrived in 2023 carrying the strange glow of music that had already lived an entire hidden life. Recorded in 2002 by South African singers Vusi Mahlasela and Norman Zulu with the Swedish collective Jive Connection, the album spent roughly two decades in producer Torsten Larsson’s archive before Strut brought it into daylight. That long delay changes the way the record feels. It is not a reconstruction or reunion assembled after the fact. These performances preserve the immediacy of people discovering how naturally their musical languages could coexist, then return years later without having lost their warmth.
The collaboration grew from cultural exchanges between South Africa and Sweden, two countries connected through Sweden’s long support for the anti-apartheid struggle. Mahlasela had already become known as “The Voice” of South Africa, singing at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration and building a body of work around freedom, reconciliation and the dignity of ordinary people. Norman Zulu, born in Sophiatown and raised in Soweto, brought another powerful vocal presence and a friendship with Mahlasela that he described as brotherhood. Jive Connection supplied Swedish jazz, soul, reggae and post-punk experience without treating the singers as exotic guests standing in front of a European backing band.
“Prodigal Son” opens the record with one of its clearest demonstrations of that equality. The arrangement moves with a bright, elastic groove, but the song’s parable gives the rhythm emotional weight. Voices answer one another, guitars and bass keep the track buoyant, and the drumming refuses to become either a rigid imitation of township music or a polished jazz exercise. The band sounds less interested in proving fluency than in creating a shared language quickly enough for everyone to begin telling stories inside it.
“Umzala” and “Inkomo” deepen that conversational feeling. The backing vocals are especially important throughout the album because Mahlasela and Zulu taught the Swedish musicians to sing in several South African languages. Those voices do not appear as a decorative chorus placed behind the “authentic” singers. They show the practical work of collaboration: listening closely, learning unfamiliar sounds, accepting correction and allowing one’s mouth to be changed by another language. The resulting harmonies make the album feel social at its foundations.
“Faceless People” is the record’s emotional center. Mahlasela addresses child abuse without hiding behind general language, yet the performance does not reduce suffering to spectacle. His voice carries grief, accusation and protection simultaneously, while the band leaves enough space for the words to remain unavoidable. The title describes one of abuse’s cruelest effects: the victim can be made invisible while institutions, families or communities protect the appearance of normality. Music cannot repair that harm, but it can refuse the silence that allows harm to remain faceless.
The title track approaches connection from another direction. “Face To Face” suggests direct human encounter, the condition required before cultural exchange can become more than an official program or optimistic slogan. People must stand close enough to risk misunderstanding, embarrassment and change. The record’s strongest moments come from that proximity. Mahlasela’s phrasing stretches against the band’s groove; Norman Zulu’s voice enters with its own grain; Swedish rhythm players add roughness and propulsion; nobody disappears into a smooth idea of international unity.
That roughness distinguishes Jive Connection’s contribution. Guitarist and bassist Stefan Bergman and drummer Erik Bodin, later known through Little Dragon, help the music retain edges that a more reverential production might have removed. Reggae rhythms, jazz phrasing, township arrangements and occasional post-punk sharpness pass through the same songs without being separated into labeled sections. The album does not sound like a demonstration of fusion. It sounds like musicians using whatever works to keep the song alive.
“Themba Lami,” “Intombi Ye Mbali” and “Abantu Abangana Buso” expand the album beyond the eight tracks selected for the vinyl edition. On the full fourteen-song sequence, Face To Face develops more like an evening shared among musicians than a tightly edited commercial album. Some pieces feel immediate and danceable, others reflective, and several allow the singers’ voices to become almost conversational. This range makes the archive feel inhabited. The session was not built around one marketable mood.
“Push” contains the album’s central ethic in one word. Mahlasela’s music has often balanced knowledge of political cruelty with an insistence that despair must not receive the final authority. Here forward motion is neither naive optimism nor motivational decoration. It is survival converted into rhythm. The groove carries the body while the voices remind the mind why continuing matters. Hope is not presented as the absence of history. It is a practice performed while history remains present.
“Roots” makes that principle explicit without turning heritage into something frozen. Roots feed growth; they do not dictate the exact shape of every future branch. South African vocal traditions and township rhythms remain central, but the Swedish musicians’ jazz, soul and alternative sensibilities are not asked to vanish. The collaboration respects origin by allowing it to generate new relationships. Cultural exchange becomes meaningful when everyone arrives with a history and nobody demands that history remain untouched.
The final “Son of Prodigal Son” returns to the album’s opening idea, creating a generational circle. A parable about leaving and returning becomes a reflection on what happens after return, when another life inherits the consequences. That structure feels especially appropriate for music recorded in 2002 and released in 2023. The album itself became a prodigal object, departing into an archive and returning to listeners twenty years later. It came back carrying the sound of people who had remained friends even while the tapes were silent.
The Carvery’s mastering preserves the recording’s warmth without making it sound artificially contemporary. The album still belongs to its original moment, but it does not feel trapped there. Its messages about abuse, dignity, reconciliation, collective learning and the need to keep moving have not expired. If anything, the delay reveals how little these songs depended upon fashion.
Face To Face is ultimately a record about what becomes possible when solidarity moves beyond agreement and enters practice. Sweden’s support for the anti-apartheid struggle forms part of the historical background, but the music brings that relationship down to human scale: singers teaching syllables, musicians adjusting rhythms, friends sharing stages and a producer preserving tapes because the encounter mattered. The album’s joy is not evidence that hardship has disappeared. It is evidence that hardship did not prevent people from meeting, learning and creating something capable of surviving its own long disappearance.

Suffering Hour - 2017 - In Passing Ascension

 

Blood Harvest – YOTZ#2017-002

In Passing Ascension sounds like death metal discovering that gravity can bend. Suffering Hour’s debut full-length is dense, violent and physically grounded, yet its most distinctive guitar phrases seem to curve away from the earth beneath them. Riffs do not simply descend or accelerate. They twist, hover and return from unexpected angles, producing the sensation that the listener is being pulled through a structure whose dimensions keep changing. The Minnesota trio called this their take on cosmic blackened death metal, but the cosmic quality is built into the movement of the songs rather than added as science-fiction decoration.
“Insufferable Scorn” functions as a short opening portal. Bent guitar tones rise from a murky foundation while the rhythm section establishes pressure without revealing the album’s full speed. When “For the Putridity of Man” erupts, the record’s technical control becomes immediately apparent. Fast death-metal attack, thick low-end force and a violently warped whammy-bar passage coexist without turning the song into unrelated demonstrations. Every strange event remains attached to the central riffing.
The lyrics treat humanity with open contempt, but the music is more interesting than simple misanthropy. Anger becomes architecture. DgS’s vocals hang over the guitar rather than dominating it, appearing as another layer of pressure inside the arrangement. The words do not interrupt the riffs to explain their meaning. They seem to emerge from the same contaminated atmosphere, brief verbal shapes forming inside a larger instrumental storm.
“Devouring Shapeless Void” begins with a more direct thrashing impulse, preserving traces of the band’s earlier history before the compositions grew increasingly dissonant and atmospheric. That forward motion soon begins folding inward. A riff made for immediate physical impact becomes surrounded by blackened harmony and irregular transitions. Suffering Hour repeatedly demonstrates that accessibility and strangeness do not have to occupy separate songs. A memorable headbanging passage can exist inside a structure that refuses to behave predictably.
“The Abrasive Black Dust” is where the album’s identity becomes fully visible. Its central mantra sounds both ancient and extraterrestrial, a repeated phrase eroding the space around it while lead guitar flickers above the rhythm like damaged light. The title is tactile: dust enters every opening, while abrasion describes gradual wearing. Repetition and accumulation slowly alter the listener’s sense of scale.
“Withering Microcosmos” interrupts the longer songs with a compact instrumental passage. The title joins collapse and immensity inside a tiny frame, suggesting a private universe shrinking or dying. Its placement gives the album a moment to inhale without offering comfort. A short, strange interval makes the following attack feel as though it has arrived from farther away.
“Through Vessels of Arcane Power” returns with one of the record’s clearest combinations of muscular death metal and poisonous melody. The trio format matters enormously. With only one guitarist, bass and drums cannot disappear behind doubled rhythm tracks. IsN’s drumming gives every contortion a physical skeleton, while DgS’s bass helps the guitar maintain mass even when YhA’s lines detach from conventional harmony. The musicians sound larger than three people because each occupies a distinct structural function.
That economy keeps the album from becoming ornamental. Dissonant metal can confuse complexity with depth, adding more layers whenever an idea has not become convincing. Suffering Hour introduces a strong riff, studies the pressure inside it and alters its surroundings. Technical skill becomes useful because it allows the band to maintain clarity while the apparent geometry changes. The songs are intricate, but their intricacy remains directed toward atmosphere and impact.
“Procession to Obscure Infinity” is the album’s longest and most ambitious composition. Its title suggests ceremonial movement toward something that cannot be understood or reached, and the music advances accordingly. Slower passages create an immense corridor before faster sections begin tearing through it. The song does not feel long because it contains excessive material. It feels long because recurring ideas are allowed to acquire history. Each return carries the memory of where the riff has already travelled.
This is not frantic escape into infinity but organized movement toward it, conducted with ritual patience. Death metal, black metal and thrash become less useful as separate labels here. What remains is a shared interest in transcendence through extremity. Speed, distortion and repetition push perception beyond ordinary proportions until violence begins producing a strange spaciousness.
“Empty Avowals” closes the album by bringing its philosophical concerns into focus. A spoken passage near the end supplied the album’s title, connecting ascension with DgS’s fascination regarding death, earthly worthlessness and the possibility of existence beyond the body. The record offers no religious certainty. Its strength lies in making uncertainty physical, suspending the listener between disgust with earthly life and curiosity about whatever may exist outside it.
Alexander Brown’s cover gives that uncertainty a suitable visual body. A human figure appears caught within a vast organic or cosmic mechanism, surrounded by forms that could be roots, nerves, celestial matter or decomposition. The image reflects the album’s central contradiction: ascent occurs through filth, mortality and physical collapse rather than through clean separation from them.
The album took roughly three years to write, record and refine, beginning while its principal composer was still a teenager. That long construction is audible in the sequencing. The tracks form a deliberate passage from opening invocation through increasingly unstable chambers toward the final spoken meditation. Even the two short pieces function as hinges, controlling pressure and making the full album more immersive than any isolated song.
Blood Harvest issued In Passing Ascension in 2017 after the band sent its press material to numerous labels and found someone who understood what it was attempting. Suffering Hour sounds rooted in underground death metal’s dirt and physicality while refusing to treat tradition as a closed map. The album absorbs suffocating death metal, black-metal hypnosis, thrash propulsion and progressive disorientation, then bends those forces into its own orbit.
What makes In Passing Ascension endure is the fluency with which the trio moves between those conditions. Strange riffs still hit like riffs. Atmosphere does not excuse weak structure. Complexity never removes the body from the experience. The album feels meticulously assembled yet dangerously unstable, a machine opening a wormhole while still functioning as death metal.
Suffering Hour ultimately treats ascension as a passing state rather than a permanent achievement. One rises briefly through distortion, repetition and concentration, glimpses a larger and more terrifying structure, then returns to the same mortal ground with altered senses. The album supplies no escape from decay. It discovers that decay itself may contain doors.

Volcano the Bear - 2015 - Commencing 5xLP

Miasmah – MIALP032

 Commencing is an ideal title for a five-record retrospective because it refuses to behave like an ending. Volcano the Bear assembled twenty years of tapes, CD-Rs, live recordings, compilation tracks, alternate versions and unfinished pieces, then arranged them as five new albums rather than a chronological museum. The result opens a door into the workshop while the machines, jokes, rituals and half-invented instruments are still moving. Sixty-four tracks pass across more than four hours, yet the box feels less like a completed archive than evidence that Volcano the Bear were always beginning again.

The group formed in Leicester during the mid-1990s when Aaron Moore, Nick Mott, Clarence Manuelo and Daniel Padden became frustrated with ordinary musical limitations. Their solution was not to replace one fixed style with another. They created a situation in which folk song, free improvisation, post-punk, tape manipulation, theatrical performance, chamber music, noise and deliberate foolishness could occupy the same room. The playful titles and absurd voices never mean the music is empty. Humor becomes a tool for escaping inherited expectations before those expectations can determine what a violin, drum, Dictaphone, trumpet or human mouth is supposed to do.
The earliest material has the volatile charm of people realizing that private amusement can become a genuine artistic method. “Yak Folk’s Y’are” resembles a damaged sea song remembered by someone waking from anesthesia, while miniature pieces such as “Tubular Smells,” “BB” and “Fog Slicer” make seconds of sound feel like objects discovered in coat pockets. “Pretty Flower” turns repetition and tape pressure into something both comic and oppressive. These recordings preserve the instant when an idea was still surprising to its makers.
Commencing becomes more impressive because it does not hide the unevenness of that development. A conventional anthology would isolate the recognized achievements and remove the strange fragments, failed jokes and transitional experiments surrounding them. Volcano the Bear understood that those fragments explain how the achievements became possible. A forty-second interruption may contain the seed of a later performance language. A ridiculous title may release the players from dignity long enough to find a new rhythm. The archive treats wrong turns as part of the map.
The nonchronological sequencing is crucial. Early cassette pieces sit beside later recordings without being introduced as primitive ancestors. Live performances interrupt studio constructions, then a compact folk melody may emerge after several minutes of clatter. This arrangement allows the band’s methods to appear across time. The same appetite for unstable rhythm, warped song and collective surprise persists even as the playing becomes more controlled and the available instruments expand. Development is heard as accumulation rather than improvement.
Across the middle records, Volcano the Bear’s invented folk music becomes especially vivid. Titles such as “Ballet of Swedish Mountain,” “Elephant Bingo,” “Woman Who Weighs Out the Wool” and “The Middle Farm” suggest traditions from countries that exist only while the track is playing. Familiar gestures appear, including a bowed phrase, processional rhythm, rural melody or communal chant, but their origins remain scrambled. The band does not imitate an authentic village tradition. It demonstrates how quickly a few sounds can cause the mind to invent one.
That approach keeps the group separate from both conventional folk revival and sterile avant-garde technique. Their music remains handmade, bodily and socially awkward. Percussion rattles as though gathered from a kitchen or shed. Voices wheeze, mutter and suddenly become beautiful. Instruments do not always enter with professional certainty, but the uncertainty creates interaction. One player proposes a world and the others decide whether to inhabit, decorate or sabotage it.
The fourth record contains some of the set’s most fully realized transformations. “Halo Onna Volcano,” “Fat Monarch,” “Aflame,” “Night Fig,” “Baltic” and “Curly Robot” move through ritual percussion, warped chamber music, unstable song and unexpectedly tender piano without needing a single governing genre. By this stage, Volcano the Bear could change emotional climate almost instantly while remaining unmistakably themselves. Their identity was no longer a sound. It was the confidence that any sound could be absorbed if the group approached it with enough attention and nerve.
The fifth LP turns toward live material, where the visual and theatrical elements can only be inferred through voices, abrupt dynamics and audience-space acoustics. Tracks such as “Amateurs Blind,” “Crikey Biscuits,” “Did You Ever Feel Like Jesus?” and “Hairy Queen” preserve performance as social risk. The band’s concerts were temporary environments in which costume, gesture, improvisation and comic confrontation could redirect the music. Without seeing the stage, the listener hears the instability created by bodies making decisions in public.
Aaron Moore and Miasmah founder Erik K. Skodvin spent roughly two years shaping the box from dozens of hours of recordings and multiple versions surviving on cassette, MiniDisc and CD-R. Some unfinished pieces were completed during the process. That labor gives Commencing an unusual balance between preservation and creation. The sources remain marked by their original formats, but the selection and sequence turn them into a new composition. Archiving becomes another form of improvisation, performed slowly through listening and hundreds of decisions about what should sit beside what.
The physical edition makes that labor visible. Five individually sleeved black records sit inside a screen-printed burgundy box with track notes on the backs, accompanied by a fifty-page book of photographs, flyers, artwork and writing. Nick Mott’s graphic elements, Irmgard Mann’s cover image, Erik Skodvin’s design and contributions from the musicians turn the set into a portable history of a culture made by hand. The limited edition of five hundred copies resembles the small-run cassettes, painted sleeves and self-released documents from which much of the history grew.
Commencing ultimately argues that an archive need not make a difficult band easier to classify. It can preserve the difficulty more accurately. Volcano the Bear were funny without being novelty music, improvised without being careless, theatrical without abandoning sound, and prolific enough that mistakes and revelations often travelled together. The box does not separate those qualities into respectable and disposable piles. It shows how one depended upon the other.
The title therefore becomes a statement about creative life. After twenty years, five records and sixty-four tracks, Volcano the Bear are still commencing because their central achievement was not a perfected style. It was the repeated construction of conditions in which something unforeseen could begin. Anyone who encountered the early cassettes, Volucan CD-Rs or theatrical concerts may hold another fragment of this enormous story, and this is exactly the kind of archive that becomes richer when those fragments are returned.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples - 2022 - They Only Wanted Your Soul

 

Slumberland Records – SLR 266

They Only Wanted Your Soul is technically a compilation, but it feels more like a recovered chapter from the moment Glenn Donaldson’s Reds, Pinks & Purples project discovered its permanent emotional weather. The first four songs originally appeared on the 2020 I Should Have Helped You EP, a tiny Swedish pressing that vanished before the project’s audience had fully formed. Slumberland rescued those tracks from collector captivity, added six recordings from the same early period and created a miniature album containing nearly everything that would make Donaldson’s later work so affecting: bright guitars shadowed by regret, dry drum-machine rhythms, neighborhood-scale observations and a voice that sounds resigned until one notices how sharply it is still paying attention.
“I Should Have Helped You” begins with remorse stripped of romantic grandeur. The title names the ordinary failure to act decently when another person needed something. Donaldson’s songs often become devastating by refusing the exceptional. A missed opportunity, awkward encounter or private act of cowardice can remain active for years because nothing dramatic arrived to close it. Organ and chiming guitar make the song feel almost buoyant, but that brightness only clarifies the self-accusation underneath.
“Unrequited” treats rejected affection with more irritation than noble suffering. Its softly glowing surface carries a bitter awareness that heartbreak can become repetitive theater, complete with familiar poses and inherited phrases. Donaldson knows the indie-pop vocabulary of longing, yet he does not stand outside it making jokes. He remains vulnerable to the same beautiful clichés while recognizing how ridiculous they can look the next morning. Believer and critic occupy one body.
“Keep Your Secrets Close” is one of the collection’s finest examples of weather becoming psychology. The guitars initially suggest movement into clearer air, but Donaldson’s voice lowers the temperature. Rain, darkness and withheld information gather until secrecy feels less like protection than a private climate two people have agreed to inhabit. The arrangement is fuller and rougher than the most delicate material here, with fuzz giving the song enough physical resistance to prevent melancholy from floating away.
The original EP closes with the title track, whose soul-stealing figures may be lovers, institutions, scenes, employers, religions or any structure that asks for identity as the cost of belonging. Donaldson wisely leaves the accusation broad. Exploitation rarely introduces itself with horror-film music. It can arrive through admiration, opportunity or the promise that becoming useful to someone else will finally make a person visible. The guitars shimmer while the lyric quietly asks what remains after a name and inner life have been converted into a role.
The six added songs widen the record from private heartbreak into a small social world. “Is Your Mind That Free?” begins with the suggestion of forward rhythmic motion, then withholds the expected release. The hesitation perfectly matches a song examining whether another person’s claims of freedom are genuine or merely another rehearsed identity. Donaldson’s skepticism hangs in the gap between what the music appears ready to do and what it actually permits.
“Saw You at the Record Shop Today” locates an entire emotional crisis inside one ordinary encounter. Record shops are public archives where private taste becomes briefly visible, making them ideal settings for recognition, avoidance and silent comparison. Seeing someone among the bins can revive a friendship or relationship before either person has decided whether they want it revived. What someone carries toward the counter may reveal more than whatever polite sentence passes between them.
“In My Poems & Pictures” brings Donaldson’s visual and literary practices into the emotional frame. Art can preserve a person after direct contact has failed, but preservation is not the same as possession. A photograph, collage or line of writing may keep someone present while confirming their absence. The modest home-recorded sound supports that intimacy. These are not monuments built in a professional studio. They resemble objects made at a table and kept nearby because throwing them away would feel like another betrayal.
“Workers of the World” is the collection’s longest piece and its clearest movement beyond romantic disappointment. The famous political phrase enters Donaldson’s private indie-pop language without becoming a costume. Drum machine, fuzzy guitar and weary singing make solidarity sound like something considered after work, when exhaustion has replaced heroic rhetoric but the need for collective dignity remains. The track connects emotional exploitation with economic life: people asked to surrender time, personality and hope to systems that may never remember their names.
“We Won’t Come Home at Christmas Time” removes the manufactured warmth from the holiday without losing tenderness. Christmas songs usually promise return, reconciliation and temporary repair. Donaldson writes from the point where return has become impossible, undesirable or dishonest. The melody retains seasonal softness while the title refuses the expected journey home. Its sadness is the recognition that some homes survive mainly as ideas maintained by people who can no longer inhabit them.
“Sky & Earth” closes the album by expanding its scale without abandoning its modest means. After record shops, poems, employment and dysfunctional holidays, the title reaches toward the largest possible division, everything above and everything below. Yet the music remains domestic, built from close voice, drum machine and overlapping guitar light. That contrast summarizes the Reds, Pinks & Purples method: immense feeling carried by sounds that never pretend to be immense.
The history of the release adds another meaning to its themes. A four-song record pressed in only two hundred copies became expensive precisely because more people later wanted access to it. Slumberland’s mini-LP interrupts that process by returning the music to listeners and treating scarcity as a problem rather than proof of cultural value. The royal-blue vinyl remains a beautiful object, but the purpose is not to guard an exclusive early chapter. It is to let the songs travel.
They Only Wanted Your Soul preserves Donaldson before wider attention made the project easier to locate, but there is nothing embryonic about the writing. The emotional architecture is already complete: melody offers shelter, fuzz roughens the walls, humor prevents sorrow from becoming self-worship, and San Francisco appears not as a glamorous city but as a network of rooms, shops, jobs and remembered encounters. This is music about losing people, distrusting institutions and discovering that art may preserve what life cannot repair. The soul survives because the songs refuse to hand it over completely.

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.