Aggi - 2022 - Aggi Hates You

 

Jigsaw Records – PZL198

Aggi Hates You (Completely) contains an entire band’s recorded life in sixteen minutes and forty-three seconds. Ten songs, most ending before another group would have completed its first chorus, preserve the brief existence of a quartet from Bekasi, Indonesia whose music understood that indiepop does not need to choose between sweetness and impact. Aggi’s guitars scrape and flare, the bass arrives with startling size, the drums push every melody toward the nearest exit, and the voices deliver romantic disappointment with enough humor to prevent sensitivity from becoming self-pity. The record feels tiny only when measured by a clock. Emotionally, it leaves debris everywhere.
The opening “Spill My Blood” establishes the method immediately. Noise does not surround the song as atmosphere; it is one of the hooks. Beneath the guitar abrasion is a melody simple enough to survive almost any amount of damage. “Pinchbelly” then compresses the idea below one minute, proving that brevity can be abundance when every sound has a job. Aggi shares obvious DNA with Henry’s Dress, Tiger Trap and the rougher edge of 1990s American indiepop, but the band’s speed and playfulness prevent those references from becoming museum labels. These songs behave like discoveries made in real time, not careful demonstrations of correct taste.
“College Friend” was the song that first brought Aggi to Jigsaw Records’ attention through a 2014 EP issued by HeyHo! Records. It contains the central ache of the band’s world: friendship becoming attraction, affection becoming embarrassment, and ordinary social life becoming almost unbearably important. Indiepop has always understood that a hallway, telephone call or poorly timed confession can carry the dramatic weight that other music assigns to wars and mythological battles. Aggi intensifies those small experiences by making the instruments sound too large for the room, as though the feelings have overloaded the electrical system.
That mixture of modest subject matter and enormous noise continues through “Jerry Hates Me” and “Television Personalities.” The latter title naturally recalls Dan Treacy’s band, but it also captures Aggi’s habit of treating record collections as part of everyday language. References are not offered to establish superiority. They are social signals, little flags placed for another listener to recognize. The group’s humor keeps this culture of knowledge open rather than exclusive. Aggi sounds delighted by indiepop’s history, but equally willing to poke it, shorten it, mispronounce it and throw it into a forty-eight-second song.
“Punk Boy Meets Punk Girl So What” is the compilation’s miniature romantic comedy. The title dismisses its own story before the music begins, but the duet reveals genuine affection beneath the shrug. That “so what” is defensive, protecting two people from the possibility that their meeting matters. The track stretches beyond two minutes, practically an epic by Aggi’s standards, yet it never becomes heavy. Its charm comes from how little it demands: two voices, a few chords, and the recognition that shared taste can briefly make an enormous city or scene feel privately arranged for two people.
“Heather” softens the distortion and exposes the band’s melodic skeleton. Without the usual guitar storm, Aggi does not become less distinctive. The song reveals how carefully the louder recordings were built. Noise was never covering weak writing; it was exaggerating strong writing until the emotional proportions became funny and beautiful at once. “Indie Rock 101,” borrowed from split-EP partners Saturday Night Karaoke, returns the record to scene consciousness. Its title suggests both a beginner’s lesson and a joke about people who turn spontaneous pleasure into coursework. Aggi knows the syllabus, but the band plays as though someone has pulled the fire alarm halfway through class.
“The Pains of Being Stupid at Heart” may be the perfect Aggi title. It turns romantic confusion into a condition that is painful, foolish and unavoidable. The phrase gently refuses the polished intelligence with which people reconstruct failed relationships afterward. In the moment, the heart is not writing criticism. It is making obvious mistakes at high speed. The song appeared during the group’s final period, when the production had become slightly clearer and the hooks less buried, but Aggi never lost the sensation that each recording might fall apart before reaching its conclusion.
The closing “Not to Kiss / Something Must Be Done” joins two pieces into three minutes, the band’s version of progressive rock. Its second half reportedly includes a playful Stephen Pastel impression, a detail that captures Aggi’s relationship with influence. Admiration becomes performance, but performance remains a joke shared among friends rather than a claim to authenticity. The medley also makes an appropriate ending because it refuses a grand farewell. One small song passes into another, and then the complete discography simply stops. There is no mature album, reunion narrative or late-career correction waiting beyond it.
Aggi consisted of Rega on vocals and tambourine, Yanu on guitar and vocals, Mamet on bass and vocals, and Tyo on drums. Between 2013 and 2016 they issued two EPs, a single and a split with Saturday Night Karaoke through small Indonesian labels including HeyHo! and Dismantled. Rizkan Records first gathered the ten songs in 2017 under the excellent title Buy This Discography Make Me Rich!, pressing only fifty copies. Jigsaw’s 2022 edition carried the music from a highly local, short-lived network into wider international circulation without pretending that Aggi had secretly been a major band.
That movement is part of the record’s meaning. Indiepop has never existed only in the British, American or Swedish cities most frequently used to narrate its history. The same inexpensive guitars, copied recordings, handmade releases and intense friendships have produced local constellations across Indonesia and far beyond. Aggi’s songs belong fully to that international language while retaining the personality of the scene that made them. The compilation does not present Bekasi as an exotic surprise. It quietly corrects any map of indiepop that failed to include it.
Aggi Hates You (Completely) is ultimately a preservation of velocity. The band formed, recorded ten songs, disappeared, and left behind less music than many albums contain on one side. Yet nothing feels unfinished in the disappointing sense. The brevity is part of the emotional truth. Some friendships, labels, bands and periods of life matter precisely because they do not last long enough to become routine. Jigsaw’s compilation gives those sixteen minutes another future. Aggi may hate us completely, but the songs keep rushing outward with the unmistakable energy of wanting to be found.

Free/Slope - 2018 - Abracadabra

Sound Effect Records – SER 052

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

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

Svenska Psykvänner - 2019 - The Hägersten Sessions

 

Drone Rock Records – DRR 027

Svenska Psykvänner translates as “Swedish Psych Friends,” and The Hägersten Sessions sounds exactly like friendship becoming a recording before anyone has time to overthink it. The group was assembled in Stockholm in March 2019 when Domboshawa needed a live backing band for a Drone Rock Records event. Anders Broström was joined by Mikael Tuominen and Jonas Yrlid from Fanatism, Charlotta Andersson from CB3, and Mattias “Indy” Pettersson from Kungens Män. Rehearsals produced more than preparation for one concert. The musicians recognized that their loose instrumental chemistry had created another band worth preserving.
That origin explains why these four tracks feel discovered rather than manufactured. Nobody appears to be forcing the session toward a predetermined identity. Domboshawa’s drone-heavy psychedelic language provides some raw material, but the ensemble immediately changes its scale. Two guitars can blur into weather, bass can function as both anchor and current, and the two drummers heard across the sessions give the music different kinds of momentum. The album is not a supergroup showcase in which recognizable musicians wait for individual turns. Its personality comes from overlap.
“Tellus” opens with a drum roll and enters motion almost immediately. The title can mean Earth, but the track refuses to stay grounded. Bass establishes a broad, patient route while the guitars generate layers of fuzz, repetition and high drifting tone. One guitar seems to mark the path; the other keeps altering the landscape around it. The music becomes dense without losing direction. Even at its most saturated, every player appears to understand where the shared pulse is located.
The group’s connection with the wider Stockholm psychedelic network is audible here, but not as a checklist. Kungens Män’s improvised patience, Fanatism’s heavier edge, CB3’s exploratory guitar work and Domboshawa’s devotion to drone enter the room without remaining separate properties. Swedish psychedelic music has often been particularly good at making repetition feel communal rather than mechanical. A groove continues because the musicians are listening to how everyone else inhabits it, not because a machine has ordered another cycle.
“Tre Vänner,” or “Three Friends,” begins more cautiously. The musicians feel their way into the piece, leaving enough air for each gesture to suggest several directions. A lead guitar gradually becomes the brightest visible object, but it never turns the others into scenery. Bass and drums build a slow-moving enclosure around it, creating the sensation of being carried rather than pushed. The track’s nearly twelve minutes pass easily because development occurs through pressure, tone and relationship rather than obvious sectional changes.
The title is slightly funny for music performed by more than three people, but it suits the album’s informal social character. Friendship here is not sentimental decoration. It is a compositional method. Improvisation requires enough trust for one person to repeat a simple idea without fearing that simplicity will be mistaken for emptiness, and enough attention for someone else to recognize when that idea needs support rather than interruption. “Tre Vänner” sounds confident because nobody appears desperate to prove ownership of the moment.
“Landet” is the album’s longest and deepest excursion. The Swedish title can suggest the country, the land or the countryside, and the music develops with the scale of entering open terrain after leaving a more contained urban space. Its opening is patient, almost tentative, but the group gradually discovers a heavy rolling movement. The bass supplies gravity while guitar tones widen above it. What begins as a jam slowly acquires the emotional weight of a journey, even though no destination is announced.
At more than fifteen minutes, “Landet” demonstrates why duration matters. A shorter edit might preserve the strongest riff and most dramatic guitar moments, but it would remove the process through which those moments become meaningful. The listener hears the band approach, test and finally inhabit the central groove. Repetition transforms from musical information into environment. By the time the track reaches full density, the early uncertainty remains inside it as memory.
The album closes with “Svandammsparken,” named for a park in the Hägersten area. At under four minutes, it is far shorter than the other pieces and feels like a small clearing after the long movement of “Landet.” The guitars are gentler, the rhythm less urgent, and the group allows the session to end without manufacturing a final climax. The track resembles the walk home after an intense rehearsal, when the ears are still reorganizing ordinary street sounds into music.
Place names matter throughout the record. Hägersten is not used as exotic scenery but as the practical location where people met, rehearsed and accidentally formed a group. “Tellus,” “Landet” and “Svandammsparken” expand outward from planet to countryside to a neighborhood park, while the music performs the reverse movement, turning local rooms and friendships into large imagined space. Psychedelia here is not escape from place. It is what happens when attention makes one place reveal more dimensions.
The sessions were recorded and mixed in nearby Aspudden, preserving enough roughness for the performances to retain their rehearsal-room life. John McBain mastered the vinyl, giving the low end and guitar haze physical force without polishing away their uncertainty. Anders Broström supplied the artwork, Maria Häggqvist handled the graphic design, and Drone Rock Records issued the LP as DRR027 in only 250 copies: 150 on orange-and-black “Cornetto effect” vinyl and 100 on black.
That limited pressing matches the record’s accidental birth. The Hägersten Sessions was not created as the opening move in a planned campaign. It was evidence that one gathering had produced more than expected. The band did continue, eventually returning with Böjda Toner in 2022, but this first album retains the pleasure of the unrepeatable beginning, when nobody yet knows whether a rehearsal lineup or one-night collaboration has become something with a future.
The Hägersten Sessions succeeds because it never tries to make improvisation sound important by becoming solemn. The playing is serious, but the atmosphere remains generous. These musicians bring years of experience into the room, then use that experience to leave space for one another. Four tracks become forty minutes of shared navigation, with no captain standing above the deck. The record captures the instant when preparation turned into discovery and a backing band realized it had grown its own name.

Svenska Psykvänner - 2022 - Böjda Toner

 

Drone Rock Records – DRR049

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

Black Bug - 2013 - Reflecting the Light

HoZac Records – HZRCD-127

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

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

Ball - 2017 - ST

 

Horny – HOR-666

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

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

 Lumpy Records ‎– 087

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

A Taste of Ra - 2007 - Morning of My Life

Häpna – H.36

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

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.