Kammerflimmer Kollektief - 2015 - Désarroi

 

Staubgold – staubgold 136

Désarroi can mean disarray, distress or the bewilderment produced when the systems normally used for orientation stop functioning. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not represent that condition through shapeless chaos. The album is full of recurring melodies, recognizable instruments, steady movement and moments approaching conventional song. Disorientation begins because those familiar materials refuse to remain what they first appear to be. A double bass becomes a damaged door opening somewhere below the floor. Harmonium breath turns into weather. Guitar loses the evidence of strings and amplification until it resembles machinery, heat or an animal moving behind a wall. The listener is never completely lost, but every available landmark keeps changing its name.

The six numbered sections of “Désarroi” create the suggestion of an organized suite, yet three separate pieces keep interrupting that order. “Free Form Freak-Out,” “Evol Jam (Edit)” and “Zurück zum Beton” appear like rooms constructed inside a corridor that supposedly had only six doors. Even the sequence cannot decide whether it is one extended composition or nine individual tracks. This uncertainty gives the album its peculiar momentum. It repeatedly establishes a form, discovers an opening in that form and crawls through before the listener has finished measuring the original space.

“Mayhem!” begins with Heike Aumüller’s harmonium sounding simultaneously ancient, intimate and slightly ill. Air enters the reeds, but the resulting tones do not provide the devotional stability often associated with the instrument. They sway and scrape against Johannes Frisch’s double bass, whose bowing, knocking and low-frequency movement immediately loosen the floor. Thomas Weber’s guitar and electronic devices approach from less identifiable directions. The trio seems to be assembling a chamber ensemble from instruments that remember being used for other purposes. Mayhem arrives not as an explosion but as several small uncertainties discovering that they can coexist.

“Grundstürzend” suggests something radical enough to overturn foundations, and the track makes that idea physical. A dub-like pulse supplies temporary gravity while delays and displaced fragments create depth around it, but Frisch is not required to secure the rhythm in the conventional role of bassist. Loops can maintain the clock, freeing the double bass to creak, slide, scrape and resist whatever order has been established. This division of labor is central to the record. Machinery preserves enough repetition for the human players to become unstable. Instead of electronics liberating music from bodily inconsistency, the electronics allow the bodies to become more inconsistent, vulnerable and alive.

“Free Form Freak-Out” removes much of the shelter provided by groove. Sounds arrive as torn surfaces, pressure changes and interrupted gestures whose sources are difficult to identify. Yet the track never becomes a pile of random noise. The trio has recorded not only the ideal tone of each instrument but its entire physical situation: fingers, breath, wood, friction, room reflections and the complaint produced when an object is pushed beyond its polite range. The recording listens around the notes as carefully as it listens to them. What normally would be edited away becomes evidence that music is being made by materials with limits.

This attention to failure is not accidental. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not pursue perfection as the removal of mistakes, resistance or unintended sound. A perfect surface would destroy the album’s most important information. The creak tells us how much force is being applied. The breath tells us how long a phrase can be sustained. An unstable effect reveals that electricity and equipment are participating rather than merely obeying. Désarroi treats imperfection not as romantic decoration but as a method of preserving causation. Every sound carries some trace of what had to happen for it to exist.

At the center, “Evol Jam” turns love backward and then attempts to rebuild it. Aumüller repeats the idea that the more one loves, the greater one’s capacity for love becomes. Her voice is unusually tender, almost close enough to feel spoken directly into the listener’s ear, while guitar and harmonium gather a fragile song around it. Then language begins losing its stable shape. Words stretch, syllables detach and the voice becomes another acoustic substance entering the electronics. Meaning dissolves into sound before gradually finding its way back toward the original phrase.

That journey gives the song more weight than a simple affirmation could carry. Love is not preserved by keeping it untouched. It enters confusion, loses grammar, becomes noise and still attempts to return. The album does not oppose tenderness and extremity. Tenderness becomes radical because it remains exposed while the structure around it is failing. Aumüller’s voice is not protected from the trio’s disorienting processes; it is allowed to pass through them. When the phrase returns, it has survived rather than merely repeated itself.

“Burned” emerges with enough rhythmic drive to suggest rock, dance music or some shadowy late-night hybrid, but the track refuses to select one destination. Claps, rebounds, guitar movement and buried voices form a groove whose edges remain in motion. The title implies that the damage has already occurred. What we hear is not fire at its theatrical height but matter afterward, still releasing heat and changing composition. The trio’s production works similarly. Instruments are not presented in their untouched state. They arrive processed by contact with the other players, microphones, loops, amplifiers and room, each carrying residue from the larger event.

“Unlösbar” means insoluble or impossible to solve, and its bowed bass and tremolo guitar make unresolved tension into a complete environment. The instruments circle one another without agreeing upon which one is foreground, rhythm or obstruction. Faster movement briefly promises an escape, but acceleration merely generates additional angles. The track does not fail to solve its problem. It recognizes that certain problems remain productive precisely because no final answer can close them. Listening becomes less a hunt for resolution than a willingness to remain near incompatible truths.

The compact “Saumselig” slows that process into delay itself. The word suggests tardiness, dawdling or a refusal to proceed at the expected speed. Trembling tones and rubbing textures occupy a dim space where time appears reluctant to complete its next step. On an album already filled with loops, delayed signals and unstable forms, this brief piece reveals procrastination as another compositional method. A sound postpones its disappearance. A transition fails to arrive on schedule. What might be considered inactivity begins developing its own texture.

Then “Zurück zum Beton” returns us to concrete. S.Y.P.H.’s original song rejected sentimental fantasies of pure nature and called for a return to cities, subways, artificiality and human construction. Kammerflimmer Kollektief removes much of the original punk attack and discovers melancholy, intimacy and even sensual pleasure inside its argument. Aumüller sings over flickering double bass and delicate percussion, making concrete sound less like brutal architecture than a human-made surface carrying generations of touch, dirt, labor and memory. The group does not cover the song by reproducing its historical aggression. It rotates the song until another emotional face becomes visible.

Placed near the album’s end, the cover also provides an answer to the surrounding disorientation. The answer is not a return to nature, purity or a world before machines. It is a return to construction. Concrete is mixed, poured, shaped and allowed to harden; it is artificial, collective and capable of becoming a shelter, public square, prison or monument. Music is constructed through similarly ambiguous acts. Kammerflimmer Kollektief cuts fragments from jazz, dub, psychedelia, punk, improvisation and song, but refuses to restore them to their original cultural rooms. These materials are poured together and made to bear unfamiliar weight.

“Mayhem! (Reprise)” returns to the beginning without returning the listener to the same place. A reprise normally confirms that a theme has survived its journey, but here the journey has altered our hearing of the theme. After voices have dissolved, bass has abandoned its grounding function and punk has become a smoky ballad, the original mayhem no longer resembles simple disorder. It sounds like the condition from which every temporary order emerged. The album closes its circle while leaving the circle visibly cracked.

That is the deeper deception of Désarroi. Its wildness is carried through a trio playing with extraordinary restraint. Its most abstract sections contain bodily detail; its most accessible song is gradually dismantled; its punk cover becomes tender; and its loops create freedom rather than confinement. Kammerflimmer Kollektief does not hide meaning behind deliberate obscurity. It allows several meanings to remain active without forcing one to defeat the others. Music can be artificial and intimate, composed and improvised, comforting and structurally unsound.

The result resembles a building whose rooms remain usable even though none of the walls meet at dependable angles. You can enter, rest, dance, listen or become lost, sometimes during the same track. The floor creaks because somebody is walking across it. The harmonium wheezes because air is being forced through a body. The guitar becomes unrecognizable because recognition is only one small function sound can perform. Désarroi does not rescue the listener from disorientation. It makes disorientation habitable, then quietly demonstrates how much tenderness can survive there.

Juju - 2021 - Our Mother Was a Plant

Fuzz Club Records – FC70

 Our Mother Was a Plant compresses billions of years of biological history into one intimate family statement. Before humanity invented property, nations, engines, religions or the idea that nature was something outside us, life depended upon organisms turning sunlight, soil and water into a world other creatures could inhabit. Calling the plant our mother is not merely psychedelic whimsy. It restores kinship where modern life has installed hierarchy. Gioele Valenti builds the album around that forgotten relationship, but he does not retreat into an imaginary untouched garden. The music remains crowded with cities, displacement, racial division, mechanical rhythm and the uneasy knowledge that a species capable of recognizing its dependence upon the Earth has organized much of its existence around denying it.

“Death by Beautiful Things” opens with seduction already carrying its consequence. The bass and percussion establish a fluid, almost celebratory groove while guitars, voices and electronic details make the surface increasingly lush. Beauty is not accused of being false. The danger comes from wanting beautiful objects, images and sensations badly enough that their production, possession and disposal become invisible. The song can move the body while quietly implicating the appetite moving it. Juju’s psychedelia is political at precisely this level: pleasure is not forbidden, but neither is it allowed to pretend that it has no material history.

Valenti’s arrangements often feel much larger than the number of people involved. Bass, percussion, keyboards, guitar, voice and studio processing enter in carefully staggered layers, creating the impression of a collective ritual assembled by one central imagination. Repetition supplies the communal architecture. A phrase is not repeated because the song has stopped developing; it returns until individual ownership begins to weaken. The groove becomes a place where instruments, voices and listeners can temporarily occupy the same cycle. Psychedelia here is not escape from the body. It is the body discovering that rhythm connects it to other bodies before language decides how they should be divided.

“In a Ghetto” makes that division explicit. A ghetto is a space created through enforced separation, where people are contained geographically and then blamed for the conditions containment produces. Capra Informis’s djembe and choral presence intensify the track’s physical motion, but the percussion does not turn suffering into colorful spectacle. It creates a rhythm that refuses confinement. The groove keeps crossing the boundaries named by the title, while the blurred vocal seems to arrive from inside the imposed enclosure rather than reporting upon it from a safe distance. Juju’s response to segregation is not to imagine that music erases walls. It demonstrates that cultural memory and human motion continue passing through them.

“And Play a Game” initially sounds lighter, almost mischievous, but its title introduces another form of power. Games have boundaries, permitted actions, winners and losers, and somebody usually decides the rules before anyone begins. The track moves through repeated rhythmic episodes as though testing those rules from inside, accepting a pattern long enough to understand it and then slipping into another. Guitar and electronics repeatedly disturb the apparent stability of the beat. What might have become an uncomplicated dance track remains alert to the possibility that participation and manipulation can resemble one another. The invitation to play is attractive, but the music never reveals who owns the board.

“James Dean” places a familiar human face among the album’s older plant, ritual and collective imagery. Dean survives culturally as youth frozen before age could complicate the image, an icon repeatedly reproduced until the person beneath it becomes unreachable. Juju surrounds that kind of glamour with darker propulsion, treating celebrity as another beautiful thing capable of feeding upon life. The song is concise by the album’s standards, but its force comes from refusing a full explanation. Dean enters as symbol, velocity and premature ending. The culture remembers the pose because the pose is easier to consume than mortality.

“I Got Your Soul” turns possession into rhythm. The phrase can sound romantic, predatory, supernatural or commercial depending upon who speaks it and what they intend to do with what has been taken. The music keeps all those possibilities active through an uneasy funk pulse, nervous instrumental accents and a vocal that never settles into ordinary intimacy. Soul has religious meaning, musical meaning and market value; it can describe the irreducible center of a person or become a style sold back to an audience. Juju does not untangle those meanings. The track makes them rub together until possession itself begins sounding unstable.

That instability becomes heavier in “Patrick.” The groove remains present, but the surrounding sound tightens, with denser guitar and a vocal that appears trapped behind its own atmosphere. Across the album, Valenti repeatedly demonstrates that danceable music need not communicate uncomplicated happiness. Rhythm can express compulsion, anger, mourning or the physical need to keep moving when stillness would allow despair to catch up. “Patrick” feels especially close to that threshold. Its momentum is forceful, but the person inside the song does not necessarily seem free.

The nearly ten-minute “What a Bad Day” provides the album’s deepest descent. A large bass figure returns with the blunt inevitability of bad news that cannot be revised by hearing it again. Instead of constructing an elaborate progressive-rock journey around that repetition, Juju allows the groove to become heavier through duration. The listener begins by following it, then gradually feels followed by it. Voices and instrumental details pass around the central line like thoughts circling an event too large to absorb in one attempt. The title’s ordinary language makes the grief more effective. Human beings often reduce catastrophe to small phrases because daily vocabulary is all that remains available when experience has exceeded it.

The song also clarifies the album’s relationship with the refugee crisis. Political language tends to turn displaced people into quantities, movements, problems or threats. Music can reverse that process by restoring duration and bodily presence. A bass pattern occupies time that cannot be skipped without ending the encounter. Repeated voices remain in the room. The listener is not given statistics to evaluate but pressure to inhabit. Juju cannot reproduce another person’s experience of exile, yet the music can resist the speed with which public attention consumes suffering and moves on to the next subject.

“Sunny After Moon” closes with Capra Informis returning and the album opening toward light. The title reverses ordinary sequence: sunshine does not simply follow night as a guaranteed natural reward, but appears after the moon as a condition that must still be imagined. Acoustic and folk-like elements initially make the piece feel more exposed, then percussion and layered rhythm enlarge it into a final communal movement. Hope arrives, but not as proof that the preceding violence has been repaired. It is a practice of continuing, another cycle entered after darkness without pretending darkness has ceased to exist.

The plant at the center of the album embodies this kind of hope. Plants do not overcome hostile conditions through heroic individual will. They respond, adapt, exchange, spread roots, store information and depend upon relationships with soil, fungi, insects, weather and other living systems. Their apparent stillness conceals constant communication. Juju’s music operates similarly. Repetition creates roots, percussion carries signals, voices form temporary canopies, and studio layers establish an ecology in which no sound survives entirely alone. The record does not merely sing about connection. Its arrangements are built from interdependence.

Valenti’s stated inspirations include psychedelic thinkers and explorers of plant consciousness, but Our Mother Was a Plant works best when heard not as an illustrated reading list but as a challenge to the separation those figures attempted to address. The unconscious, the biosphere, politics and rhythm are not placed in different intellectual compartments. Racism, sexism, species hierarchy, displacement and private ownership appear as related consequences of a mind that has defined freedom as separation from everything upon which it depends. The album’s answer is not a perfected doctrine. It is reunion enacted through sound: opposing materials joined without requiring one to conquer the other.

That helps explain the dedication to A Chosen Few, the pioneering Black American motorcycle club. A motorcycle club may appear far removed from botanical ancestry, but it offers another image of collective autonomy, people constructing belonging, mobility and identity within a society prepared to restrict all three. The album’s imagined freedom is never purely solitary. It requires movement with others, a chosen formation capable of carrying individual difference without surrendering the shared road. Plants form networks below the visible surface; riders form them across geography; musicians form them through pulse.

Our Mother Was a Plant is therefore less interested in returning humanity to nature than in exposing the absurdity of believing humanity ever left it. Amplifiers, cities, motorcycles, records and electronic rhythm are not unnatural intrusions into an otherwise pure world. They are things the biosphere has produced through one particularly restless animal. The question is whether that animal can recognize its technologies as relationships carrying consequences rather than proof of exemption from consequence. Juju’s mixture of afrobeat, funk, krautrock, post-punk, shoegaze and ritual repetition refuses stylistic purity for the same reason. Purity is another fantasy of separation.

The record remains exhilarating because it does not demand that awareness arrive dressed as punishment. Its grooves are generous, its colors vivid and its repetitions capable of pleasure. Dance becomes a way of remembering that thought begins in a body already connected to gravity, air, food and other bodies. The album’s seriousness does not sit behind the music waiting to be decoded after the fun ends. It moves inside the fun, asking what pleasure might become when it no longer depends upon forgetting who paid for it.

Our mother was a plant, but the past tense is deliberately misleading. The plant is not a dead ancestor left behind during humanity’s ascent. It continues producing oxygen, food, shelter, medicine, color and the conditions under which every record can be heard. The relationship has not ended; only recognition has weakened. Juju restores that recognition through rhythm rather than nostalgia. The final sunlight does not illuminate a vanished paradise. It falls upon the damaged, crowded world that remains, where roots continue working beneath the concrete and another form of belonging is still possible.

Kajsa Lindgren - 2021 - Momentary Harmony

Recital – none

 Harmony is often described as agreement, several notes arriving together and accepting a shared identity. Momentary Harmony makes that agreement temporary. Voices, strings, piano and faint environmental traces meet long enough to form something warm and recognizable, then begin separating before the listener can possess it. Kajsa Lindgren does not treat this impermanence as failure. The music suggests that harmony may be valuable precisely because it cannot be permanently secured. People, memories and sounds briefly occupy the same emotional space, recognize one another, and move on carrying some alteration produced by the meeting.

“Abundance” opens the album with more feeling than its restrained scale initially reveals. Abundance here does not mean overcrowding or accumulation for its own sake. It means discovering that a few carefully placed tones already contain more relationships than attention can exhaust. Piano, voice and strings appear within generous amounts of air, allowing resonance to continue after the visible gesture has ended. Lindgren does not fill the room to prove that it is rich. She adjusts the listener’s scale until richness can be heard inside one sustained interval, one breath or the slow disappearance of a note.

This marks a quiet departure from her earlier work. Lindgren had often approached composition through field recordings, interviews and electroacoustic environments, using recorded places as materials from which another imagined ecology could be constructed. Momentary Harmony returns toward the classical instruments of her childhood, but she carries her field-recordist’s listening method with her. Piano, cello, lute, koto and voice are not treated as stable objects whose identities are already known. Each becomes a location. The microphone enters its surface, discovers weather inside the resonance and records the small disturbances that conventional arrangement might regard as background.

“For Voice I” and “For Voice II” stand near opposite ends of the album like two small human markers. Voice is present elsewhere in layered, choral or partially dissolved forms, but these titles draw attention to the body required before singing can exist. Air enters, muscles organize pressure, and vibration leaves one person to occupy another person’s room. Lindgren does not ask the voice to carry a narrative or establish a commanding lead. It becomes one material among others, intimate because its source is human and mysterious because processing and layering can make one throat sound communal, distant or remembered.

“Pärlan,” the pearl, offers an ideal image for Lindgren’s method. A pearl forms when an organism surrounds an irritation with repeated layers, transforming intrusion into something luminous without erasing the event that began it. The album’s pieces often seem built through an equivalent process. One tone attracts another; voices gather around an interval; cello resonance, piano wash or plucked string slowly covers a small uncertainty without making it disappear. Beauty is not presented as a flawless natural state. It forms through patient attention to whatever initially failed to fit.

“Interlute” makes its own tiny linguistic instrument by joining interlude to the lute heard across the record. The pun is modest, but it identifies how Lindgren organizes the album. Short pieces do not merely separate the important compositions. They are joints through which the larger body bends. “Interlute,” “Intermission,” “Feathers” and the two voice studies alter the listener’s posture between the more extended tracks, interrupting continuity without breaking the atmosphere. A minute of music can change the emotional temperature of everything placed before and after it.

The title piece contains the album’s central proposition without attempting to summarize it grandly. Harmony arrives as a condition produced by proximity. Different instrumental timbres retain their identities while their overtones create a third presence belonging completely to none of them. Lindgren’s collaborators repeatedly enter in this manner, not as featured soloists stepping beneath a spotlight, but as temporary inhabitants of the shared acoustic space. Bass, cello, koto, guitar, lute, piano, saxophone and several voices appear almost botanically, separate growths whose roots remain partly hidden beneath the same soil.

“Aero” makes air itself feel composed. Air is the invisible requirement connecting voice, saxophone, room resonance and the listener’s ear. It carries vibration while appearing empty, and Lindgren repeatedly uses this apparent emptiness as active material. Silence is never truly vacant. It contains decay, breath, microphone atmosphere and the anticipation produced when one sound has ended but another has not yet arrived. The album’s quietness therefore does not withdraw from the listener. It makes the medium between instrument and listener newly perceptible.

“Separate Thoughts” names another paradox. Thoughts may originate in separate minds, yet music allows them to coexist without requiring translation into identical language. Lindgren receives contributions from musicians in Sweden and the United States, then arranges their instrumental stems with the same sensitivity she previously applied to clusters of field recordings. The resulting ensemble does not need to have occupied one physical room at one time in order to create intimacy. Separation becomes one of the conditions from which harmony is built rather than the opposite of connection.

That idea carries unusual weight for an album completed around the beginning of the 2020s, when physical separation became a defining social experience. Momentary Harmony does not turn that historical circumstance into an explicit concept or documentary device, but its music understands how closeness can be assembled from fragments. A recorded voice can meet a cello overtone later and elsewhere. A piano can provide a room into which a distant koto enters. People who were separate during the act of recording can become briefly simultaneous whenever the album is played.

“Korall,” the longest piece, suggests a structure created through countless small lives contributing to something far larger than any one participant. Coral appears motionless on the human scale, but it is continuously living, growing and responding to environmental pressure. Lindgren’s arrangement develops with similar quiet multiplicity. Choral and instrumental colors accumulate without becoming a wall, creating branches, cavities and delicate surfaces through which other tones can pass. The piece does not monumentalize the ensemble. It reveals how a large form can emerge from many vulnerable additions.

“Feathers” lasts barely more than a minute, but its lightness is not the absence of weight. A feather is evidence of a body, flight, warmth and evolutionary history, even after it has become separated from the creature that produced it. The miniature pieces on Momentary Harmony behave like these detached signs. They arrive without full explanation, yet imply a larger organism continuing somewhere beyond the frame. Their brevity allows them to remain suggestive rather than incomplete. Each is a small object capable of changing the direction of the surrounding air.

“Vagga till sömns” means to rock or cradle someone to sleep. Placed near the album’s end, it turns listening into an act of care. A lullaby does not solve whatever threatens the sleeper, and sleep itself is not permanent safety. The singer or musician simply creates a temporary enclosure in which vigilance can be lowered. Lindgren’s harmonies offer the same modest shelter. They do not promise transcendence, recovery or escape from time. They create a few minutes in which several sounds hold one another gently enough that the listener may also feel held.

The closing “For Voice II” returns the album from ensemble space to its most fragile instrument. After the harmonic abundance, pearls, air, coral and feathers, the voice remains a body making itself audible across distance. The second study does not complete or correct the first. It demonstrates that returning to an apparently similar material creates another encounter rather than repetition. The singer has passed through the album, and the listener has learned to hear the surrounding emptiness differently.

The five postcards included with the original vinyl edition extend this interest in brief, separated impressions. A postcard carries an image from somewhere else and only enough room for a small message. It cannot reproduce the place, relationship or journey it represents. Its meaning depends upon selection: this view, these words, this recipient, this moment. The thirteen tracks operate similarly. None attempts to contain an entire emotional history. Each sends a limited but carefully chosen signal from one interior place toward another.

Momentary Harmony is delicate, but delicacy should not be mistaken for timidity. The album’s restraint requires confidence that a faint voice, one plucked string or a slowly changing chord can carry emotional force without reinforcement from dramatic climax. Lindgren repeatedly stops before beauty can become coercive. She does not tell the listener what must be felt or inflate private emotion into universal revelation. The pieces offer themselves as conditions in which feeling might occur.

Harmony ultimately remains momentary because the people and sounds creating it remain alive. They breathe, change position, fall silent and enter other relationships. Permanent agreement would require the music to stop responding. Lindgren chooses something more vulnerable: a collection of temporary alignments whose endings do not invalidate their existence. Every piece gently forms a world, permits us to enter, and releases it before familiarity can turn the world into property. What remains is not the harmony itself, but the altered attention with which we hear the next one arriving.

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.