Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden - 2022 - I Get Along Without You Very Well

 

Thrill Jockey – THRILL 566

“I get along without you very well” is the sort of sentence that becomes less convincing each time it is repeated. It declares independence while quietly confirming the continued presence of whoever is supposedly no longer needed. Ellen Arkbro and Johan Graden build an entire album inside that contradiction. These songs describe closeness, absence, love and departure without raising their voices or demanding a dramatic resolution. The emotional pressure remains beneath the surface, carried by low brass, woodwinds, contrabass, organ and piano while Arkbro sings as though every word has been carefully examined before being allowed to leave the body.

“Close” begins with intimacy already complicated by distance. Arkbro’s voice is dry, exposed and almost physically near, yet the instruments around her form a dim enclosure whose dimensions cannot be confidently measured. Two bass clarinets, tuba, bass, organ, synthesizer and light percussion occupy similar registers, allowing their separate colors to merge into one breathing darkness. The arrangement is dense on paper but spacious in the ear. Instead of stacking instruments upward into grandeur, Arkbro and Graden place them beside one another in the shadows, creating depth through small differences in pressure, grain and air.

This is Arkbro’s first album centered upon her singing, and the vulnerability comes partly from hearing a composer known for long instrumental durations suddenly place language in the foreground. Her earlier organ and brass works could allow harmony to remain impersonal, almost architectural. A chord did not need to confess anything. A sung sentence cannot avoid carrying evidence of the person saying it. Arkbro does not respond by becoming theatrical. Her voice remains soft, occasionally hesitant, and resistant to the polished confidence expected from a conventional lead singer. The words sound more intimate because they have not been fortified against doubt.

“Out of Luck” gives the ensemble more rhythmic movement, but the groove never frees the song from uncertainty. Graden’s piano places small lights inside the low reeds while percussion advances with the careful looseness of someone moving through a dark room without wanting to wake anybody. Flute, bass clarinets and baritone saxophone blur into electronic tone and upright bass, producing a sound that is warm without becoming comforting. The song reaches toward another person while remaining stranded outside whatever emotional shelter that person might provide. Being held and being lost are not opposites here. One may be the condition that reveals the other.

Graden’s arrangements repeatedly make instruments of similar depth behave like one enlarged voice. Bass clarinet, tuba, trombone and contrabass do not support Arkbro in the ordinary sense of accompaniment. They seem to breathe alongside her, sometimes extending the emotional color of a word after she has stopped singing. This creates the impression that the songs are remembering themselves while they occur. A vocal phrase disappears, but a horn continues carrying its shape. The listener hears not only the statement but the atmosphere it leaves behind.

“All in Bloom” places Arkbro against Graden’s piano with unusual tenderness. The title suggests a moment of full arrival, when everything has opened and become visible, yet blooming also contains the certainty that the flower’s present form cannot last. Trombone, tuba, bass clarinet and contrabass gather around the piano without turning the song into a chamber-music display. Their sustained tones make the fragile melodic movement feel temporarily protected, but the protection remains transparent. Nothing is locked away from time. Blooming is beautiful because it is already passing.

The lyrics repeatedly return to forgetting, darkness, guidance and the possibility that nothing is ever completely lost. These are large ideas, but Arkbro sings them without enlarging her voice to match their philosophical scale. The restraint preserves their private origin. A question about whether anything truly disappears may arise from metaphysics, grief or an ordinary moment of missing someone. The album never forces a distinction. It allows personal separation to open naturally toward larger questions about memory and continued existence.

“Never Near” compresses the album’s grammar of distance into a little over two minutes. Contrabass and bass clarinet hold the lower air while drums and synthesizer establish only the faintest structure around the voice. The title sounds impossible at first. To describe somebody as never near is to measure their absence repeatedly, which means they remain close enough in thought to keep being measured. The song ends before that contradiction can be settled. Its brevity makes it feel like an admission that escaped before the singer could reconsider saying it.

“Temple” reduces the instrumentation to Arkbro’s voice and Hilary Jeffery’s trombone and tuba. The result is not empty. Breath becomes the common substance from which every sound is formed. Arkbro releases words through the body, while the brass instruments enlarge breath into sustained columns capable of surrounding her. A temple usually promises a stable place where the human voice can address something greater than itself, but this temple is constructed only for the duration of the song. It has no stone, doctrine or permanent congregation. It exists wherever one vulnerable voice and two lengths of resonating metal create enough space for attention.

This minimal instrumentation also prevents spirituality from becoming spectacle. There is no enormous organ announcing transcendence and no choir confirming that an answer has arrived. The brass swells and recedes around Arkbro without deciding whether it represents comfort, doubt or the invisible presence being addressed. Devotion remains an action rather than a certainty. The song creates a sacred enclosure while preserving the possibility that nobody is listening from the other side.

“Other Side” widens that uncertainty. Piano, synthesizer, bass clarinet, tuba and contrabass form another low harmonic body, while Arkbro’s voice seems to approach from a different depth inside it. The other side might mean death, emotional separation, the far side of a difficult period or simply the place another person occupies when communication has failed. The arrangement refuses to illustrate any one possibility. It suspends the words inside harmonies that feel both ancient and electronically displaced, making the song sound like a message whose sender and recipient no longer share the same measurement of time.

Despite their experimental construction, these pieces remain songs in the most useful sense. Their melodies can be remembered, their words carry private emotional consequence, and their arrangements serve the vocal line rather than competing for intellectual attention. Yet Arkbro and Graden do not simplify their harmonic language in order to enter pop. They slow pop down until its smallest mechanisms become visible. A chord is allowed to remain long enough for internal friction to emerge. A drumbeat can disappear for several measures without removing the song’s pulse. The chorus is replaced by the return of an emotional condition.

“Love You, Bye” contains the album’s entire tension within three ordinary words. Love is declared, and departure follows immediately. The phrase may be casual, affectionate, defensive or devastating depending upon what has happened before it. Arkbro and Graden allow it to become all of those things. Organ recorded inside Stockholm’s St. Jacob’s Church sends wide harmonic waves through bass clarinets, tuba, contrabass and drums. The arrangement begins with intimacy and gradually grows immense, but its expansion does not make the farewell more heroic. It reveals how much feeling can be concealed inside a phrase spoken every day.

The church organ gives the song a scale larger than the relationship being addressed, but it never swallows the human voice. Sacred resonance and ordinary language remain together. “Love you, bye” becomes a tiny secular prayer, repeated at the moment when nothing more useful can be said. The organ continues after language reaches its limit, allowing harmony to carry what speech cannot organize. Goodbye is treated not as the opposite of love but as one of the forms love is sometimes forced to take.

The closing “Waqt,” Arabic for time, strips the ensemble back to voice, piano, trumpet, bass and drums. After songs titled “Close,” “Never Near,” “Other Side” and “Love You, Bye,” time becomes the larger medium containing every approach and separation. Graden was living and working within Amman’s experimental music community during this period, and the Arabic title quietly opens the record beyond its Swedish and Berlin geography without turning the final piece into an exotic departure. Time is the simplest translation, but the word carries the album’s central problem: how two people can occupy the same relationship while experiencing its duration differently.

The track does not provide a grand ending. Piano and voice remain fragile, while trumpet, bass and drums create a final ensemble whose looseness feels more like continued breathing than resolution. The album finishes without proving that the speaker truly gets along well alone or revealing whether the absent person will return. Time has not repaired the relationship. It has only given every feeling another chamber in which to resonate.

Arkbro and Graden developed the record slowly, sometimes leaving it untouched for months. That patience can be heard in the arrangements. Nothing seems included merely because it was beautifully recorded or because a player of great ability was available. The musicians enter only where their timbres can deepen the emotional ambiguity. Bass clarinets blend with organ, tuba merges into synthesizer, and contrabass can become indistinguishable from the lower edge of the piano. The ensemble repeatedly achieves richness through refusal, allowing instruments to surrender their individual prestige to the shared color.

The friendship between Arkbro and Graden is equally important. These songs emerged through conversations about music, philosophy and ways of being, as well as through improvisation and studio work. That history makes vulnerability possible without making the album confessional in a narrow autobiographical sense. One person can present a fragile idea because another person is listening carefully enough not to force it into premature completion. Collaboration becomes the emotional method as well as the production method.

I Get Along Without You Very Well occupies a rare region where experimental composition does not make feeling abstract, and pop songwriting does not make complex sound ordinary. Its low instruments create darkness without menace. Its voice communicates intimacy without pretending intimacy is simple. Its arrangements are meticulous, but they preserve uncertainty rather than correcting it. Every song appears to know exactly how little it can safely say.

The title never becomes entirely true, which is why it remains moving. Getting along without someone is not the same as becoming untouched by their absence. Independence can coexist with longing, and farewell can remain full of love. Arkbro and Graden do not resolve those contradictions because emotional life does not resolve them. They arrange a space in which contradictory feelings can sound together without one being required to defeat the other. For thirty-three minutes, loss and closeness occupy the same chord, and neither is asked to leave.

Dungen - 2015 - Allas Sak

Smalltown Supersound – STS264

Allas Sak means everyone’s thing, everyone’s concern or something belonging to all of us, yet the album begins with Gustav Ejstes’s private experiences: family, friendship, parties ending, people leaving, familiar places and the unstable thoughts that arrive when ordinary life becomes quiet enough to hear. Dungen does not make these experiences universal by removing their Swedish language or local detail. The band makes them communal by giving each song enough melodic and rhythmic life for listeners to build their own memories inside it. Meaning travels through the words, but also through Reine Fiske’s bending guitar, Johan Holmegard’s restless drums, Mattias Gustavsson’s bass and the warmth of four musicians reacting to one another in real time.

The title track establishes this exchange immediately. Electric piano, compressed fuzz guitar and an agile rhythm section create something bright and welcoming without becoming simple. Dungen’s melodies often feel instantly familiar, but the arrangements refuse to remain where the melody first places them. Drums lean into unexpected accents, guitar enters with a different emotional temperature, and Ejstes’s voice carries the tune while the instruments quietly rearrange the ground beneath it. The song belongs to everyone not because it has been reduced to a broad slogan, but because every part seems prepared to share its space.

“Sista Festen” and “Sista Gästen,” the last party and the last guest, place celebration beside the strange emptiness that follows it. A party is communal while it is happening, but its ending reveals that each person eventually leaves alone. Dungen catches both conditions. The music retains the color and motion of company while the titles look toward the room afterward, when glasses remain on tables and the final conversation has become memory. Ejstes has always been able to place melancholy inside melodies too generous to sound defeated. Here sadness does not cancel pleasure; it proves that the pleasure mattered.

“Franks Kaktus” opens another region entirely. Flute carries the principal melody while guitar and percussion move around it with the loose elegance of folk music, jazz and tropical rhythm meeting without needing to announce their separate origins. The cactus of the title suggests something self-contained, able to store what it needs and survive in an environment offering very little. The piece behaves similarly. A few memorable figures are enough to sustain an entire instrumental landscape, and each repetition stores more feeling rather than exhausting the original idea. Jonas Kullhammar’s reeds deepen the record’s vocabulary elsewhere, but even without words Dungen’s wind instruments speak with an unmistakably human breath.

“En Gång Om Året,” once a year, gives repetition a different scale. Some events return because calendars require them, while others return because families, friendships and private rituals keep carrying them forward. The stately arrangement feels ceremonial without identifying exactly what is being observed. That uncertainty allows the listener to supply an anniversary, holiday, birthday, visit or remembrance of their own. Dungen’s Swedish specificity does not close the music to outsiders. It creates a real place from which emotional recognition can travel.

“Åkt Dit” is more unstable. The phrase can suggest having gone somewhere, but it can also imply getting caught, being busted or suffering the consequences of one’s actions. The music shares that double meaning. Its chord movement feels slippery, as though a familiar route has suddenly delivered the traveler somewhere unintended, before the saxophone enters with enough force to make the mistake feel exhilarating. Dungen repeatedly discovers freedom inside arrangements that remain meticulously shaped. A song can lose its footing without losing its direction.

“En Dag På Sjön” allows the band to stretch outward. A day on the water sounds peaceful, yet water never holds still beneath the person crossing it. Reine Fiske’s guitar gives the instrumental its motion, moving between lyrical phrases and rougher electrical surges while the rhythm section keeps the surface continuously shifting. The piece demonstrates why Dungen’s improvisational passages rarely feel like detours. The band does not abandon the composition in order to jam. It follows the composition beyond the point where its original map remains useful.

“Flickor Och Pojkar” brings girls and boys into an arrangement of Rhodes piano, acoustic strings, flutes and details moving across the stereo field. The title is almost childishly elemental, dividing a social world into the two categories people are often handed before they know what either one will require of them. The music is gentler than the album’s louder psychedelic passages, but its delicacy contains enormous activity. Sounds appear briefly, touch the central melody and disappear, creating the sensation of watching personalities form inside a group before any one person has learned how to remain fixed.

“Ljus In i Min Panna” asks for light to enter the forehead or mind, turning illumination into something almost physical. Twelve-string shimmer and sharper guitar tones coexist without deciding whether the light is comforting or overwhelming. Dungen’s psychedelia works particularly well when revelation retains this ambiguity. To see more clearly is not always to feel safer. Light can warm, expose, awaken or make previously hidden confusion impossible to ignore. The band surrounds the request with enough groove that thought remains attached to the body, preventing enlightenment from floating away into decorative mysticism.

“Sova” closes the album by entering sleep for more than eight minutes. Organ, harp-like textures, jazz color and accumulating layers gradually loosen the distinction between lullaby and hallucination. Sleep is everyone’s daily disappearance, an ordinary biological act that remains completely mysterious from inside. Conscious control is surrendered, time passes without being measured normally, and private images assemble themselves from material the waking mind may not recognize. Dungen does not treat the final track as a gentle fade into rest. Sleep becomes the album’s largest psychedelic environment, where the everyday finally reveals how strange it has been all along.

The way Allas Sak was recorded strengthens this movement from private thought toward collective life. Ejstes arrived with completed songs and entrusted producer Mattias Glavå to capture Dungen playing them live to analogue tape. Earlier albums often grew through Ejstes’s prolonged studio construction and desire to control every detail. Here another pair of ears stands between imagination and finished sound, while the core quartet is allowed to demonstrate what years of playing together have created. The resulting precision does not feel assembled piece by piece. It feels discovered by people who know how one another will move but remain capable of surprise.

That shift matters because Dungen had been silent for five years while its members worked in other bands and projects. Allas Sak does not return with the anxious need to prove that the group remains relevant. It simply sounds inhabited. Fiske’s guitar can erupt without turning the album into a showcase; Holmegard’s drumming can be technically startling while remaining inside the song; Gustavsson’s bass connects folk melody, jazz movement and hip-hop-informed rhythm; Ejstes can move among voice, keyboards and flute without making the album resemble a demonstration of versatility. Everybody’s contribution becomes part of one recognizable body.

Dungen’s relationship with the past is similarly communal. Swedish folk music, progressive rock, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop production and melodic pop are not lined up as references for knowledgeable listeners to identify. They have already been absorbed into the band’s ordinary language. A flute may carry folk memory while the drums suggest a sampled break; fuzz guitar can open into jazz harmony; an old recording method can produce music whose rhythmic understanding remains completely contemporary. The band does not revive a lost golden age. It shows how the past continues living whenever people use what they inherited to describe the present.

Allas Sak ultimately proposes that ordinary life is not artistically small. The last guest leaving, an annual ritual, a day on the water, girls and boys, light entering the mind and the nightly surrender to sleep are enough to support an entire psychedelic world. Ejstes’s experiences remain his own, but music prevents ownership from becoming isolation. The band receives them, changes them through collective playing and sends them outward in a form another person can inhabit. Everyone’s thing does not mean that every story becomes identical. It means our separate stories can briefly recognize one another inside the same song. 

Embalm - 2022 - Prelude To Obscurity

 

Hospital Productions – none

Prelude to Obscurity sounds like a young band introducing the darkness it expects to explore more deeply on future records. History gave the title another meaning. Embalm recorded four increasingly distinctive songs, continued writing, played shows and then disappeared before a proper album could convert that momentum into a visible career. What should have been a prelude became nearly the entire surviving structure, while obscurity arrived not as an aesthetic pose but as the practical fate of a high-school death-metal band working in 1990s Wisconsin. Twenty-five years later, this collection does not pretend to recover a lost masterpiece in pristine condition. It gathers the demo, its raw predecessor and two nearly buried live recordings so the distance between youthful possibility and disappearance remains audible.

The opening four tracks contain Embalm at its most fully developed. “Descend Into Extinction” moves with a mid-paced weight that makes each riff feel larger than speed alone could manage. The guitars do not race constantly toward the next display of brutality. They establish a groove, allow bass and drums to deepen it, then introduce melodic movement whose coldness recalls Swedish death metal without removing the blunt Midwestern body underneath. Oscar Perez’s drumming gives the music both impact and direction, while Matt Ramirez’s bass remains part of the physical attack rather than a faint shadow beneath the guitars. Josue Guadalupe and Andy Schoengrund divide lead, rhythm and vocal pressure until the group sounds far more mature than the familiar story of teenagers discovering extreme music in a basement.

“Sanctified Massacre” captures Embalm’s ability to make contradiction productive. The title joins religious consecration with organized killing, while the music joins brutal chugging to guitar lines carrying an almost mournful grandeur. The melodic passages do not excuse the violence surrounding them or function as decorative relief. They make the heavier returns feel more consequential, introducing the suggestion that something human has been destroyed rather than merely providing another opportunity for aggression. Embalm understood that brutality becomes more vivid when the listener is briefly allowed to see what the brutality is crushing.

“Cry in Agony” gives that buried humanity a voice without turning the song toward confession. Vocals arrive as another damaged surface within the ensemble, low and forceful but not separated cleanly from the guitars. The band’s grooves remain memorable because they are built from rhythm rather than technical excess. A riff can be followed bodily before its construction has been analyzed, and that immediate recognition allows the song’s stranger harmonic details to enter without interrupting the momentum. This is death metal designed for the physical space of a small show, where complicated ideas must still survive amplifiers, poor acoustics and bodies moving directly in front of the band.

“Exquisite Tenderness” is the most revealing title and the most openly furious performance. Tenderness is ordinarily associated with careful contact, but the adjective “exquisite” can also describe pain sharpened to an almost unbearable degree. Embalm compresses that ambiguity into its fastest attack, allowing aggression to become precise rather than shapeless. The song demonstrates that the group was not trapped inside one effective mid-tempo formula. It could accelerate without losing articulation, then return to heavier movement with the sense that speed has damaged the ground beneath it. Placed last among the completed studio songs, it sounds less like a conclusion than a door opening toward an album that was never made.

The collection then travels backward to Demo ’95, where the same band exists in a far more primitive acoustic world. “Intrusion,” “Repulsive Existence,” “Persistence of Suffering” and “Inhumane Thoughts” are not presented under their original names on every edition, but their short forms preserve Embalm before its sound had acquired the greater weight and separation heard on the final demo. The cassette recording flattens voice, drums and guitars into one grim basement organism. Details disappear, yet intention becomes impossible to miss. The band already understood repetition, sudden rhythmic emphasis and the usefulness of a riff that could survive poor equipment because its shape was strong enough to remain recognizable through distortion.

This is where the collection becomes more valuable than a simple reissue of the best demo. The 1995 material lets development remain audible. Embalm did not emerge fully formed with a lost classic conveniently waiting for rediscovery. The musicians learned by playing together, refining their sense of groove, expanding the guitars’ harmonic language and discovering how production could make heaviness feel larger without making it cleaner than the music required. The raw cassette and later DAT recording are two photographs of the same group at different stages of self-recognition. One is a dark outline; the other reveals the anatomy that had been forming inside it.

The two live tracks from March 28, 1998 carry that history beyond the final demo, although they arrive through much rougher evidence. The recording is overloaded and distant, with drums, room noise and amplification fighting for the same narrow strip of tape. Yet these are not bonus tracks included because somebody mistook poor fidelity for automatic authenticity. They preserve music written after Prelude to Obscurity that never reached the studio. Beneath the damaged surface are new rhythmic turns, slamming breaks, tortured lead guitar and the band’s developing use of dual and multilingual vocals. The sound requires adjustment, but adjustment is part of encountering underground history. Sometimes the only surviving document is not the one anyone would have chosen. It is the one somebody happened to keep.

Hearing those live tracks means standing at the back of an unknown room after the official story has already ended. The recording cannot restore the bodies, volume or local relationships that gave the event its original meaning. It does preserve pressure. The snare overwhelms the balance, guitars smear into the walls and audience noise briefly enters the field, but those apparent defects reveal that the music once belonged to a social situation before it became archival material. Embalm was not created for future collectors studying a rare demo. The band existed for people close enough to feel the amplifiers, trade tapes, recognize a new song and remember afterward that the room had briefly contained something unavailable anywhere else.

Wisconsin is essential to the sound without requiring Embalm to imitate a regional stereotype. The group formed in the shadow of Milwaukee Metal Fest and within a Midwestern network of demo tapes, tiny labels, compilation appearances, local festivals and support slots with touring bands such as Internal Bleeding and Incantation. This was a culture built through physical movement. Flyers traveled, cassettes were copied, envelopes crossed states, and bands learned about one another through partial evidence rather than constant online visibility. Remaining local did not mean remaining disconnected. It meant participating in a network whose connections were slower, more deliberate and easier to lose.

The 2022 release reconstructs that network through its twenty-page booklet of flyers, tape art, photographs, zine reviews and other surviving paper. Those materials are not secondary illustrations surrounding the “real” music. They document how the music became real in the first place. A demo cassette required somebody to duplicate it, write an address, answer mail, book a show and place the band’s name onto a flyer beside other names that might eventually become famous or disappear just as completely. The booklet restores Embalm as a group of working participants rather than a mysterious logo discovered after the fact.

Arthur Rizk’s remastering respects the differences among the sources rather than forcing them into false uniformity. The final demo acquires enough definition for its grooves, bass weight and melodic guitar work to register fully. The 1995 cassette remains cruel and enclosed, because polishing away its limitations would also remove the physical evidence of how it was made and circulated. The live tracks remain damaged because no mastering decision can manufacture information the original tape failed to capture. The collection’s changing fidelity becomes chronological. Each recording tells us not only what Embalm played, but what resources, circumstances and accidents allowed that particular moment to survive.

Hospital Productions’ involvement gives the recovery a personal dimension. Dominick Fernow’s route into noise and the creation of Hospital began partly within the 1990s Wisconsin worlds of death metal, techno and underground tape culture. Releasing Embalm is therefore more than a label identifying an overlooked artifact that fits current taste. It returns to a formative local current and carries something forward that might otherwise have remained known only through private memories and aging copies. The collaboration with 20 Buck Spin joins that personal archaeology to a contemporary metal audience capable of hearing Embalm without reducing the band to nostalgia.

Prelude to Obscurity does not ask us to imagine that Embalm would certainly have become important had the group continued. That fantasy would replace the actual band with an invented future. What matters is already present: four musicians developed an individual form of death metal while still in high school, created songs whose grooves and harmonies remain effective decades later, participated in a larger underground, and left behind incomplete evidence of further growth. Their obscurity was never proof of artistic failure. It was one possible outcome within a culture where preservation depended upon fragile tape, local loyalty and somebody remembering where the box had been stored.

The collection ends without resolving that incompleteness. The final live song stops, and no debut album follows. Yet the release transforms absence into form. The mastered demo shows what Embalm achieved, the basement cassette reveals where it began, and the live recordings point toward what remained unfinished. Together they create a complete portrait of an incomplete life. The prelude finally reaches an audience, not by escaping obscurity entirely, but by carrying obscurity with it as part of the sound.

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.