Sewer Election - 2021 - Psychic Panorama

Discreet Music – DMCD03

 A panorama normally promises distance. The viewer stands outside a landscape and receives a wide, orderly account of what lies before them. Psychic Panorama turns that arrangement inward. Dan Johansson offers no stable scene, horizon or viewing platform, only long fields of synthesized sound whose proportions keep changing according to where attention happens to land. The panorama is psychic because its landscape is constructed between electrical signal, loudspeaker, room and nervous system. Nothing is seen, yet the music repeatedly produces the sensation that something enormous has entered view.

Sewer Election had spent much of the preceding two decades working with tape, contact microphones, field recordings, crude electronics and noise capable of making physical discomfort part of the listening experience. Psychic Panorama does not abandon that severity. It concentrates it. The source has been reduced largely to synthesizer, but reduction does not make the album clean, elegant or emotionally neutral. Its tones have rough edges, unstable pressure and the slightly threatening independence of machinery operating without explaining its task. The violence has moved inward from obvious impact toward prolonged exposure.

“1” lasts nearly twenty minutes, establishing the album’s scale before the listener has decided what kind of object is being entered. Johansson does not provide a theme that can be followed through recognizable development. Blocks of tone, pulses, sustained frequencies and changes in harmonic pressure create a space whose architecture is discovered gradually. A sound may initially appear flat, then reveal several layers once another frequency is placed beside it. What seemed like background becomes structural; what appeared dominant begins dissolving into the surrounding field. The piece advances without needing to travel in a straight line.

This is minimalism without immaculate surfaces. Repetition does not remove dirt, malfunction or emotional disturbance. It gives those things enough time to become visible. A recurring electronic figure can first resemble a technical process, then a warning signal, then a private obsession whose original cause has been forgotten. The material remains simple while the listener’s relationship to it becomes increasingly unstable. Johansson does not need to add constant information because duration keeps changing the meaning of what is already present.

The phrase “psychedelic minimalism” is especially useful here because the album reaches altered perception through restriction rather than abundance. There are no swirling guitars, radiant choruses or decorative references to the familiar history of psychedelic music. The mind is altered by being held near a small number of sounds until ordinary measurements begin weakening. A minute may feel compressed into one electrical event, while a barely shifting tone can seem to contain a much longer history. Psychedelia becomes the discovery that perception itself is unreliable once attention has been exposed to the same material for long enough.

“2” shortens the duration without reducing the pressure. The numbered title refuses to tell the listener what emotional image should be attached to the piece, allowing the sound to remain unclaimed by language. Numbering also suggests a sequence of tests, rooms or conditions rather than songs with separate personalities. One follows another because an experiment has not yet finished. The absence of descriptive titles prevents interpretation from settling too quickly and keeps the album closer to direct sensation.

Then comes “Pause,” the only named piece and the shortest by a considerable distance. A pause ordinarily interrupts meaningful activity, but placing the word in a track list turns interruption into composition. The album stops its extended development without becoming silent, creating a narrow chamber between the first and second halves. After more than half an hour of sustained synthetic concentration, two minutes acquire unusual scale. The listener becomes newly aware of waiting, of the body’s expectation that sound should resume its previous work, and of how completely the preceding pieces have changed the room.

The pause also gives the record an almost theatrical architecture. The first two compositions occupy one large psychic act; the interruption allows the scenery to change invisibly; the final two begin after the listener has crossed a threshold without knowing what was altered there. It resembles an intermission stripped of social relief. Nobody leaves the theater, the lights do not rise and conversation does not restore ordinary time. The pause remains inside the work, making suspension another form of pressure.

“3” and “4” each last approximately fifteen minutes, creating a second pair whose near-equal proportions suggest balance without producing symmetry. By this stage, the listener has been trained to hear synthetic sound less as an object and more as a condition. Small changes can reorganize the apparent depth of the stereo field. A higher tone may turn a low frequency from background hum into physical weight; a pulse can make apparently static material reveal that it has contained rhythm all along. The home stereo is not merely reproducing a composition. It is generating a temporary acoustic structure inside the listener’s own domestic space.

That home setting matters. Noise music has often been associated with performance volume, confrontation and the public body standing before amplification. Psychic Panorama redirects the confrontation toward private listening. The album enters an apartment, bedroom or living room and begins changing the emotional function of familiar walls. Speakers normally deliver songs, voices and entertainment into the home. Here they emit an impersonal environment that appears capable of continuing whether the listener understands it or not. Domestic safety is not destroyed, but it becomes acoustically uncertain.

Johansson’s Studio Malign is therefore more than a production location. The name identifies a private laboratory where unfriendly material is given time to develop. “Malign” suggests harmful intent, yet the music’s threat never resolves into an attack that can be identified and survived. It remains atmospheric. The synthesizer does not scream continuously or overwhelm through maximum density. It maintains a colder pressure, allowing unease to arise from the suspicion that the sounds possess rules unavailable to the person hearing them.

This makes Psychic Panorama surprisingly close to Johansson’s work within more collective and fragile projects such as Enhet För Fri Musik. The surfaces are radically different, but both depend upon accumulated fragments, unstable memory and the emotional consequences of things that refuse complete explanation. In a collective tape collage, a voice or folk melody may appear briefly and disappear into hiss. Here human presence has nearly vanished, yet the synthesizer tones behave like memories stripped of their original events. Something remains, but the person, room or experience that produced its emotional charge can no longer be recovered.

The four numbered pieces also resist the usual relationship between composition and personality. There is no vocalist, instrumental virtuosity or narrative title through which Johansson can place himself visibly at the center. His decisions are everywhere, but the composer remains hidden behind the conditions he has created. Sewer Election becomes less a performer presenting expression than an operator opening circuits and allowing their consequences to occupy time. The apparent impersonality makes the album more intimate because the listener has fewer external characters behind whom to hide.

Half of the music first circulated through an edition of only twenty-five personalized cassette copies. That original form suits the album’s private scale. A personalized tape is not an anonymous product entering mass distribution; it acknowledges the specific person receiving it. The later compact disc widened the panorama while preserving its domestic destination. Three hundred copies could travel farther, yet the work still required individual listeners to activate it inside their own rooms. Its community was distributed rather than gathered, each person entering the same frequencies through different speakers, walls and volumes.

Cassette and compact disc also offer different versions of electronic time. Tape moves physically, accumulating hiss, instability and mechanical wear while sound passes from one reel to another. A compact disc appears cleaner and less vulnerable, its information accessed by laser without visible contact. Psychic Panorama belongs comfortably to both because its synthesizer tones already hover between material roughness and abstract signal. The sound can appear purely electronic while retaining the grain and cold damage associated with Sewer Election’s tape practice.

The later appearance of Psychic Panorama II confirms that this was not simply an isolated stylistic experiment. Johansson had discovered a territory capable of further exploration, but the existence of a sequel does not make the first album feel preliminary. Psychic Panorama has the blunt authority of an initial map drawn before the landscape has acquired names. Its tracks are numbers because there is no settled vocabulary yet, only four large regions, one pause and the knowledge that the terrain continues beyond the disc.

The title finally becomes less descriptive than operational. Psychic Panorama names what the record causes rather than what it contains. The synthesizers supply frequencies, but the panorama forms inside the person hearing them. Memory, anxiety, architecture, bodily sensation and imagined distance fill the spaces the composition leaves undefined. Another listener will not enter the same landscape because another nervous system cannot organize the pressure identically.

This is why the album’s coldness never becomes empty. Beneath the severe tones is an unusual trust in the listener’s capacity to generate meaning without being instructed toward it. Johansson does not provide images or emotional explanations. He constructs an electrical horizon and leaves us alone before it. The longer we look with our ears, the less certain we become whether the panorama is spreading outward from the speakers or has always existed inside the room, waiting for the correct frequencies to make it visible.

Present Electric - 2023 - ST

 

Paisley Shirt Records – PSR-62

In the summer of 2011, my partner and I were walking past a garage sale on her street. We saw this striking painting: a portrait of a man in a snow covered landscape. The houses look like the Swedish farmhouses I grew up seeing, flowers pinned to his coat, his head is shaped and wrinkled in layers like an onion. Simple lines, primary colors, and those glaring eyes.

The songs on Present Electric are scratchy, somewhat primitive, low fidelity recordings. They range from cassette 4-track recordings, voice memos, field recordings, and percussion-first songwriting. The “onion-head man” painting seems to pair well with the album. Both are naive in their own ways.

credits

released July 7, 2023

All music: K Linn

Recorded 2021-2022

Mastered by Mikey Young in 2022

Re-edited by K Linn in 2023

"Onion Head Man" painting purchased from garage sale on Laurent St, Santa Cruz in 2011. Possible artist name "RiMajer"

Anna Von Hausswolff - 2018 - Dead Magic

City Slang – none

 Dead Magic does not describe a world from which magic has vanished. It describes the more frightening condition in which the world may remain full of mystery, love and creative energy while a person has temporarily lost the ability to perceive any of it. Anna von Hausswolff wrote these five pieces after prolonged touring left her exhausted, passive and estranged from her own imagination. That origin gives the album’s grandeur an unusually human center. Pipe organ, strings, guitars and enormous drums may fill a marble dome, but the real drama occurs inside one body attempting to make contact with itself again. The music is not gothic architecture erected around despair. It is the labor of reopening a sealed interior room.

The twenty-century pipe organ at Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken becomes the ideal instrument for that work because an organ already joins private action to forces larger than one person. Fingers and feet touch the controls, air is sent through pipes placed throughout a building, and the room returns the sound after marble, height and distance have changed it. Von Hausswolff is not merely playing notes into the church. She is activating an entire structure and then receiving its response. The instrument, architecture and performer form a circuit in which it becomes difficult to decide where intention ends and environment begins.

“The Truth, the Glow, the Fall” enters that circuit gradually. Its title presents three conditions that might be expected to form a clear sequence, yet the music allows them to coexist. Truth can illuminate, but illumination can expose the distance one is capable of falling. Low organ, strings, percussion and voice gather without immediately announcing which force will lead. The twelve-minute duration lets every element acquire emotional weight before the next transformation occurs. Von Hausswolff’s voice does not stand safely above the arrangement as narrator. It moves through it, sometimes intimate, sometimes enlarged by the surrounding resonance until the human throat appears to have borrowed the scale of the building.

The album’s physicality begins there. Organ pedals produce low frequencies that enter the body before the ear has fully interpreted them, while strings and upper-register pipes create brightness sharp enough to feel nearly tactile. Von Hausswolff wanted this record to be more connected to flesh and bone than the fantasy and natural landscapes surrounding The Miraculous, and the difference is immediate. Dead Magic may invoke invisible powers, but its spiritual questions remain tied to breathing, exhaustion, muscle, screaming and the effort required to remain upright. Transcendence is not an escape from the body. It is something the body must attempt while carrying all its damage.

“The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra” compresses that struggle into six violent minutes. Drums advance with ceremonial force, guitars grind against the organ, and the vocal moves from melody toward a cry that seems to be tearing the singer out of the song carrying her. Electra is already embedded within von Hausswolff’s own full name, giving the title the feeling of a partial self-disappearance rather than a distant mythological reference. The song asks what remains when movement, love and identity no longer feel sufficient to save the person inhabiting them. Yet the performance itself contradicts total disappearance. Every shriek is proof that a body still exists and is producing resistance.

That resistance expands into “Ugly and Vengeful,” the album’s sixteen-minute central chamber. It begins as though some old ritual has been discovered still operating beneath the building: low organ, drifting voices, cymbal shimmer and repeated figures whose purpose remains hidden. The music does not hurry to explain itself. It accumulates enough pressure that later changes feel like alterations in gravity rather than ordinary transitions. When drums and guitars finally become fully physical, the earlier stillness is not replaced. It remains underneath them, making the force above feel summoned rather than merely performed.

The title refuses the familiar demand that suffering become beautiful before anyone will consider it meaningful. Ugliness is permitted to retain anger, age, resentment and the desire to answer whatever produced it. Von Hausswolff’s voice moves through several states, from incantation and restraint toward something enormous and nearly ungovernable. The band never treats that escalation as a vocalist losing control while the instruments remain stable behind her. Organ, synthesizer, guitar, bass and drums are transformed alongside the voice. Vengeance becomes collective weather.

This is where Randall Dunn’s production is most important. His experience with amplified music of extreme density could have encouraged the album toward one continuous wall, but Dead Magic depends upon preserving depth inside its mass. The guitars do not simply make the organ heavier, and the organ does not provide sacred decoration behind a rock band. Each element changes the apparent age and function of the others. Distorted guitar can sound like masonry splitting under pressure; organ overtones can resemble electrical feedback; strings can appear to continue the voice after breath has run out. The recording is huge because its layers remain capable of moving independently within the same atmosphere.

“The Marble Eye” withdraws the voice and allows the building to become a kind of witness. Von Hausswolff originally imagined a gentler piece, but the organ’s harsh upper register and the unusual overtones created by the domed marble room changed its character. The title transforms architecture into an organ of perception. Marble is cold, apparently lifeless and unable to blink, yet this eye seems to see precisely because it does not participate in ordinary human time. Generations enter the church, perform ceremonies, grieve, celebrate and disappear while the stone continues receiving their vibrations.

The piece demonstrates that the organ’s most powerful quality is not sheer size. It is the way one note can release a population of secondary tones that gather high above the original pitch. Those overtones make the instrument appear to exceed its own mechanism. A key is pressed in one location, but the result seems to descend from the dome, emerge from the walls and shine from surfaces nowhere near the performer’s hands. The song remains present beneath those textures, yet it is partly overtaken by the room’s interpretation of it. Human composition enters architecture and returns altered.

“Källans återuppståndelse” closes the album with the resurrection of the source, or the spring. After the disappearance, ugliness, vengeance and unblinking marble, the final title introduces renewal without pretending that everything preceding it was only a temporary nightmare. The source does not return untouched. Organ, voice and strings carry evidence of the journey, but their gentler movement opens space where the earlier pressure had nearly eliminated it. Resurrection here is not a spectacular victory over death. It is the quieter return of responsiveness: the ability to hear beauty again, to recognize another person, or to notice that imagination continued circulating during the period when it felt inaccessible.

The Swedish title matters because a source can be both an origin and a body of water rising from hidden ground. A spring may disappear below the surface while continuing to move through rock and soil. When it emerges elsewhere, the water is not newly created; it has completed a passage that remained invisible. Von Hausswolff’s description of making Dead Magic follows the same shape. Creativity seemed dead because she could not feel it, yet she continued writing. The songs became the underground route through which imagination eventually reached the surface again.

This makes the album’s five-song structure feel less like a collection than one broken rite. Von Hausswolff initially imagined creating a single long composition, but the emotional material arrived in fragments. Those fractures became necessary. Truth, disappearance, vengeance, perception and resurrection could not be forced into one uninterrupted argument. Each required its own chamber, while the organ and recurring atmosphere kept the chambers connected beneath the visible floor.

Walter Ljungquist’s words about legends arising within silence and secrecy provide another entrance. Modern life often treats the unknown as a temporary technical failure, something to be searched, explained or filled with continuous information. Dead Magic protects areas that cannot be solved that way. Its lyrics remain suggestive, its long developments avoid simple narrative, and its most important transformations occur without a cleanly marked instant of arrival. Mystery is not a hole in the record’s meaning. It is the space in which the listener’s own imagination becomes active.

The Marble Church supplied a grand environment, but the album never mistakes grandeur for certainty. Churches, legends and organs may carry the appearance of authority, yet von Hausswolff uses them to express doubt, fury and psychic disintegration as readily as devotion. Sacred architecture becomes a place where disbelief can resonate at full volume. A voice may address the unseen without knowing whether it expects an answer, while the organ continues sending air through pipes as though faith and doubt were simply different stops available within the same vast instrument.

The band keeps that vastness human. Ulrik Ording’s drums turn emotional change into bodily movement; David Sabel’s bass gives the organ another form of ground; Karl Vento and Joel Fabiansson make guitars function as pressure, abrasion and expanding horizon; Filip Leyman’s synthesizers introduce frequencies that blur the border between ancient church mechanism and modern electronics. The strings supply neither sweetness nor prestige. They behave as another system of tension, wood and vibration entering the living architecture. Dead Magic is credited to one artist, but its scale depends upon many bodies learning how to occupy the same dangerous space.

Its darkness is therefore not a costume, and its beauty is not an attempt to redeem darkness after the fact. Both are products of the same imaginative faculty. The mind capable of constructing legends, love and spiritual possibility can also construct hopelessness so convincing that every magical quality in the world appears dead. Von Hausswolff does not defeat that destructive imagination by silencing it. She gives it organ pipes, amplifiers, strings and forty-seven minutes in which to reveal the full size of what it has built.

By the end, the album has not proven that magic exists as an external supernatural fact. It has demonstrated something equally powerful: the ability to perceive possibility can die temporarily and return through creative action. Music becomes both evidence and method. The source rises, not because the darkness was imaginary, but because the act of giving darkness a form has created a path through it. Dead Magic begins inside emotional numbness and ends with the world resonating again.

Och - 2022 - Po Om Po

Rocket Recordings – LAUNCH250

 Pö om pö means “little by little,” which proves to be more than an attractive title for OCH’s third album. It describes the actual behavior of the music. These pieces do not announce themselves with riffs that demand immediate recognition or melodies arranged into clean destinations. They collect. A drum pattern begins turning, a bass figure establishes a patch of ground, an organ tone appears at the edge of hearing, and guitar or electronics gradually alter the atmosphere around them. OCH allow repetition to perform its oldest magic: not simply making the same thing happen again, but changing the listener until the same thing no longer feels the same. By the time a track has reached full strength, it can be difficult to remember precisely when its harmless little pulse became an environment.

The Linköping trio of Fredric Ilmarson, Martin Daun and Lars Hoffsten performed, recorded and mixed the album themselves, and that internal control can be heard in the strange balance between looseness and precision. The performances retain the breathing, slightly dangerous character of a jam, but the record never feels like somebody left a tape running and later declared the results finished. Sounds have been allowed to accumulate without being cleaned into obedience. Mikey Young’s mastering preserves that cloudy density while keeping the rhythm section physically present, particularly Hoffsten’s drumming, which repeatedly gives the listener something solid to hold while the remainder of the music changes shape. The drums are not merely keeping time beneath a psychedelic surface. They are the apparatus carrying the entire experiment forward.

“Bolid” begins with that principle already in motion. Its recurring beat seems capable of continuing indefinitely, while drones, fuzz and unstable electronic colors gather around it like weather around a transmitter. The title suggests a bolide, a brilliant body entering the atmosphere, and the track has a related sense of something glowing becoming more dangerous as it approaches. “Vadstena” follows with a more earthbound but no less peculiar construction. OCH’s geographic titles never function like neat postcards. Places become psychic coordinates, locations remembered through fogged glass after waking. Bass and percussion imply a route, but every surrounding texture seems determined to obscure the road signs.

“Syzygy,” named for an alignment of celestial bodies, stretches the process close to seven minutes and demonstrates how naturally OCH can move between cosmic music and something older, rougher and more ceremonial. The organ hangs in the air while the rhythm proceeds underneath it, producing the peculiar sensation that the ground is moving while the sky remains fixed. There are recognizable traces of German kosmische music here, yet OCH avoid the polished sensation of musicians reenacting a beloved record collection. Their repetition is too crooked for that. Small clashes, distortions and uncertain edges remain intact, giving the music the character of a machine assembled from wood, wire, devotional objects and obsolete electronics rather than a perfectly calibrated synthesizer laboratory.

At the album’s center, “Silverstjärnan” opens one of its clearest windows. The title means “silver star,” and its recurring keyboard figure casts a pale melodic light through the surrounding wah-wah, drone and percussion. It is among the record’s most immediately inviting passages, though OCH never allow its beauty to settle into decoration. The melody is repeated until it begins to feel less like a tune than a signal. “Isfält,” or “ice field,” then brings together elements that should resist one another: pastoral keyboard colors, raw space-rock pressure and a rhythm that feels both ancient and electrically amplified. This combination is central to OCH. Their music can suggest Swedish landscape without turning landscape into peaceful scenery. Forest, ice, water and distance remain active substances, capable of concealing as much as they reveal.

“Bråviken” is named for the bay extending inland from the Baltic near Norrköping, but the music gives the location a much less reassuring identity. Competing pulses and layers appear to crowd the available space, creating the sensation of looking across calm water while something enormous moves underneath it. The album’s psychedelic effect rarely depends upon extravagant soloing. It comes from unresolved relationships between sounds. A rhythm may suggest stability while the organ destabilizes it; a guitar may appear to pull upward while the bass draws everything back into the soil. OCH do not separate beauty from unease because, throughout Pö om pö, each seems to be the condition that makes the other visible.

“Impetus” is appropriately named. Its percussion supplies a renewed physical push, clearing a path through the album’s accumulated vapor without breaking the trance. It leads into “Ochra,” where the record gathers its remaining energy into a finale that begins almost gently before becoming increasingly heated and abrasive. Guitar and electronics flare against the rhythm, and the patient method promised by the title finally reveals its destination: not a grand resolution, but a state of saturation. OCH have added sound little by little until the listener is standing inside the total result. When the album ends, the silence feels newly manufactured.

Rocket Recordings’ comparisons to Cluster, Harald Grosskopf, Arbete Och Fritid, Anna Själv Tredje, Sun Araw and Magic Lantern are useful coordinates, but Pö om pö is not reducible to any of them. What OCH share with those artists is less a particular sound than permission: permission for repetition to become composition, for recording texture to remain visible, and for psychedelic music to be exploratory rather than nostalgic. OCH’s strongest quality may be their refusal to explain away the mystery. Even the musicians’ individual roles begin to blur inside the recording, with bass, guitar, synthesizer, electronics and percussion functioning as parts of one slowly mutating organism.

Issued as Rocket’s LAUNCH250 in a limited violet-vinyl edition, mastered by Mikey Young and wrapped in John O’Carroll’s artwork, Pö om pö is an especially complete object, but its deeper attraction remains the gradual process preserved inside it. The record does not seize consciousness by force. It enters through repetition, occupies a small area, and quietly expands from there. Little by little, the room changes dimensions. Anyone with knowledge of OCH’s Linköping orbit, the locations hidden among these titles, or differences heard between the vinyl and digital versions is warmly invited to add another coordinate to the map.

Skogen - 2014 - Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long

Another Timbre – at71

“Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long” is not merely an imposing title placed over quiet music. It is a surviving line from John Dowland’s 1597 song “If My Complaints Could Passions Move,” whose lament supplies Magnus Granberg with the hidden bones of this fifty-seven-minute composition. Rhythmic and harmonic fragments from Dowland are taken apart so thoroughly that the original song can no longer be recognized, yet some of its emotional gravity remains embedded in the new structure. The result is not an arrangement, variation or historical tribute. It is closer to an old building whose stones have been scattered through a forest and gradually incorporated into the roots, soil and undergrowth. The architecture has vanished, but its material continues living in another form.
Skogen means “the forest” in Swedish, and the name suits an ensemble whose music is built less around individual statements than around coexistence. Sounds appear at different distances and heights, sometimes touching and sometimes remaining unaware of one another. Magnus Granberg’s piano and clarinet, Angharad Davies and Anna Lindal’s violins, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello, Ko Ishikawa’s shō, John Eriksson’s vibraphone and marimba, Erik Carlsson’s percussion, Henrik Olsson’s bowls and glasses, Petter Wästberg’s contact microphones and objects, and Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixing board form an unusual acoustic-electronic ecology. No instrument becomes the narrator. The players seem to enter the music as inhabitants rather than performers standing in front of it.
Granberg’s method offers the musicians composed materials while allowing them considerable freedom in deciding when, how and whether to use them. This solves a problem that has troubled many musicians moving between composition and improvisation: how to preserve harmonic identity without dictating every event, and how to permit genuine unpredictability without allowing the music to lose its center. Here the score behaves less like a railway timetable than a collection of possible paths through shared terrain. The ensemble can wander, hesitate, retrace a route or remain motionless, yet the buried Dowland material quietly keeps everyone within the same climate.
The opening minutes establish this balance almost invisibly. Single piano tones, bowed strings, struck metal and faint electronic currents are separated by enough air that each sound seems to possess its own temperature. Silence is not treated as an empty interval waiting to be filled. It becomes the material through which every vibration must travel. A vibraphone tone can glow for several seconds after the mallet has disappeared; a violin line can narrow into a thread; the no-input mixing board can produce an electrical presence that feels strangely organic. Listening closely reveals constant activity, but nothing behaves as though it needs to prove that activity is occurring.
Ko Ishikawa’s shō is especially important to the album’s atmosphere. The Japanese mouth organ traditionally produces sustained clusters that can seem to suspend time, and its breath-fed harmonies provide a quiet bridge between the strings, percussion and electronics. The instrument does not arrive carrying an obvious quotation from gagaku or turn the piece into an East-West cultural demonstration. Its sound is absorbed into the ensemble’s shared air. Bowls, glasses, crotales and vibraphone similarly blur the distinction between pitch and resonance, while contact microphones enlarge tiny physical actions until rubbing, touching and vibration become compositional events.
Although the title promises despair, the music does not act out despair as collapse, violence or theatrical darkness. Granberg has described melancholy as sadness transformed into lightness, reaching a state of equilibrium through gravity and moderation. That distinction is central here. The composition does not deny sorrow, but it removes sorrow from the machinery of crisis. It allows despair to become observable, spacious and almost weightless, no longer governing every movement. The title’s past tense matters: despair had governed too long. The music occupies the fragile condition that follows, when nothing has been repaired completely but perception has begun opening again.
Small melodic shapes occasionally emerge from the long field, carrying a distant memory of song without resolving into anything singable. These fragments may be only a handful of notes, but because the surrounding music is so patient they acquire tremendous emotional force. A piano interval can sound like a question remembered from childhood. A violin’s restrained rise can briefly suggest human speech. Electronics form thin clouds around acoustic tones, then withdraw before their presence becomes comfortable. The musicians continually create the possibility of recognition without delivering the reassurance of a familiar theme.
Recorded at Atlantis in Stockholm in November 2012, the performance has the concentration of musicians listening not only to one another but also to the room receiving them. Atlantis had existed in earlier forms as Metronome Studio, a historically important recording space, yet nothing here attempts to exploit studio grandeur. The recording instead makes scale ambiguous. A tiny metallic click may feel inches from the ear while a sustained string tone opens a much larger interior distance. Domestic playback becomes part of the work: heating systems, passing traffic, footsteps and sounds from outside can slip into its wide spaces without necessarily feeling like interruptions. The piece does not surrender to its environment, but it leaves its doors unlocked.
This openness also explains why repeated listening can produce radically different experiences. Attention may follow the prepared or isolated piano tones during one encounter, then migrate toward the low strings, shō, resonant percussion or nearly subliminal electronic activity during another. There is no central melody forcing the ear down a prescribed route. The album changes according to where the listener stands inside it. At low volume it becomes a subtle alteration of the room; played more attentively, it reveals a dense network of choices, responses and withheld gestures.
The work’s great accomplishment is that its freedom never sounds casual. Every contribution carries the possibility of changing the balance of the entire ensemble, so restraint becomes a form of responsibility. The musicians do not merely leave space because spaciousness is aesthetically fashionable. They appear to understand that each sound must justify its effect upon everything already sounding and everything that might follow. This creates an unusual moral character within the performance: patience without passivity, individuality without domination, and order without command.
“Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long” ultimately behaves like an act of transformation performed in real time. A four-hundred-year-old lament is dismantled, distributed among ten musicians and allowed to become something Dowland could never have imagined, while the emotional truth of his song remains strangely intact. Sorrow survives, but it is no longer trapped inside a single voice pleading for release. It has been opened into a communal field where acoustic instruments, household objects, electricity, breath and silence can carry portions of its weight. The despair has not vanished. It has simply stopped governing alone.

 

Organ of Corti - 2022 - Incus ∕ Malleus

 

Dead Mind Records – DMR50

Organ of Corti is one of those group names that becomes more revealing as soon as its literal meaning is understood. The organ of Corti is the structure inside the cochlea where mechanical vibration is converted into the electrical signals the brain recognizes as sound. The incus and malleus are two of the tiny middle-ear bones responsible for carrying those vibrations inward. By naming the project and both pieces after this hidden machinery, Joachim Nordwall, Mattias Gustafsson and Dan Johansson place the listener inside the act of hearing itself. This is not music describing the ear from a safe scientific distance. It feels more like the ear has been enlarged into an industrial chamber and we have been placed among its moving parts.
That concept would be little more than anatomical decoration if the sound did not fulfill it so completely. Gustafsson and Johansson construct the material from deteriorating tape loops, while Nordwall introduces analogue synthesizer and shapes the mixture into something spacious enough for each damaged component to remain audible. The three musicians already carried deep individual histories into the project: Gustafsson through Altar of Flies, Johansson through Sewer Election and Enhet för Fri Musik, and Nordwall through iDEAL Recordings, The Skull Defekts and decades of Swedish electronic and industrial activity. Organ of Corti does not flatten those identities into a polite collaboration. It places their methods in physical contact and listens to the friction.
“Incus” begins with a revolving liquid pulse that might have originated in water, tape drag, breath, machinery or some private combination of all four. Its source matters less than the way it functions. The loop becomes the record’s first ossicle, receiving pressure and passing it onward while metallic interruptions, clipped electrical gestures and fragments of unstable texture collect around it. The rhythm is repetitive without becoming dependable. Each return arrives carrying slightly different damage, as though the tape has aged during the few seconds required to complete its circuit. This is repetition as erosion rather than reassurance.
The sounds surrounding that central motion are remarkably active, but the piece never becomes a solid wall. Sharp electronic particles flash and disappear. Abraded surfaces rub against one another without entirely merging. A faint atmosphere seems to hover behind the more immediate events, giving the impression that the audible machinery occupies only one room inside a much larger facility. Nordwall’s synthesizer does not supply a conventional melodic lead or a comfortable ambient cushion. It creates pressure and distance, turning Gustafsson and Johansson’s collapsing loops into objects suspended within an electrically charged space.
This sense of spatial arrangement separates Organ of Corti from noise made solely through accumulation. Every sound is given enough room to expose its grain. The trio understands that a damaged loop becomes more unsettling when the listener can hear its boundaries, its return point and the small failure repeated with every rotation. Instead of concealing the mechanism, they make the mechanism the subject. “Incus” can therefore feel strangely intimate. We are not being struck by an anonymous mass of volume. We are listening closely to a system attempting to transmit information while its components corrode.
“Malleus” begins in a more restless condition. The title means hammer, and the music behaves accordingly, though not through a simple pounding beat. Small impacts, rattling objects and anxious electronic movements create an irregular industrial metabolism. Something sputters into operation, loses coordination and continues anyway. Synthesizer tones hang over the activity with the unease of a warning system whose message cannot be translated. What first resembles a collection of separate nervous gestures gradually develops into a tense communal movement, with each musician pushing against the others without overcrowding the available space.
There is an important distinction between this and three soloists competing to produce the most extreme event. Organ of Corti works through collective listening. One musician introduces a disturbance, another leaves it exposed, and the third changes the atmosphere around it. The music becomes intense because the participants are attentive, not because they are fighting for dominance. Even as “Malleus” grows more animated, its rough elements remain legible: the loop turning beneath the surface, the synthesizer widening or narrowing the room, the brief percussive incidents striking the structure and testing its stability.
The reversed anatomical order is intriguing. In ordinary hearing, vibration reaches the malleus before passing through the incus and onward toward the inner ear. Here “Incus” precedes “Malleus,” so the record appears to travel backward from transmission toward impact. Whether intended as a precise anatomical joke or simply as the most effective musical sequence, the order changes the experience of the two sides. “Incus” establishes circulation and interior space; “Malleus” returns to the strike that might have initiated it. Played together, they form a closed neurological loop in which the perceived sound travels backward toward its own cause.
The seven-inch format is especially effective for this material. Organ of Corti does not need forty minutes to establish a world and then furnish every room. These two pieces operate like concentrated injections, each long enough for repetition to alter consciousness but short enough to preserve its physical urgency. The changing sides of the record becomes part of the composition: one mechanism stops, the listener manually intervenes, and another mechanism begins. Even transferred into digital form, something of that original design survives in the sharp division between the two tracks and their complementary movements.
There is also a dry humor hidden within the project’s clinical terminology. Experimental music is often discussed as though hearing were an abstract intellectual activity occurring somewhere above the body. Organ of Corti insists upon the opposite. Listening depends upon fluid, bone, hair cells, membranes, pressure and electrical impulses. The most refined composition still enters through wet biological machinery. By constructing music from unstable tape, corroded repetition and unruly voltage, the trio makes that machinery perceptible again. These sounds do not glide invisibly into consciousness. They scrape, rattle and crawl through the passage.
Incus / Malleus was Organ of Corti’s first vinyl release, appearing shortly after the debut CD Auris and extending its investigation of hearing into an even more compact physical object. The trio would continue naming works after anatomy, illness and altered bodily states, but this single already contains the essential method: tape loops that retain dirt and instability, synthesizer used as architecture rather than decoration, and composition understood as the careful placement of forces. Nothing is polished merely to make it easier to receive. The resistance is part of the transmission.
The result is less a pair of noise tracks than a miniature model of perception under stress. Vibrations enter, encounter damaged mechanisms, change form and somehow emerge as meaning. That may also describe the deeper pleasure of recorded sound itself. Every record passes through microphones, tape, circuitry, mastering, vinyl, stylus, amplification, speakers, air and finally the private construction of the listener’s ear. Organ of Corti turns that normally invisible chain into the music. Incus / Malleus does not ask us merely to hear two compositions. It asks us to notice the miraculous, unreliable apparatus doing the hearing.

Och - 2020 - II

 

Rocket Recordings – LAUNCH180

OCH is the Swedish word for “and,” a name so ordinary that it becomes strangely suggestive when attached to music this elusive. “And” is not an object or destination. It is the connective tissue between things, the little hinge that allows one condition to open into another. II behaves in exactly that fashion. Its eight pieces rarely settle into fixed identities before discovering another passage, rhythm, temperature or imagined location. One track becomes the corridor leading into the next, and the album gradually feels less like a collection of separate compositions than a transportation system built between incompatible worlds.
This was OCH’s first album for Rocket Recordings, arriving six years after the self-released ETT cassette, and the long interval seems appropriate for a group that initially revealed almost nothing about itself. II emerged as an artifact before OCH became a more legible band, carrying only the knowledge that the anonymous Swedish trio had connections to Flowers Must Die and belonged somewhere within Linköping’s unusually fertile psychedelic underground. That deliberate lack of biography helps the music. Without personalities standing in front of it, the record appears to operate autonomously, a machine discovered already running in an unattended room.
“Jag är här, jag är här,” meaning “I am here, I am here,” begins with the sound of a train and the German transit warning “Zurückbleiben bitte,” immediately placing the listener inside a journey that has already begun. The title insists upon presence while the music makes stable presence nearly impossible. Feedback gathers, the rhythm locks into forward motion, and a dark repeated figure supplies the sensation of travelling through illuminated stations without leaving the carriage. The motorik pulse is recognizable, but OCH do not treat it as a historical costume borrowed from seventies Germany. They understand its psychological function: repetition can make movement feel stationary and stillness feel impossibly fast. The train travels forward while the mind circles in place.
“Baum Baur” changes the scenery without stopping the trip. Tabla- and sitar-like colors enter the rhythmic field, but the piece does not announce a decorative excursion into vaguely defined Eastern mysticism. These sounds are used as additional surfaces within OCH’s shifting construction, another set of materials passing through the album’s circuitry. Echo around the drums creates a humid, enclosed atmosphere, while the guitar eventually pulls the music back toward something earthier and less ceremonial. The track feels assembled from fragments collected in different countries and decades, yet the seams remain visible. OCH’s psychedelic language depends upon those seams. The music is most alive when its components do not entirely agree about where they belong.
“Åkkså” drifts further from recognizable ground. Repeating electronic tones, sustained textures and gradually intensifying noise create a sense of isolation that is not empty so much as overextended. Space expands beyond a comfortable human scale, leaving the rhythm and recurring figures to act as navigational markers. OCH are especially good at allowing a repeated sound to change meaning without significantly changing shape. What first appears calm can become ominous simply because it has continued longer than expected. A modest pulse becomes an alarm; an atmospheric tone acquires weight; an apparently open landscape starts to resemble an enclosure.
The low frequencies of “Den såmm bor i Tarim” bring another transformation. Bass and fuzz thicken the air, replacing the abstraction of “Åkkså” with a slower physical threat. The title appears to point toward the distant Tarim region, yet the music refuses the clarity of geographic illustration. It sounds less like arrival in a known place than a transmission received from one. Reverberation makes every gesture feel partially concealed, as though the source remains somewhere behind the sound. II repeatedly uses place names and cultural references this way. They are not explanations. They are coordinates entered into faulty equipment, producing destinations that may never have existed.
“Färgen ur rymden,” literally suggesting a color arriving from space, is the album’s shortest piece and one of its most necessary. After the density of the preceding tracks, it opens a pale clearing where drones and electronic residue can hover without being driven forward. The title carries an inevitable echo of cosmic horror, but OCH’s treatment is subtler than a soundtrack for an approaching monster. The disturbance is color itself, something perceived but difficult to name, entering ordinary space and quietly altering it. The track changes the listener’s scale of attention. Instead of waiting for an event, we begin examining the atmosphere for evidence that an event has already occurred.
That suspended condition flows directly into “Pelennor’s fält,” whose title relocates Tolkien’s Pelennor Fields into Swedish grammar. The literary reference might suggest heroic spectacle, but OCH approach the field after mythology has loosened from its story. A quasi-folk opening establishes a distant pastoral mood before drums begin carrying the piece with renewed force. Organ and guitar rise around the rhythm until the track feels both celebratory and damp, a procession crossing land that remembers violence beneath its greenery. The composition joins two impulses that often remain separated in psychedelic music: the pastoral desire to return to something ancient and the electronic desire to leave the human world altogether.
“Nu:64” pulls the album toward another kind of imagined future. The title resembles an obsolete model number or the surviving label on a forgotten machine, and the music answers with one of the record’s most compact unions of propulsion and electronic strangeness. A firm groove moves beneath synthesizer tones that seem to blink, scan and transmit. OCH’s technology never sounds clean or newly manufactured. It has dust in its switches and unstable current passing through its wiring. Even when the group approaches science-fiction music, the future appears to have been constructed from secondhand equipment found in a rural storage building. That mixture of technological imagination and handmade imperfection gives II much of its personality.
Then comes “Pandemi på Händelö,” a title that became unnervingly well timed. Händelö is an island and industrial district outside Norrköping, known for its interdependent system of energy production, manufacturing and recycled industrial resources. OCH transform this specific local environment into the location of an unnamed outbreak. The album was released on February 28, 2020, less than two weeks before the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. There is no need to turn the coincidence into prophecy. Its accidental precision is already strange enough. A record concerned with transit systems, interconnection, invisible transmissions and unstable environments ended with a pandemic at a local industrial network just as the actual world was preparing to close its doors.
Musically, “Pandemi på Händelö” refuses to become a solemn prediction. It is animated, urgent and oddly melancholy, driven by rhythms that seem increasingly unable to contain all the activity around them. Earlier tracks moved through uncertainty with a degree of patience; here the system begins showing stress. Sounds overlap, momentum accelerates, and the careful travelogue threatens to scatter into fragments. Yet the piece never collapses into indiscriminate noise. The trio keeps enough structure intact to make the instability perceptible. Disorder requires a surviving measure of order, just as a machine must continue operating long enough for us to hear it malfunction.
The album’s physical presentation strengthened its identity as a mysterious discovered object. Rocket issued it as LAUNCH180 in an edition of 350 fluorescent-yellow and black-splattered records, with artwork credited to label co-founder Chris Reeder and mastering by James Plotkin. Plotkin’s long experience with heavy, experimental and electronically saturated music makes particular sense here. II requires clarity without domestication. Its bass and drums need physical force, but the drones, field recordings and small electronic disturbances must remain separate enough to preserve the sensation of several realities occupying the same room.
Compared with Pö om pö, the OCH album that followed in 2022, II feels more restless and externally directed. Pö om pö moves inward, gradually accumulating detail within a hypnagogic state. II is the journey before sleep, when trains, games, literature, industrial landscapes, remembered recordings and intrusive thoughts continue flashing behind the eyes. Its transitions suggest stations on a route, but the route does not form a sensible map. Berlin transit audio leads toward imagined deserts, cosmic contamination, Tolkien’s battlefield, outdated technology and finally an industrial island under quarantine. The logic is associative rather than geographic, resembling the way unfamiliar music can connect memories and ideas that had never previously occupied the same conscious space.
This is also why the familiar references surrounding OCH never fully account for the record. Popol Vuh, Guru Guru, Heldon, Lard Free, Träd Gräs Och Stenar and Älgarnas Trädgård all provide useful entrances, but II does not remain inside any one inherited style. OCH understand that experimental tradition is not a museum of recognizable sounds. It is permission to create relationships that did not previously exist. German repetition can encounter Swedish pastoralism, synthesizers can coexist with field recordings and folk shadows, and science-fiction machinery can be powered by drums that feel physical, communal and ancient.
II lasts only about forty minutes, yet it leaves behind the impression of a much larger structure. Each track opens a temporary chamber, and each chamber contains another doorway before the listener has finished examining it. The album never provides a final answer to the question announced by “Jag är här, jag är här.” Where exactly is “here”? Inside a train, an invented landscape, an industrial complex, a record groove, a historical lineage, or the changing electrical activity of the listener’s own mind? OCH’s answer is contained in their name. Here is never one thing. It is this and that and whatever enters next.
Anyone familiar with the Linköping and Norrköping scenes, the Flowers Must Die connection, Händelö, or the stranger meanings concealed inside these titles is encouraged to add what they know. OCH created an album filled with coordinates, but they wisely neglected to supply the complete map.

Oh Sees / Dead Medic - 2017 - A Few Days of Reflection

 

Castle Face – CF-99

Dead Medic occupies an unusually revealing position in the Oh Sees catalog. Released near the end of 2017 after Orc and the quieter OCS album Memory of a Cut Off Head, this two-track record does not feel like a promotional single or a tray of scraps left beside the main course. Both pieces were extracted from longer improvisations recorded during the Orc sessions, and they expose the process that was beginning to reshape the band from a compact garage-rock weapon into something more spacious, rhythmic and exploratory. The songs on Orc had already begun opening trapdoors into progressive rock, electronics and extended instrumental passages. Dead Medic allows the band to remain below the floorboards for an entire side at a time.
The title track begins as though somebody has switched on a complicated machine whose intended function has been forgotten. John Dwyer’s recorder or flute produces an eerie little signal over Tim Hellman’s patient bass, while drummers Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone establish the repeating movement beneath it. The rhythm does not hurry toward a chorus because no chorus is coming. It settles into a circular pattern and lets duration become one of the instruments. The longer the pattern continues, the more closely the ear examines its internal machinery: the slight differences between the two drum kits, the bass notes pressing against the beat, and the electronic shapes that flicker around the edges without announcing their source.
The recording credits specify Rincon as the drummer on the right and Quattrone on the left, making the stereo field part of the composition rather than merely a way of accommodating two people playing similar instruments. Their rhythms overlap, separate and occasionally appear to chase each other around the listener. One drummer may emphasize the groove’s skeleton while the other adds muscle, friction or a momentary imbalance. The result is less a conventional drum solo than a mobile rhythmic architecture. The listener is placed inside a structure whose two walls keep moving independently without allowing the roof to collapse.
Dwyer uses nearly everything within reach during these sessions: guitar, Mellotron, synthesizer, flute, recorder, fife, hand percussion, Wurlitzer electric piano and sampling. Yet “Dead Medic” does not resemble a demonstration of a crowded instrument cupboard. Many of these sounds appear only briefly, performing small acts of interference before disappearing into the groove. A keyboard tone hangs in the air, a woodwind cry suggests some anxious animal loose inside the studio, and the guitar arrives less as the traditional leader of a rock band than as another electrical substance entering the mixture. This restraint makes the track feel larger. There is always the possibility that another unidentified object is moving somewhere beyond the microphones.
The music was recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, a residential studio complex located in the desert near the Mexican border. That setting seems audible even without turning it into mythology. “Dead Medic” possesses the spaciousness of musicians playing far from the interruptions of ordinary schedules, able to continue a groove long after a normal studio clock might have told them to stop. The dry repetition and small floating sounds suggest an expanse surrounding the band, while the dense percussion creates a temporary shelter within it. The studio becomes both laboratory and campsite: wires, keyboards and tape machines assembled in the middle of something much older and less interested in human activity.
“A Few Days of Reflection” establishes an even deeper historical passage. It is an interpretation of “Låt oss tänka ett par dagar” by the Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar, a title more literally translated as “Let us think for a couple of days.” The original performance was recorded at the Gärdet festival in Stockholm on June 12, 1970 and stretches beyond twenty-one minutes. Oh Sees reduce it to just under ten, but reduction is not the same as simplification. They take the central emotional and rhythmic material, remove much of the original performance’s open-air sprawl, and rebuild it as a heavy, slow-moving studio hallucination.
Träd, Gräs och Stenar belonged to a Swedish counterculture in which music, collective organization and everyday life were not easily separated. The group helped arrange the free Gärdet festival and developed a leaderless form of psychedelic rock based upon repetition, participation and the momentum generated by people playing together. Their work could contain rock-and-roll riffs, Terry Riley-like minimalism, communal singing and stretches of uncertainty in which no one seemed entirely responsible for deciding where the music should go. Oh Sees do not imitate the surface of that history. They recognize the operating principle inside it: a repeated figure can become a shared space, and a band can discover a composition by remaining within that space long enough.
The cover therefore reveals something important about Dwyer’s listening and about the band’s evolution. Oh Sees are sometimes treated as though their music erupted entirely from California garages, cheap organs, damaged amplifiers and the need to propel bodies across sweaty floors. Those elements are real, but “A Few Days of Reflection” exposes a longer international wiring diagram. Swedish progg, German motorik music, British progressive rock, American punk and home-built electronic experimentation all pass through the group without being carefully sorted into separate historical boxes. Dwyer’s relationship with the past is neither reverent preservation nor casual theft. He hears an unfinished possibility inside older music and invites his present band to continue it.
Where the original Träd, Gräs och Stenar performance feels loose, communal and exposed to the conditions of an outdoor festival, the Oh Sees version moves with a heavier interior pressure. Hellman’s bass becomes the central gravitational object, repeating a phrase that appears simple until it has occupied the room for several minutes. Rincon and Quattrone surround it with rolling percussion, sometimes matching each other and sometimes producing a subtle rhythmic blur. Dwyer’s guitar avoids the constant upward climb expected from a psychedelic solo. It hangs, bends and briefly illuminates the surrounding darkness, leaving the rhythm to carry most of the emotional weight.
The title acquires another meaning through this change in atmosphere. “A Few Days of Reflection” sounds less like a vacation from activity than a necessary pause after exhaustion. The band released Dead Medic as a year-end message to its listeners, describing 2017 as a heavy year while insisting that hope and strength remained possible. That sentiment could easily have become a decorative note attached to the record, but the music performs the same idea more convincingly. It refuses panic. Both tracks find a pattern, remain with it and allow thought to reorganize itself around repetition. The record does not pretend that difficulty can be solved in eleven minutes. It makes eleven minutes of inhabitable time inside the difficulty.
There is a quietly generous quality to releasing this material as a fan-oriented holiday record. Many groups would have shortened these performances, added vocals or treated them as deluxe-edition residue. Oh Sees instead gave each jam an entire side of vinyl and trusted the listener to stay inside it. The original announcement even joked that nobody would need to get up and flip the record for approximately eleven minutes. Beneath the humor is a serious understanding of the format. A twelve-inch single can create a different relationship with time than an album crowded with songs. Dropping the needle becomes an agreement to remain with one developing thought until the side physically runs out.
Dead Medic also captures the importance of the Rincon and Quattrone lineup at the moment its possibilities were becoming fully apparent. Two drummers can easily become a spectacle, a larger hammer used to strike the same nail, but this band increasingly treated them as separate rhythmic voices. Their interaction made it possible for Dwyer and Hellman to simplify without making the music feel empty. A bass line could remain almost unchanged because dozens of tiny negotiations were occurring within the percussion. This would become essential to the more improvisational records that followed, where Oh Sees, later Osees, could move into long jazz-rock, krautrock and synthesizer passages without losing the bodily urgency of the earlier garage band.
The production preserves that bodily presence while leaving room for the record’s stranger details. Eric Bauer, Ty Segall, Enrique Tena and Dwyer were involved in producing and recording the sessions, with Bauer, Tena and Dwyer handling the mix and J.J. Golden mastering the result. The sound is substantial without being polished into a sealed modern surface. Drums retain their separate impacts, bass remains thick enough to guide both pieces, and the various winds, keyboards, samples and guitar treatments appear as physical events rather than plug-in decorations. One can hear a band in a room, but also the studio being used to expand that room beyond its architectural limits.
The two sides complement each other through different forms of inheritance. “Dead Medic” documents the band generating material from its own immediate chemistry, while “A Few Days of Reflection” begins with an idea passed forward from Swedish musicians playing together forty-seven years earlier. One side looks inward at the current lineup; the other looks backward and discovers a route forward. Together they reject the idea that improvisation means creating without history. Every jam contains remembered music, learned reflexes, old technologies and previous communities, whether or not the players name them. Oh Sees make that inheritance audible without allowing it to become a burden.
This may be why Dead Medic feels more significant than its modest two-track format suggests. It is a small hinge between distinct eras of the band, preserving the moment when acceleration ceased to be the only route toward intensity. The record discovers that repetition can be violent, meditative, funny, ominous and hopeful without substantially changing tempo. It also places an American underground institution in open conversation with a Swedish one, demonstrating how music can cross nearly half a century without losing its communal purpose. Someone hears an old recording, recognizes unfinished life within it, gathers friends in another room and begins the thought again.

Rat Cage - 2020 - Screams From The Cage

 

La Vida Es Un Mus – MUS215

The first voice heard on Screams From the Cage is almost comically civilized: “Ladies and gentlemen...now then.” It resembles the introduction to a public meeting in a Sheffield community hall, perhaps moments before somebody overturns the tables and drives a motorcycle through the wall. Then Bryan J. Suddaby screams, the drums detonate, and Rat Cage’s first full-length begins compressing decades of British and Swedish hardcore into nineteen minutes of exceptionally organized panic. The contrast is perfect. This is not undirected rage stumbling through the door. It has arrived on time, cleared its throat and prepared a detailed list of grievances.
Rat Cage is essentially Suddaby alone, writing and performing the songs before allowing a small number of friends into the enclosure for additional guitar and backing vocals. One-person punk projects can sometimes feel airless, with every instrument obeying the same imagination too neatly, but Screams From the Cage turns that concentration into force. The guitar, bass, drums and voice are not competing personalities negotiating a compromise. They are four limbs attached to the same furious nervous system. Every accent lands where the next instrument expects it, yet the record retains enough abrasion to sound endangered by its own momentum.
Suddaby’s central language is the Scandinavian hardcore often gathered beneath the wonderfully destructive word “mangel,” but this is not Swedish music reproduced by an English technician. Rat Cage drags that vocabulary back through Sheffield, UK82, street punk and the rough directness of early British anarcho-hardcore. The drums carry the familiar d-beat propulsion, but the guitars frequently contain more hook and rock-and-roll movement than pure genre reenactment would allow. Missbrukarna, Totalitär, Mob 47 and Skitkids may haunt the machinery, while the blunt melodic instincts of the Partisans and other No Future-era bands remain visible beneath the corrosion. Suddaby understands influence as fuel rather than costume.
“A Country for Idiots” begins the attack with a title broad enough to survive almost any change of government. The song’s frustration is not presented as abstract political theory. Rat Cage works in the old punk scale of bodily recognition: the sense of being governed by people who appear insulated from the consequences of their own decisions, hearing public language reduced to slogans, and watching obvious destruction sold as unavoidable common sense. The riff does not illustrate an argument so much as give that argument shoulders, boots and forward motion. In under two minutes, contempt becomes something the listener can physically enter.
“Jump Off a Building” and “Snake Oil” follow so quickly that the record barely permits the nervous system to reset. This velocity is not merely speed for its own glorious sake. Rat Cage uses short songs to eliminate the false comfort of distance. There is no leisurely instrumental introduction from which to admire the anger. The listener is placed immediately inside it, hurried from one condition to another before a stable perspective can form. “Snake Oil” is especially well named for an era in which political salesmanship, media performance and commercial wellness language increasingly borrowed one another’s tricks. Everything is a cure, every disaster is an opportunity, and everyone speaking from above wants another minute of your attention.
The two tiny “Vanity Game” fragments divide the album with only a few seconds each, behaving like cracks in the structure rather than fully developed songs. Their brevity gives them a strange importance. Amid music committed to frontal movement, these interruptions briefly expose the editing, performance and artificial construction holding the assault together. They are little trapdoors through which the album’s momentum momentarily falls before “Midnight Death Ride” restores it with one of the record’s strongest combinations of hardcore velocity and filthy rock-and-roll swing.
That rock-and-roll element matters. Without it, Screams From the Cage might have been an impressive but sealed demonstration of inherited d-beat technique. Instead, Suddaby repeatedly bends the guitar away from pure rhythmic punishment and toward riffs that feel reckless, catchy and slightly poisoned. George Wright and recording engineer James Fidler contribute additional leads and solos, small bursts of another personality entering Suddaby’s tightly controlled construction. These are not polished metal solos floating above the songs. They sound scorched into the recording, preserving the primitive excitement of somebody finding a narrow opening and forcing the guitar through it.
“I Don’t Wanna Listen” may be the album’s simplest possible statement of refusal, but refusal is one of punk’s fundamental creative tools. Before a person can articulate an alternative, there is often a necessary moment of saying no to the language already occupying the room. No to the explanation, no to the advertisement, no to the official reassurance, no to the instruction to behave reasonably while unreasonable conditions continue. Rat Cage understands that such refusal does not have to be philosophically complete to be meaningful. Sometimes shutting out one more fraudulent voice is how a private thought survives long enough to become an idea.
“Charge Them with Murder” sharpens that anger into accusation. The title refuses the soft vocabulary through which institutional harm is normally processed: mistake, mismanagement, oversight, regrettable outcome. Hardcore has always been unusually good at restoring verbs to situations that public language has smothered beneath nouns. Somebody chose, somebody profited, somebody authorized, somebody died. Rat Cage’s speed prevents the accusation from being absorbed as a calm topic for debate. The song arrives already past the stage of politely requesting that power investigate itself.
“Anti Trident” places the record within a specifically British history of nuclear opposition. Trident, the United Kingdom’s submarine-based nuclear weapons system, becomes a perfect subject for Rat Cage because it combines almost unimaginable destructive power with the numb administrative language of budgets, deterrence and national security. The song is one of the album’s shortest and most direct attacks, refusing the grandeur generally used to justify weapons capable of erasing cities. The music does not attempt to sonically imitate a nuclear explosion. It is the smaller, human sound made by somebody refusing to accept that such machinery should exist quietly in their name.
“Cold Furnace” is an especially evocative Sheffield title even before any lyrical meaning is considered. The city’s industrial identity, steelmaking history and subsequent economic transformations linger behind those two words. A furnace is supposed to be the source of heat, labor and production; a cold one suggests abandonment, interruption and a vanished system of collective purpose. Rat Cage does not turn industrial decline into sepia nostalgia. The recording is too immediate for that. Its distorted guitar and pounding drums feel assembled from whatever remains available after the official machinery has stopped, a smaller unauthorized factory generating its own voltage.
The album closes with “Not Got No Hope,” the longest track at three minutes and the closest Screams From the Cage comes to stretching out. Even here, Rat Cage does not suddenly become reflective or spacious. The extra time allows the final riff to dig deeper and the accumulated negativity to become almost triumphant. The title’s double negative contains an accidental opening: to have “not got no hope” can grammatically mean that some hope remains, however battered or unwilling to identify itself. That ambiguity suits punk. Total despair rarely produces records this energetic. Making the thing, playing every instrument, involving friends, pressing vinyl and sending the noise outward are all acts requiring a stubborn belief that contact remains possible.
The album was released on April 10, 2020, when the title Screams From the Cage had acquired an additional meaning that could not have been fully anticipated during its creation. Much of the world was suddenly confined indoors, public life had contracted, and the cage was no longer only a political or psychological metaphor. Yet the record does not sound like a document made in response to lockdown. Its anger was already prepared. That timing instead demonstrated how quickly old punk subjects can become newly literal: confinement, incompetent leadership, social abandonment, mistrust of official explanations and the need to create an outlet before pressure becomes paralysis.
James Fidler recorded the album at Harvest Studio in Sheffield, James Atkinson mixed it at Stationhouse in Leeds, and Brad Boatright mastered it at Audiosiege. That chain preserves the useful contradiction at the center of the record. Screams From the Cage sounds raw, but it is not careless. The instruments remain distinct enough for the riffs to register immediately, the drums possess physical impact without becoming an indistinguishable blur, and Suddaby’s voice sits at the front like a damaged emergency broadcast. Mylo “Mangel” Oxlo’s artwork completes the object by giving its claustrophobic hostility a visual body rather than smoothing it into tasteful punk design.
Warren Lovett and Henry Gumpson’s backing vocals are another small but essential breach in the one-person construction. Their appearances remind us that Rat Cage may be authored largely by a single musician, but the music belongs to a communal tradition. Hardcore survives through borrowed amplifiers, shared floors, guest shouts, tiny labels, mail orders, traded recordings and people recognizing something of themselves inside another person’s noise. Suddaby can construct the entire machine, but it becomes socially alive when other voices enter and the finished record leaves his possession.
La Vida Es Un Mus released the LP as MUS215 on black vinyl and in a blue-vinyl edition accompanied by a beer mat, a beautifully ordinary object for music this apocalyptic. That detail captures something central to British punk culture: catastrophe delivered without theatrical grandeur, world-ending anger sitting beside pub humor and everyday social life. Screams From the Cage does not imagine rebellion occurring in some purified revolutionary future. It happens now, among friends, jokes, cheap rooms, political exhaustion and whatever equipment can be made to work.
The record’s greatest strength is not simply that it moves fast or sounds furious. It is the precision with which Suddaby converts disgust into momentum. Twelve tracks pass in less time than many bands require to establish an atmosphere, yet the album contains a complete environment: governmental contempt, nuclear dread, fraudulent authority, industrial ruin, psychological confinement and the thin surviving wire of collective resistance. Rat Cage does not offer a program for escaping the cage. It makes enough noise to confirm that somebody else is trapped nearby, still alive, and kicking the same wall.

Rat Cage - 2023 - Savage Visions

La Vida Es Un Mus – MUS274

 The eleven-second “Beginning of the End” sounds less like an introduction than the instant somebody realizes the brakes are gone. Then “Savage Visions” erupts, and Rat Cage spends the next twenty minutes driving through a world where every available exit appears to lead toward another collapsing bridge. Screams From the Cage was already a concentrated blast of Sheffield mangel, but this second full-length feels darker, heavier and less willing to convert frustration into rowdy release. The earlier album still carried the exhilaration of resistance, the communal rush of shouting back at an idiotic world. Savage Visions begins after that exhilaration has curdled into something more claustrophobic. The cage remains, but now the occupant has been awake inside it for too long.

Bryan Suddaby continues to function as Rat Cage’s central nervous system, writing and performing the album while James Fidler, C. Mackay and Warren Lovett enter as additional musicians. The predominantly one-person construction gives the record an unusual consistency of attack. Guitar, bass, drums and voice all appear to have received the same emergency message at precisely the same moment. Yet Savage Visions does not feel clinically assembled or deprived of social friction. The additional players produce small breaches in Suddaby’s enclosed system, while gang vocals, lead breaks and abrupt stylistic turns make the record sound like a roomful of people trying to escape through one door at once.
The title track immediately reveals how much Rat Cage’s vocabulary has expanded. The familiar Swedish hardcore engine remains, but blackened guitar shapes, heavy-metal momentum and reckless rock-and-roll leads have been welded onto it without weakening the punk foundation. Venom, Midnight and later Darkthrone now flicker beside Totalitär, Disarm, The Varukers and The Partisans. This could easily have become a tour through influences, with each recognizable sound arriving in its assigned historical uniform. Instead, Suddaby throws them together until genre distinctions become sparks inside the same electrical fire. Metal is not added to make the music grander or more technically respectable. It makes the danger feel less containable.
“Scapegoats of Fear” compresses one of the record’s central political mechanisms into less than two minutes. Fear becomes useful to power when it can be redirected toward a visible target, especially one with fewer resources to answer back. Economic failure, institutional decay and political incompetence can all be disguised if the public is repeatedly offered somebody else to blame. Rat Cage does not approach this as a detached analysis of propaganda. The music reproduces the sensation of being trapped inside the process, with the drums surging forward while the guitar appears to scrape against every available surface. The song is short because the mechanism itself is brutally efficient.
“Change From a Fiver” may be the album’s most perfectly British title. A five-pound note is not wealth, yet even that modest sum becomes a measure of shrinking possibility. The phrase evokes bus fare, a drink, food, admission to a show, or the small daily arithmetic performed by people trying to remain functional while prices climb beyond wages. Rat Cage’s politics work best at this scale. Rather than speaking only in enormous abstractions, Suddaby notices how national decisions eventually arrive in pockets, cupboards, electricity meters and the anxious pause before buying something ordinary. The song’s velocity turns penny-counting into panic, making economic pressure audible as a body being hurried through its own life.
“Sinister Town” brings the album’s anxiety into the streets. Sheffield is never used merely as an industrial badge attached to the music, but its history remains present in the record’s combination of metal, machinery and working-class anger. The town here is not sinister because it contains cartoon villains lurking beneath streetlights. It is sinister because ordinary surroundings have become subtly hostile: shuttered spaces, unaffordable rooms, public neglect, surveillance, exhaustion and the suspicion that everything once held in common is being quietly sold. The riff moves with the swagger of street punk, but the mood underneath it is much colder. Rat Cage can still produce a chorus built to be shouted collectively, even when the words offer no celebration.
“Through the Darkness” shows how carefully the record balances despair against propulsion. Savage Visions repeatedly insists that conditions are intolerable, yet its music is never inert. The drumming keeps finding another burst of energy, the bass drives beneath the distortion, and Suddaby’s voice tears forward as though volume itself might create a passage through the wall. This is not optimism in any comfortable sense. It is closer to the body’s refusal to stop functioning merely because the mind can see no convincing outcome. Punk has always contained this contradiction: songs announcing that everything is hopeless, made by people working extremely hard to communicate with strangers.
“I.D.C.” introduces a different kind of release, a staggering, confrontational movement that feels less like a disciplined march than a barroom argument becoming architectural. The initials reduce language to a final exhausted refusal. Whatever explanation, demand or social performance preceded them has reached the point where engagement itself feels dishonest. Yet the track’s gang-ready force turns indifference into something communal and strangely exhilarating. The phrase may announce that the speaker no longer cares, but the violence of the performance proves the opposite. Nobody makes music this committed because nothing matters. The refusal is aimed at a world that has demanded too much attention while offering too little reason to trust it.
Then “Spitting on the Ceiling” opens a trapdoor beneath the expected Rat Cage method. Synthesizer enters the attack, not as an atmospheric introduction or post-punk decoration, but as another unstable substance inside the room. Its appearance is brief enough to remain startling and natural enough that it never feels pasted on for novelty. The track suggests how much territory Rat Cage can explore without losing its identity. Mangel is not being treated as a sealed historical formula whose authenticity depends upon excluding unfamiliar sounds. The genre survives because musicians continue testing what can be pushed through its overloaded circuitry.
“Expensive Bombs” returns to a concern already visible in “Anti Trident” from Screams From the Cage, but the newer song’s title sharpens the obscenity through ordinary financial language. Governments describe weapons in the vocabulary of procurement, capability, investment and deterrence, as though a device built to erase human beings were another piece of municipal equipment. Calling them expensive bombs strips away that protective language. The word “expensive” also connects military expenditure with the daily scarcity running through the album. Money is apparently unavailable for housing, heating, wages, hospitals or public life, yet limitless resources materialize when destruction requires funding. Rat Cage’s attack is effective because it makes that contradiction sound ridiculous before it sounds horrifying.
“Cover Up” barrels through another familiar public ritual: catastrophe followed by institutional self-protection. Responsibility becomes fragmented among committees, reports, private contractors, revised timelines and people who have already moved into other positions. Rat Cage’s music does the opposite. It concentrates responsibility. One person writes, performs and screams the accusation without allowing it to dissolve into procedural fog. Suddaby’s voice has become even more extreme here than on the previous album, less a conventional hardcore bark than an arterial shriek that appears to have bypassed ordinary speech. Its abrasion is not merely stylistic. It is what language sounds like after polite channels have repeatedly failed.
“Nothing’s Sacred Anymore” closes the album by allowing its metal component to reach full physical size. The track carries the familiar käng drive, but the guitar rises with a larger, almost apocalyptic weight, as though the record’s street-level frustrations have finally accumulated into weather. The title can sound like a conservative complaint about lost tradition, but within Savage Visions it suggests something more material. What remains protected when homes, labor, public space, truth and human survival can all be assigned prices? Sacredness here is not nostalgia for obedience. It is the belief that some parts of life should exist beyond extraction, calculation and sale.
James Atkinson’s engineering and mix make this increased heaviness possible without turning the album into an indistinguishable block. The kick drum and bass possess far more weight than decorative low-end normally permits, giving the record a constant bodily shove. Guitar leads cut across the rhythm with a thin, dangerous sharpness rather than floating above it. Will Killingsworth’s mastering pushes the whole construction toward overload while retaining the hooks hidden inside the impact. Savage Visions is ferocious, but its songs are not vague. Choruses remain memorable, changes register immediately, and each carefully placed disruption keeps the twenty-minute assault from becoming a single extended blur.
Mylo Oxlo’s artwork and M. Czerwoniuk’s layout complete a record whose visual and musical worlds are governed by nervous compression. Rat Cage releases have always understood hardcore as a total object rather than an audio file wearing an image. The drawing, lettering, lyric insert, sticker, vinyl and compact running time participate in the same transmission. Even the album’s brevity feels physical. One side ends before the listener’s body has adjusted to its speed, requiring the record to be turned over and the mechanism restarted. Digital playback can preserve the sound, but the LP’s interruption adds a tiny moment of agency inside music obsessed with losing control.
La Vida Es Un Mus described the album as the nauseating experience of “trying to get by,” and that phrase may be the clearest route into it. Savage Visions is not primarily about spectacular disaster. It is about the relentless pressure of maintaining an ordinary life within systems that make ordinary life increasingly difficult. Its songs address fear, money, towns, weapons, concealment and the erosion of anything not immediately profitable. Suddaby responds not by simplifying Rat Cage into purer d-beat, but by contaminating it with speed metal, synthesizer, rock-and-roll swagger and increasingly dramatic lead guitar. The world has become more unstable, so the music must become more resourceful.
That development makes Savage Visions a stronger companion to Screams From the Cage rather than a replacement for it. The 2020 album captured a person kicking hard enough to prove the cage had another living occupant. Three years later, the kicking has bent the structure, exposed unfamiliar corridors and revealed that the entire building may be a cage. Rat Cage’s achievement is to make this recognition exhilarating without pretending it is good news. There are enormous sing-along moments here, but no party waiting behind them. Community appears instead as the act of recognizing the same pressure in another person’s voice and answering it with your own.
Anyone who heard these songs in Sheffield, knows which parts were contributed by the additional musicians, or has compared the red and black vinyl editions is invited to add another piece of the record’s history. Savage Visions sounds like one person being pushed toward the edge, but punk becomes useful when that private alarm is heard and repeated by others.