Dungen - 2022 - En Ar For Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog

Mexican Summer – MEX336

 One is too much and a thousand is never enough describes addiction with brutal economy, but it can also describe creativity, collecting, memory and nearly every appetite that promises satisfaction while quietly moving the finish line. Dungen places that contradiction at the center of an album made during Gustav Ejstes’s early years of sobriety, when removing intoxication did not simplify his inner world but exposed more of it. The music is bright, tuneful and often immediately welcoming, yet beneath its polished surfaces are late-night questions, broken habits, recovered memories and the nervous discovery that reality can feel more psychedelic when nothing is being used to soften its edges.

“Skövde” begins with the place where Ejstes grew up, opening the album through geography and memory rather than a declaration of reinvention. Acoustic strumming, layered harmony and Johan Holmegard’s loose-limbed drums create a warm forward motion, but the nostalgia never becomes a wish to crawl backward into childhood. The past is visited because it contains unfinished relationships, particularly memories of Ejstes’s older brother and friends, and because sobriety can return old scenes with their colors unexpectedly restored. Dungen has always drawn from Swedish musical history, but here personal history becomes equally important. The hometown is not a picturesque folk setting. It is the first room in a life being reentered with altered eyesight.

“Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” makes emotional availability sound almost frightening. Its title, “If There Is Something You Want to Ask Me,” opens a door without knowing what question will enter. The music responds with gleaming harmonies and restless rhythmic detail, carrying the openness forward before hesitation can close it again. Reine Fiske’s guitar remains unmistakable, capable of moving from melodic ornament into scorched distortion without making tenderness and violence feel like separate languages. Around him, Mattias Gustavsson and Holmegard provide the elastic foundation that allows Ejstes’s increasingly electronic ideas to enter without turning Dungen into a studio project wearing the band’s name.

“Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus,” the night’s final streak of light, occupies the unstable hour when the fun has ended but the desire to begin again has not. Guitar figures skip with the clipped repetition of sequenced electronics while the drums sound simultaneously rooted in late-1960s psychedelic rock and the breakbeat logic of acid house and jungle. That overlap is central to the album. Ejstes does not introduce rhythm boxes, loops and scratching as modern additions pasted onto an older style. He hears the same controlled noise in fuzz guitar, Public Enemy production, Mitch Mitchell’s drumming, Bo Hansson’s organ and the layered breaks of 1990s UK dance music. History stops being a straight timeline. Different decades become pieces of equipment connected inside the same room.

“Möbler” brings that experiment into domestic space. Its title means “Furniture,” an almost comically ordinary word for music that begins with a relaxed bossa-like shuffle and echoing organ before the band gradually loosens the room from its foundations. Furniture defines how a person occupies a home, where bodies rest and which direction they face, yet it can also become the accumulated evidence of a life that has stopped moving. Dungen uses the song’s comfortable surface as a launch site. Holmegard’s drums keep testing the limits of the arrangement while the keyboards drift into colder space, transforming a furnished interior into something lonely and orbital. Home remains visible below, but the song has lost the route back to it.

“Höstens Färger” returns to Earth through the colors of autumn. The arrangement has the compact generosity of handmade pop, with melodic bass, soft keyboards and a guitar line that can suggest familiar 1970s songwriting without becoming an imitation of it. Autumn carries beauty precisely because its colors announce disappearance. Leaves become most vivid at the point when the tree is withdrawing life from them, making the season a natural companion to an album concerned with change, sobriety and the complicated pleasure of becoming someone who can no longer live exactly as before. Dungen does not turn that awareness into mourning. The song accepts loss as one of the processes through which color becomes visible.

“Var Har Du Varit?” asks “Where Have You Been?” and answers through one of the album’s most radical rhythmic collisions. Frenetic programming moves beneath or beside the live band, allowing jungle, psychedelic rock and melodic pop to occupy the same nervous system. The song had existed earlier, but its reappearance here gives the question additional weight. Where has the singer been while his life continued around him? Where does a familiar song go between versions? Dungen does not erase the earlier recording by remaking it. The new arrangement demonstrates that returning is not the same as going backward. A piece of music can revisit its own history carrying evidence of everything that happened afterward.

“Klockan Slår Den Är Mycket Nu” enters the album’s deepest late-night chamber. The clock is striking and it is already very late, yet the music refuses the clean choice between going to bed and continuing the night. Piano, choppy rhythm, scratching, soft-focus keyboards and spoken or sampled fragments create an environment where exhaustion and overstimulation coexist. Clocks provide objective measurements, but anyone who has remained awake too long knows that time eventually loses its ordinary proportions. Minutes expand, thoughts repeat and familiar rooms acquire an emotional weather they do not possess during daylight. The track does not depict a wild party. It occupies the lonelier period after momentum has become habit and the question of stopping can no longer be postponed.

The brief title piece reduces the album’s central struggle to something quieter and more exposed. “One is too much and a thousand is never enough” describes the collapse of scale inside compulsion. The first drink, purchase, record, experience or idea already contains the possibility of excess, while the thousandth still cannot satisfy the need that set the process in motion. Yet music complicates the warning. Repetition and appetite also make art possible. Dungen’s records are built from Ejstes’s inability to remain inside one musical box, his continuing need to hear what happens when another influence, sound or rhythmic system is admitted. The problem is not desire itself but the moment desire begins erasing the life it promised to enlarge.

“Om Natten” closes the record at night, but not within the agitated hours of the preceding tracks. Piano chords, soft electronic movement, flute, guitar and distant details leave the music suspended between melancholy and rest. Nothing is conquered. Sobriety has not converted life into a resolved major chord, and clarity does not prevent loneliness, regret or craving from returning. What has changed is the ability to remain present while those feelings move through the room. Earlier Dungen records often reached transcendence through overwhelming color and collective force. Here transcendence can occur through a piano played gently enough not to wake someone nearby.

The album was recorded in pieces beginning in 2017, giving its different ideas time to accumulate rather than forcing them into one predetermined aesthetic. Producer Mattias Glavå encouraged Ejstes to follow the ideas that initially seemed least appropriate for a Dungen record, while Fiske, Gustavsson and Holmegard helped turn those private experiments back into collective music. This is why the electronics never feel like a replacement for the band. Loops and samples create new surfaces for human playing to disturb; programmed breakbeats make the physical elasticity of Holmegard’s drums more vivid; scratching and fuzz become neighboring forms of controlled interference.

En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog is therefore not the sound of Dungen becoming sober and sensible. It is the sound of the group discovering that freedom does not require self-destruction. The record remains full of excess, but the excess has been redirected into arrangement, color, rhythm and curiosity. Its calm songs contain strange machinery; its most experimental passages retain melodic warmth; its brightest moments remain aware that the night can return. One may be too much and a thousand never enough, but these nine songs suggest another possible measurement: enough attention to feel what is happening, enough courage to let it remain real, and enough music to continue without disappearing inside it.

Kungens Man - 2019 - Chef

Riot Season – REPOSELP074

Chef means boss or chief in Swedish, but Kungens Män makes an album in which command continually changes hands. Three guitars, bass, synthesizer and drums enter without a written route, building four long pieces from repetition, small signals and the willingness to follow whichever musician has accidentally discovered the next useful direction. Nobody remains chief because leadership here is not a permanent rank. It may belong to the drummer establishing a pulse, the bassist changing one note beneath it, a synthesizer opening an unexpected horizon or a guitar introducing a phrase that the others decide is worth inhabiting. The title becomes a quiet joke about authority made by musicians whose strongest organizing principle is mutual attention.

“Fyrkantig böjelse” begins with a rhythm that feels squared off, regular and dependable, while everything above it leans toward less orderly desires. Mattias “Indy” Pettersson’s drums and Magnus Öhrn’s bass create a firm moving surface, but the three guitars refuse to behave as one large block. Mikael Tuominen, Hans Hjelm and Gustav Nygren enter from different angles, one repeating, another shading the edges and another testing how far the groove can be bent before it stops recognizing itself. Peter Erikson’s synthesizer does not hover behind them as cosmic decoration. It behaves like unstable wiring inside the structure, occasionally flashing, humming or changing the apparent size of the room.

This is where Kungens Män’s improvisational method differs from the idea of a jam as several musicians waiting for their turn to solo. The group decides upon a key and begins, using loops, motifs and memorable phrases as instant composition rather than as vehicles for individual display. A pattern may appear almost accidental, but once the others recognize its potential they begin reinforcing, disturbing and redirecting it. The music becomes songlike without having been written as a song. Its hooks are agreements reached in public, and their fragility gives them unusual force. Everyone knows that one careless move could scatter the structure, which makes each successful continuation feel newly earned.

“Öppen för stängda dörrar,” open to closed doors, slows the record into a stranger social and architectural space. The title describes an impossible hospitality: willingness directed toward something that refuses entry. The music responds through dub-like emptiness, muted guitar repetition and synthesizer sounds appearing in the gaps rather than filling them. Each closed door seems to create another room behind it, and the band investigates those invisible spaces by reducing pressure instead of increasing it. Echo, decay and silence become structural materials. A guitar figure continues almost privately while electronics suggest activity behind walls the listener cannot cross.

The piece demonstrates how carefully this six-member group can handle absence. Three guitars could easily turn every available frequency into crowded upholstery, but the players repeatedly choose not to occupy the obvious space. One instrument establishes a line and the others allow it to remain exposed long enough to acquire depth. The synthesizer sends small disturbances through the surrounding air; bass and drums maintain motion without insisting that the music travel quickly. Restraint becomes another form of collective strength. The band sounds large because its members understand how much distance can exist between six people listening closely.

“Män med medel,” men with means, arrives with considerably more muscle. The phrase can suggest resources, money, access and the quiet confidence of people accustomed to being able to act, but Kungens Män turns those means into pure physical momentum. Fuzz guitar tears across the groove while drums push the music with a directness largely absent from the preceding track. The band’s rock history becomes audible without defeating its improvisational freedom. Riffs are not treated as guilty pleasures that must be disguised beneath abstraction. A strong riff is accepted, repeated and driven until its apparent simplicity begins generating its own forms of disturbance.

The track also clarifies why Chef was described as more direct than the group’s preceding Fuzz på svenska. Directness does not mean that the music has become predictable or conventionally composed. It means that the players recognize when an idea does not need additional camouflage. Once the groove catches fire, they trust its physical intelligence. Guitars collide, separate and return with different textures, while bass and drums keep the central mechanism operating beneath the surface damage. The group’s experimental character survives not through constant novelty, but through the decision to discover how much one apparently straightforward idea can contain.

“Eftertankens blanka krankhet” closes the album in the reflective condition its title suggests, joining afterthought with a gleaming or polished kind of sickness. A repeated motif establishes a hypnotic center while the surrounding instruments produce increasingly vivid activity. The piece does not rush toward the explosive release that prolonged psychedelic rock often promises. It remains fascinated by the state created before release, when anticipation itself has become the environment. Guitars shimmer, scrape and stretch outward; synthesizer tones gather around them; the rhythm section continues holding the thought in place long enough for reflection to become slightly unhealthy.

Afterthought can be a form of wisdom, but it can also become the mind replaying an event until every possible alternative has been worn smooth. The track occupies that border. Repetition allows the listener to look again, yet every return changes what is being examined. One guitar phrase appears more fragile after a synthesizer enters beneath it; a drum accent makes the same motif suddenly feel impatient; a low bass movement darkens material that previously seemed serene. Nothing is merely repeated because the context surrounding it has already changed. Reflection becomes composition.

The four titles form a loose vocabulary of shape, access, means and contemplation. A square inclination attempts to desire within fixed boundaries. Closed doors invite or deny passage. Men with means possess the power to move. Afterthought examines what movement has produced. Kungens Män does not force those phrases into a declared concept, but their sequence gives the album a subtle narrative about control. Structures are established, entrances are tested, power is exercised and the consequences are considered. All the while, the actual music demonstrates a more flexible model of authority in which nobody commands from outside the group.

That model depends upon friendship and accumulated experience. The musicians came from different corners of Swedish rock, jazz and improvisation, but developed a shared language simple enough to remain open: establish a tonal center, find a beat and listen for the moment when unrelated sounds begin forming one body. Their limitations are not concealed. Effects may malfunction, a transition may arrive awkwardly and a phrase may repeat because nobody yet knows what should follow it. Those rough areas are part of the method because they reveal the music thinking rather than merely presenting decisions that have already been perfected.

Chef is therefore unusually effective not because Kungens Män has finally disciplined its improvisation into respectable songs, but because the group recognizes that improvisation and songwriting need not be enemies. Catchiness can be discovered in the moment. Repetition can preserve uncertainty rather than eliminate it. A riff can be direct while its future remains completely unknown. Four pieces are enough because each one finds a different answer to the same question: how can several people create order without appointing a permanent ruler?

The king’s men have named their record Chief, yet the throne remains vacant. The drums lead until the bass redirects them; the guitars multiply until the synthesizer changes the weather; a loose screw or failing effect introduces an idea no musician could have planned. Authority belongs briefly to whatever sound makes everyone else listen harder. Chef is not music without leadership. It is music in which leadership remains alive because it is always being passed along.

 

Catherine Christer Hennix - 2023 - Solo for Tamburium

Blank Forms Editions – BF-061

 Solo for Tamburium begins with a contradiction hidden inside the word “solo.” Catherine Christer Hennix performs alone, yet the instrument she created contains eighty-eight separately recorded tamburas waiting beneath a keyboard interface. One body addresses a multitude. The keyboard does not make these sounds obedient in the ordinary sense, because every activated tone enters a growing harmonic environment whose behavior cannot be reduced to the key that released it. Strings meet strings, overtones collide, rhythmic pulses appear without percussion, and the single performer gradually disappears inside a vast sounding presence.

A tambura traditionally sustains the tonal environment within which another music can unfold. Its repeated strings do not merely provide background or accompaniment; they establish the field that allows pitch, intonation and melodic direction to acquire meaning. Hennix removes the expected foreground. There is no singer or instrumental soloist arriving above the drone, because the drone has become the complete subject. What is usually treated as support is enlarged until it reveals an entire internal universe. The ground rises and becomes the architecture, weather and horizon at once.

The Tamburium extends this principle without severing it from physical strings. Hennix does not imitate tamburas through a generic synthesizer patch. She works with recordings of precisely tuned instruments, organizing their sustained vibrations through a keyboard of her own design. Digital or electronic control therefore meets a devotional acoustic practice whose power depends upon continuous sounding and exact attention to tuning. Technology does not replace the old instrument. It allows Hennix to approach it at another scale, combining more simultaneous resonances than one pair of human hands could ordinarily maintain.

At first the seventy-eight-minute piece may seem to present one enormous, slowly changing chord. That impression does not survive close listening. Bright clusters appear along the upper edge while darker tones gather underneath, and the frequencies between them generate beating patterns that behave like hidden percussion. Some pulses move quickly enough to create a trembling surface; others arrive so slowly that they resemble changes in breathing or pressure. Hennix does not need to introduce a drum because rhythm already exists inside the interference between sustained tones. The music’s apparent stillness is crowded with motion.

This creates an unusual relationship between the recording and the room in which it is played. The piece is not entirely contained by the speakers. Its frequencies interact with walls, furniture, distance and the listener’s position, causing certain tones to strengthen while others partially disappear. Walking through the space can feel like moving among chambers inside one immense instrument. A frequency suddenly becomes visible to the ear, then fades after one step, replaced by another that had been present all along. The room does not simply reproduce Solo for Tamburium. It collaborates with it.

Time changes in a similar way. The piece does not progress through themes that can be remembered as a sequence of events. It accumulates conditions. One region of harmony gradually becomes another, but the exact border remains impossible to locate because the earlier material continues resonating inside what follows. The listener may suddenly realize that the music has become brighter, denser or lower without knowing when the transformation occurred. Hennix removes the satisfaction of pointing to a decisive change and replaces it with the more mysterious experience of discovering that change has already happened.

This is not passivity disguised as patience. Hennix is actively shaping a highly sensitive system in which every addition alters the meaning of the entire field. A new tone can thicken the fundamental beneath everything, introduce a sharp light into the upper frequencies or create pulses through its friction with nearby pitches. Removing a layer can be equally dramatic, exposing structures that had been concealed by their own richness. The performance requires restraint because each decision continues producing consequences long after the key has been touched.

Hennix described the state sought through this harmonic process as a divine equilibrium or distinctionless condition. The music approaches that state not by making all sounds identical, but by making their boundaries increasingly difficult to defend. Individual tones remain present, yet their overtones pass through one another until ownership becomes uncertain. The ear stops hearing a collection of separate strings and begins hearing one distributed body whose internal parts cannot be completely isolated. Difference has not been erased. It has entered a relationship so dense that no single element can claim independence.

Her long study with Pandit Pran Nath is central to this understanding. The carefully tuned tamburas used in his Kirana practice were not casual drones switched on beneath a performance. Their continuous sounding required attention, discipline and devotional purpose. Hennix carried that experience into a practice also shaped by mathematics, electronic music and tuned keyboards. Solo for Tamburium does not place spiritual tradition on one side and technological experimentation on the other. It demonstrates that exact calculation and devotion can be two methods of approaching the same threshold.

The keyboard becomes particularly important in this history. Hennix’s earlier work explored how modal systems including raga, maqam and the blues might be mapped onto tuned keyboards without being forced into the gravitational habits of ordinary Western harmony. The Tamburium continues that investigation while changing the instrument beneath her fingers. Pressing a key no longer produces one cleanly bounded note followed by decay. It activates a recorded string whose harmonic life extends outward, meeting other strings and generating relationships too complex to remain visually represented by the keyboard’s orderly rows.

That difference between appearance and consequence gives the work some of its quiet radicalism. A keyboard suggests clear divisions: this key, then that key; one pitch separated from the next. The sound immediately undermines those divisions. Frequencies overlap, reinforce and disturb one another until the neat visual system becomes the entrance to something without equivalent borders. Hennix uses an instrument associated with rational organization to create an experience in which organization exceeds the listener’s ability to separate its parts.

The title “Tamburium” also suggests more than a newly invented device. It sounds like the name of a place, an element or a chamber designed specifically for tambura resonance. Once the performance begins, the distinction becomes unnecessary. The instrument generates an environment, and the environment behaves like an instrument. Hennix plays both. She activates strings through the keyboard while also shaping the acoustic world those strings create, adjusting its density and harmonic pressure until the listener is no longer positioned safely outside the object being heard.

The recording was made at Berlin’s Silent Green, a former crematorium transformed into a cultural space. Even without knowing that history, the music carries the sensation of occupying a large resonant structure where sound can linger and gather around itself. Knowing it adds another layer without dictating the interpretation. A building once devoted to bodily endings becomes the site of vibrations sustained beyond ordinary instrumental duration. Nothing in the music illustrates death, but its continuous resonance makes disappearance difficult to define. A tone fades into another tone rather than simply ending.

The double-vinyl edition necessarily divides the seventy-eight-minute performance into physical sections, while the compact disc and digital version preserve it as a single file. Neither form is neutral. Turning records introduces pauses and bodily action, repeatedly returning the listener to the fact that sound requires a material carrier. The uninterrupted version allows Hennix’s harmonic environment to remain continuously inhabited, removing most evidence that it must fit inside an object. One edition reveals the walls of the container; the other allows the container to disappear.

Solo for Tamburium asks for time, but it does not demand a single correct mode of attention. The listener can sit directly before it, walk through the room, let it mingle with ordinary activity or discover after many minutes that ordinary activity has slowed to meet it. The work does not punish distraction. Its continuity allows attention to leave and return, each return revealing a structure that has continued developing without waiting to be observed. The music behaves less like a story requiring every sentence than a weather system whose reality does not depend upon constant inspection.

That independence is part of its spiritual force. Hennix does not manufacture transcendence through a theatrical climax, sudden silence or overwhelming increase in volume. She establishes conditions in which perception may gradually release its usual hierarchy. Foreground and background exchange places. Tone becomes rhythm, rhythm becomes spatial movement, and the listener becomes another resonant object within the field. Nothing announces the instant of transformation because the desire for a marked instant belongs to the form of time the piece is quietly replacing.

The work ends after seventy-eight minutes, but duration has made its ending difficult to accept as a clean boundary. Harmonic residue remains in the room, and the nervous system continues searching for pulses that are no longer physically present. This aftereffect is not separate from the composition. Hennix has trained the listener to hear relationships that ordinary environments often conceal, so the refrigerator, electrical current, traffic or distant machinery encountered afterward may briefly join the same expanded continuum. The Tamburium has stopped, but the world has become harder to divide into music and everything else.

Solo for Tamburium is therefore not an enormous drone placed before the listener as a monument. It is a perceptual instrument operating through the listener. Its eighty-eight recorded tamburas generate the material, Hennix shapes their relationships, the room selects which frequencies become prominent, and the body completes the work by converting vibration into space, rhythm and altered time. One performer begins the process, but the solo does not remain singular. It expands until solitude itself becomes crowded with resonance.

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.