Goat - 2022 - Oh Death

Rocket Recordings – LAUNCH287

 The title says death, but the cover refuses to dress for a funeral. Enormous legs in red shoes frame a crowded ceremonial scene. Goat heads guard a triangular structure crowned by a white tooth. Piano keys form roads and floors beneath bodies, horns, animal shapes, staring eyes and repeated patterns that seem capable of reproducing forever. Everything is eating, dancing, falling, watching or being transformed into something else. Death has entered, but it cannot persuade anybody to sit still.

That visual contradiction is the album’s governing energy. Oh Death does not treat mortality as blankness, silence or final withdrawal. It treats death as one stage inside a larger circulation of bodies, rhythm and matter. A person disappears, but the beat has already entered other people. The living carry gestures, stories, fears, melodies and physical habits inherited from those who are gone. Goat’s answer to death is therefore not denial. It is intensified participation. If life is temporary, then the drums must be struck while hands are available.

This was the group’s first full studio album in six years. Their previous record had been called Requiem, which made the long silence afterward appear suspiciously conclusive. A band already hidden behind masks, shifting identities and a deliberately unreliable origin mythology could have vanished without issuing a formal explanation. Instead, Goat returned with an album whose opening song is called “Soon You Die,” as though the appropriate way to announce survival were to remind everyone that survival remains temporary.

The record begins with a fragment of the old childhood rhyme about seeing a hearse and realizing that one day it will carry you. It is a morbid piece of playground folklore, death converted into something children can repeat rhythmically before they fully understand its scale. Goat immediately turns that memento mori into propulsion. Drums begin advancing, fuzz guitar tears across the stereo field, and the voices reduce mortality to a blunt communal chant. You will die. The reason may remain unavailable. The useful question is what the body does before then.

“Soon You Die” contains the whole album in miniature. The opening words establish inevitability, but the music refuses paralysis. Guitar bends and scorches with the extravagant physicality associated with Eddie Hazel, while the percussion behaves less like accompaniment than a crowd gathering around the song. Goat’s singers do not offer the private confession of a single narrator. Their voices arrive as proclamations, warnings and shared instructions. The self becomes less important than the ritual passing through it.

The masks matter here. Rock music often teaches listeners to connect every sound to an identifiable personality, biography and marketable face. Goat continually interrupts that transaction. The costumes may create spectacle, but anonymity also shifts attention away from the ordinary celebrity machinery that converts music into an extension of individual fame. The musicians become temporary occupants of roles. A performer can leave, another can enter, and Goat remains a larger creature whose exact anatomy is intentionally difficult to confirm.

That does not mean there are no individuals inside the music. The playing is too physically specific for that. Hands strike skins, fingers pull strings, and voices strain against the force surrounding them. But the album treats individuality as something contributed to collective motion rather than something elevated above it. The rhythm does not ask who receives credit for beginning the dance. It asks whether everyone else will enter.

“Chukua Pesa” contracts the opening explosion into a shorter, more hypnotic piece. Its title is Swahili and can be read as an instruction involving taking money, placing commerce beside an album preoccupied with death, nationhood, blessing and impermanence. Money is one of humanity’s great attempts to make value portable and survivable. It can cross distances, outlive owners and continue directing behavior after the labor that produced it has been forgotten. Goat places the phrase inside a piece that feels older and stranger than any financial system, letting repetition expose how temporary the supposedly permanent arrangements of society may be.

The group’s use of sounds associated with African music has always been central to both its appeal and the questions surrounding it. Goat describes its music as world music in the most literal sense, a field in which psych rock, funk, folk, jazz, post-punk and geographically dispersed rhythmic traditions can interact. That openness can be exhilarating, but it should not turn distinct musical cultures into anonymous mystical ingredients. Oh Death is strongest when its references behave as active relationships rather than exotic decorations, when the musicians acknowledge through their playing that every rhythm arrived through actual communities, histories and people.

“Under No Nation” makes that refusal of borders explicit. The bass and drums produce a severe, elastic funk while guitar arrives in compact scratches, fuzz detonations and wah-wah pressure. The title imagines freedom from the nation as an organizing identity, but the song does not replace politics with passive universalism. Its groove feels demanding. To stand under no nation means losing the protection, mythology and ready-made belonging a nation supplies, while also escaping the command to treat strangers as enemies because a border assigned them elsewhere.

Goat announced the song through one of their deliberately ridiculous myths, claiming that the gods had delivered its manuscript at a drunken Round Table of Funk because humanity needed to start grooving properly again. The joke contains a serious idea. Dance can produce a temporary form of citizenship. People with incompatible languages and histories can agree upon pulse before they agree upon doctrine. For several minutes, the body belongs less to a nation than to the rhythm moving through the room.

That does not make dance politically innocent. Music can be marketed, stripped of context and used to sell fantasies of borderless togetherness while the musicians and traditions being borrowed remain unequally valued. Goat’s costume mythology risks encouraging listeners to hear all non-Western reference points as one generalized zone of ritual mystery. Yet the unruliness of the actual recordings repeatedly exceeds that simplification. The music does not become a smooth multicultural showroom. Its ingredients scrape against one another, preserving difference through friction.

“Do the Dance” turns instruction into gleeful coercion. Its heavy double-drum stomp carries a touch of glam rock and the martial bounce associated with Adam and the Ants, but Goat stuffs that framework with enough percussion and shrieking color to make the historical reference unstable. The song knows there is something faintly absurd about demanding spontaneous movement. Dancing is supposed to be freedom, yet someone is giving orders. The contradiction becomes part of the fun.

The title can also be heard as the simplest answer to mortality on the record. Theology may remain uncertain. The cause of death may be hidden. History may misidentify what a life contributed. But a living body can still move beside another living body. Dance is meaning produced without waiting for a complete explanation. It does not defeat death, but it prevents death from owning the whole interval before its arrival.

“Apegoat” provides the first short rupture in the sequence. These compact transitional pieces are important because Oh Death is mixed and arranged with almost comical density. The major tracks arrive packed with percussion, distorted guitars, voices, horns and effects. Without openings in the structure, the album’s intensity could become a single unbroken surface. “Apegoat” creates a side chamber where the listener can briefly examine the strange architecture before being pulled back into it.

The word itself joins evolutionary ancestry to the band’s chosen animal. Goat’s mythology frequently treats human, animal and spirit as porous categories. The cover performs the same operation, merging limbs, horns, faces, teeth and instruments until identity becomes anatomical collage. This is not nature presented as a peaceful alternative to civilization. Nature on Oh Death is appetite, reproduction, decay, pleasure and mutation. The goat does not symbolize innocence. It survives by eating almost anything.

“Goatmilk” begins the second half with one of the album’s richest mixtures of groove and woodwind color. Flute and saxophone loosen the hard edges of the rhythm while also opening a route toward free jazz. The title suggests nourishment produced by the group’s own symbolic animal, as though Goat has become both performer and food source. Milk sustains early life, but here it is delivered through fuzz, breath and rhythmic pressure rather than pastoral calm.

The horns do not behave as expensive ornaments brought in to certify musical sophistication. They seem to have grown inside the percussion. Their phrases can be melodic, abrasive or environmental, moving between recognizable jazz language and the cries of instruments being tested at their physical borders. Goat’s greatest arrangements often make it impossible to tell whether a sound has entered as foreground or atmosphere. By the time the ear identifies it, it has already changed the behavior of the whole track.

“Blow the Horns” makes that instruction explicit and then couples it with a lyric concerning the arrival of a child. Birth and announcement have long belonged together. Horns call communities toward ceremonies, danger, worship, war and royal arrival. Here the birth does not contradict the album’s fixation on death. It completes it. Every birth introduces another death into the future, but it also enlarges love, responsibility and possibility in the present.

The guitar harmonies briefly recall the paired leads of Thin Lizzy, a reference that sounds almost startlingly conventional inside Goat’s shifting world. Yet those harmonies are not used to stabilize the music into classic-rock familiarity. They become another bright ceremonial language passing through. Goat can absorb a recognizable rock gesture without allowing it to dictate the song’s entire identity.

This is one reason Oh Death avoids sounding like a collection of record-shop references despite the ease with which individual influences can be named. Eddie Hazel, Afrobeat, desert blues, free jazz, post-punk, glam, folk ritual and psychedelic rock are all audible, but Goat does not line them up chronologically or respectfully. The band treats recorded history as simultaneous. Music from different decades and regions arrives in the same present because that is how listening actually works now. A person can encounter a Malian guitarist, a New York no-wave record, a Swedish folk melody and a Detroit funk solo within the same hour.

The danger of this simultaneity is that history can flatten into style. The achievement is that Goat often prevents that flattening through sheer commitment to physical groove. These are not references pasted onto a neutral indie-rock foundation. The rhythm changes the foundation itself. Funk is not a guitar effect; it is the relationship among bass, drums, silence and bodily expectation. Free jazz is not a burst of random saxophone; it is permission for instrumental voices to create structure through friction. Folk is not an acoustic interlude; it is material that survives because communities keep carrying it.

“Remind Yourself” is among the album’s clearest pieces of advice. Its rhythm has the playful, interlocking quality of early-1980s New York records where funk, post-punk and dance music were not yet patrolling their borders carefully. The song’s title is incomplete enough to remain useful. Remind yourself of what? That you will die, that the body is alive, that identity is temporary, that another person exists beyond your interpretation, or that joy requires active recollection?

Memory is not passive storage. A person repeatedly reconstructs the past according to present needs. Goat’s masks make that process theatrical. The band invents histories, repeats myths and refuses to clarify where documentary fact ends. This could be dismissed as gimmickry, but it also mirrors how communities create themselves. Shared identity depends upon stories people agree to carry, even when those stories contain exaggeration, contradiction and symbolic truth rather than courtroom accuracy.

“Blessings” lasts barely more than a minute and ends with piano, a surprisingly exposed sound after so much amplified pressure. A blessing is another act whose effects cannot be measured reliably. Someone speaks care toward another person without knowing whether the words will protect them, change them or even be remembered. The value lies partly in the giving. A blessing sends hope beyond the giver’s control.

The piano sounds almost domestic, as though the public ritual has briefly moved into a smaller room. Goat’s scale contracts from masked festival spectacle to keys being struck one at a time. This change does not expose the larger tracks as false. Ceremony and intimacy are not enemies. The enormous dance may be built from countless private acts of attention, just as a crowd is made from individual bodies that will eventually disappear separately.

“Passes Like Clouds” closes the album by allowing the forward charge to drift into desert-blues space. The title supplies the record’s gentlest account of impermanence. Clouds do not fail when they change shape or vanish. Passing is their nature. They hold water temporarily, alter light, cast shadows and travel beyond the observer’s horizon. Human life is more painful because consciousness attaches itself to continuity, but the same principle remains: form gathers, affects its surroundings and disperses.

The song does not end with a funeral march or final verdict. It moves outward. Guitar lines hover above a patient pulse, and the feverish density of the earlier tracks gives way to distance. After an album that repeatedly places mortality inside the body, “Passes Like Clouds” relocates it into weather. Death is no longer only the future event waiting for each person. It is the continuous transformation already occurring in cells, relationships, generations and memory.

That movement gives Oh Death an arc without turning it into a formal concept album. “Soon You Die” begins with the blunt recognition of individual mortality. “Blow the Horns” announces birth. “Blessings” sends care toward an uncertain future. “Passes Like Clouds” accepts the changing of form. Between them, dancing provides the connective tissue. Life does not pause until the philosophy has been completed.

The artwork by Felicia Nilsson and Tobias Ekberg makes this cycle visible without illustrating any single song. Teeth recur throughout the image, including the enormous tooth at the top of the triangular structure. A tooth is part of a living body, an instrument of eating, and one of the last recognizable parts to survive after softer tissue disappears. It belongs equally to appetite and archaeology. Placing it above the scene turns consumption into a kind of crown.

The large red shoes at the sides are equally ambiguous. They could belong to dancers, giants, gods or spectators whose bodies extend outside the available frame. The album’s world continues beyond the sleeve. We see only the portion of the ceremony that fits inside the object. This mirrors Goat’s anonymity. The visible performance is real, but it is never offered as the complete body behind the sound.

The black-and-white keyboard beneath the figures turns music into terrain. Bodies dance upon it, collapse across it and emerge from it. Instruments are not separate tools operated from a safe human distance. Music is the ground on which these creatures exist. The cover refuses the polite image of musicians standing beside equipment. Everything has become entangled in the act of sounding.

Chris Reeder’s gatefold design gives the illustration enough physical space to remain overwhelming. On a small digital square, the image appears as a concentrated psychedelic commotion. Across an LP sleeve, the repeated line work, tiny faces, anatomical jokes and ceremonial details become a world that can be explored while the record plays. Different vinyl colors, including orange and cloudberry-like swirls, extend the artwork’s heat into the object itself.

Goat recorded at Parkeringshuset Studio and produced the album collectively, preserving the group identity instead of assigning the music to a named central author. Linus Andersson mastered it at Elementstudio. The lack of conventional personnel credits is consistent with the masks, but it also makes the record difficult to discuss using rock criticism’s preferred method of attaching every sound to a biography. We hear the action clearly while the people producing it remain deliberately blurred.

This creates an interesting reversal. Celebrity culture gives us enormous quantities of personal information while often concealing the collaborative labor behind a finished record. Goat withholds personal identity but foregrounds collective action. The mystery is partly manufactured, of course, and anonymity itself can become a highly recognizable brand. Yet it still interrupts the expectation that listeners are owed complete access to the private selves of artists.

The Korpilombolo origin story should be understood within that mythology. Goat has repeatedly presented itself as emerging from a northern Swedish community shaped by generations of musical and spiritual exchange, but the tale functions less as verifiable local history than as the band’s creation story. Its value lies in what it allows Goat to question: whether a group must have a stable beginning, whether identity belongs to individuals or traditions, and whether myth can communicate something that literal autobiography cannot.

Myth becomes dangerous when it disguises appropriation or converts other peoples into atmosphere. It becomes useful when it reveals that every supposedly ordinary identity is already built from inherited stories. Goat lives directly inside that tension. The band’s imagery draws freely from spiritual, folk and psychedelic sources without offering a tidy guide to their origins. A listener can enjoy the ecstatic result while remaining attentive to the real histories beneath the collage.

Oh Death works because the music never asks theory to perform the body’s labor. Whatever questions surround the imagery, the record must still move, and it does. The bass repeatedly finds the exact place where stiffness gives way to dance. The drums create forward force without flattening the percussion into a metronomic grid. The guitars treat distortion as color, friction and heat. The singers refuse the psychologically detailed first-person style dominant in much contemporary songwriting, favoring short phrases that can be shouted by people who arrived without lyric sheets.

This produces an album that feels communal without requiring a community to agree upon every meaning. One person may hear spiritual rebirth, another a record assembled from beloved psychedelic and funk artifacts, another a critique of borders, and another simply an exceptionally lively half-hour. The groove holds those interpretations together without forcing them into uniformity.

The record’s brevity is part of its force. Ten tracks pass in roughly thirty-four minutes. Goat does not extend each rhythm until transcendence becomes mandatory. Songs erupt, establish their law and move aside. The short interludes prevent the major pieces from becoming interchangeable, while the final drift arrives before the album’s energy can decay into routine. Death gives the record urgency even at the level of sequencing. Nothing is granted infinite time.

That urgency connects with the album’s deepest generosity. “Soon You Die” could support nihilism, but everything that follows argues against wasting the interval. Dance. Blow the horns. Remind yourself. Give blessings. Watch the clouds pass. Mortality does not make action meaningless; it gives every action a cost that cannot be refunded.

This does not mean every death is chosen or that suffering becomes beautiful merely because survivors discover meaning afterward. Goat’s carnival cannot erase the cruelty of lives ended prematurely, anonymously or through the decisions of others. What the album can do is refuse the additional erasure of treating those lives as though nothing valuable was lost. Its volume and color insist upon the density contained inside living bodies.

The title therefore becomes less an address to death than a challenge. Death is present, acknowledged and even welcomed into the ceremony, but it will not be permitted to define life as negligible. The dancers know the floor will empty. The musicians know the final vibration will decay. The tooth above the temple knows what remains after flesh. Still, the rhythm multiplies.

Oh Death returns Goat from a six-year silence by presenting disappearance as another entrance. Requiem was not the endpoint. The masks had not become empty relics. The ancestral story, whether historical fact, private mythology or collaborative theatre, remained capable of generating new motion. The band does not come back by explaining where it went. It comes back by making the explanation physically unnecessary.

The cover’s ceremony has no visible officiant. No one stands outside the chaos to tell us what death means. Bodies, animals, instruments and symbols have already become one system, each feeding the next. That may be the record’s final wisdom. Life is so meaningful because it is not self-contained. Its loss is immense because every life has already entered other lives.

Death takes the body, but it cannot retrieve every rhythm the body gave away.

Blod - 2023 - Ondskans Fro

 

Self-released – none

Pilgrimssånger began inside a plain parish room. Där Ska Barnet Vara asked where the child should be placed within that room and what happens when love, belief, protection and authority become difficult to separate. Ondskans Frö opens after the building, congregation and perhaps the entire human arrangement have begun disappearing. The cover shows a devastated landscape of exposed roots, broken trunks and dark earth, with a few surviving trees standing against distant green mountains. Nothing spectacular is occurring. There are no flames, falling meteors or crowds running from a city. The catastrophe has already entered the soil.

That quietness is what makes the image disturbing. It resembles a place damaged by fire, industrial clearing, disease or some unnamed combination of human and natural violence. The distant mountains remain beautiful, and the sky has not turned theatrical. The earth can therefore be mistaken for recoverable scenery until the eye notices how little shelter remains. A forest has not simply died. Its roots have been pulled into view, the hidden structures by which life held itself in place now exposed like nerves.

Ondskans Frö means “The Seed of Evil,” and Gustaf Dicksson imagines that seed less as a demonic object than as an infection moving through relationships. The trees are contaminated. They infect the water, animals, air and children. Trust begins breaking apart. Dead fish rise to the surface. The sky slowly fades. Evil is not confined to an individual villain who can be defeated before the final scene. It has entered the systems through which living things sustain one another.

This makes the album’s ecological apocalypse inseparable from its spiritual one. A poisoned tree does not suffer alone. Its roots meet soil and water, its leaves meet air, its fruit enters animals, and its shade once protected bodies below it. Once corruption enters a connected system, every relationship becomes a possible route of transmission. The seed is terrifying because it is small enough to be overlooked while containing an entire future inside it.

Unlike the communal voices heard throughout the two preceding Blod albums, Ondskans Frö is entirely Gustaf Dicksson. The congregation has vanished. There are no additional singers to enlarge his fragile voice, no fellow travellers entering at the edge of the song, and no shared parish performance through which personal doubt can temporarily dissolve. The solitary quality is not merely a recording decision. It becomes part of the story. The last person on earth would have nobody left to harmonize with.

The musical language retains traces of the earlier Christian folk melodies, but they now move through synthesizer haze, mournful organ and guitar figures, and broad ambient spaces recalling the devotional kosmische music of Popol Vuh as well as the more distant electronic horizons associated with Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. Dicksson does not use these sounds to illustrate futuristic technology. They create an ancient future, a world after modern systems have failed where the remaining person hears old hymnal shapes drifting through the machinery’s final electrical glow.

The album unfolds across one day. It begins in the morning and moves through light, darkening, night and the dawn that never arrives. That structure gives each of its ten short pieces a position within an invisible film. The listener does not receive characters, dialogue or explicit scenes, but the titles provide enough landmarks to imagine a person walking through the final twenty-four hours, repeatedly interpreting changes in the sky before realizing that time itself is approaching its last border.

“Splittringen,” “The Fragmentation,” begins not with the appearance of evil but with the breaking of unity. Something previously understood as one body has divided. This could be society, family, congregation, nature, consciousness or all of them simultaneously. Fragmentation is often how catastrophe first becomes perceptible. The world remains physically present, but its parts no longer cooperate. Information contradicts itself, trusted people withdraw, institutions protect their own survival and individuals begin discovering that the map they shared no longer describes the ground beneath them.

Placed immediately after Blod’s two parish-inspired records, the title also recalls division within a religious community. Congregations promise a body made from many members, but they can fracture through doctrine, authority, fear, money, private injury and incompatible understandings of love. A spiritual community may survive for years while its internal bonds have already begun dying. In Ondskans Frö, that social fracture appears to widen until even the distinction between human damage and environmental collapse can no longer be maintained.

“Solen Lyser Upp Min Väg,” “The Sun Lights Up My Way,” follows with the album’s briefest moment of morning radiance. The title sounds hopeful enough to belong on Pilgrimssånger. Light traditionally means guidance, divine presence and the ability to distinguish the correct path. Yet the listener already knows this is the world’s final morning. The sun is not promising another day. It illuminates the road precisely enough for the traveller to see what has been lost.

This creates one of the album’s central reversals. Light does not necessarily save. It reveals. The person can finally see the poisoned water, damaged trees and distance separating them from everybody they trusted. The sun remains physically beautiful while shining upon something unbearable. Nature has not agreed to alter its colors merely because human meaning is ending.

The title track introduces the seed itself. A seed normally contains hope, inheritance and continuation. People plant because they expect a future they may not personally live to see. Calling evil a seed gives destruction the same patience. It can be planted quietly in one generation, nourished through habit and denial, then emerge fully inside the lives of people who never chose it.

The phrase also prevents evil from remaining supernatural and safely external. Seeds require conditions. Something prepares the soil, supplies water and allows the growth to continue. The album’s evil may be spiritual, ecological, political or psychological, but it is not magic dropped into an innocent world. Human beings participate in the systems that enlarge it. Even refusal to look can become a form of cultivation.

“Ett Tionde För Varje Barn,” literally “A Tenth for Every Child,” introduces the language of measurement and religious obligation. A tenth is a tithe, the portion traditionally given to the church, God or community. Connected with children, the phrase becomes unsettling. Is every child owed a share, or must every child surrender one? Are we offering part of what we possess to secure their future, or passing a debt into lives that did not create it?

The title can be heard ecologically as well. Each generation inherits some portion of the consequences produced by the one before it. Children receive the atmosphere, water, institutions, beliefs and emotional habits adults leave available. They may inherit wealth, but they also inherit contamination. The seed of evil becomes intergenerational not because children are evil, but because they are born inside conditions already planted.

This song sits near the middle of the daylight portion, where moral accounting is still possible. There may still be time to ask what is owed and to whom. Yet Ondskans Frö offers no evidence that the debt can now be paid. The final day has arrived because too many previous days treated the future as somebody else’s responsibility.

“Innan Det Blir Mörkt,” “Before It Gets Dark,” marks the approach of evening. The title contains an ordinary urgency familiar from childhood and domestic life: return home before darkness, complete the work while light remains, find the missing person, gather what must be protected. Darkness is not yet present, but every action is reorganized by its approach.

The phrase becomes especially heavy within an album where morning will not return. Usually, “before it gets dark” assumes another daylight is waiting on the opposite side. Night is temporary, even when frightening. Here the person must decide what to do before the final visibility disappears. There is no practical reason to save supplies for tomorrow, repair a structure for next year or make plans beyond the remaining hours. Value must be separated from continuation.

That question makes “Jag Är Redo Att Komma Hem,” “I Am Ready to Come Home,” the emotional center of the record. Home might mean an actual house, childhood, family, the parish community of the earlier albums, death or return to God. Readiness does not clarify the destination. It only tells us that resistance has changed into surrender.

Within Christian language, coming home frequently means dying and entering the divine presence. The phrase can offer comfort, but it also carries the weariness of someone who no longer expects earthly conditions to improve. Dicksson’s solitary performance allows readiness to remain ambiguous. Is the speaker peaceful, defeated, faithful or simply too exhausted to continue? The music does not force those states apart.

The idea of home becomes stranger when the earth itself is ending. Every physical home depends upon a larger home: breathable air, drinkable water, living soil, predictable seasons and relationships through which safety becomes meaningful. Once that larger structure collapses, a house is only material arranged against weather. The speaker may be ready to come home because every smaller version of home has failed.

“Stjärnor Lyser Upp Min Väg,” “Stars Light Up My Way,” mirrors the earlier sunlight title. Day has ended, but guidance continues from much farther away. The sun that illuminated the road belonged to the speaker’s immediate world. The stars reveal light already travelling across distances so enormous that some of its sources may no longer exist.

That delay makes starlight an extraordinary image for the album. The traveller sees evidence of worlds as they once were, not necessarily as they are now. Human memory operates similarly. Parents, churches, friendships and landscapes continue emitting emotional light after the conditions that produced it have disappeared. A person can navigate by something that is already gone.

The stars also reduce the apocalypse to local scale. Earth may be ending, but the larger universe does not stop to acknowledge it. Constellations remain visible, light continues crossing space, and whatever events unfold elsewhere remain beyond human knowledge. This is terrifying if humanity expected cosmic centrality, but it can also be strangely consoling. Existence is larger than the catastrophe.

“Sista Natten,” “The Last Night,” removes the uncertainty. There will be no morning in the ordinary sense. The final night differs from every earlier night because sleep can no longer function as a bridge toward another day. Nobody needs to set an alarm, prepare breakfast or leave a note for later. All unfinished activity becomes permanently unfinished.

The title’s simplicity protects it from melodrama. Dicksson does not need to name the destruction again. By this point, “last night” contains the entire poisoned landscape. The music can remain gentle because finality supplies more weight than volume could produce. This is not heavy music in the conventional sense, but everything heard now rests upon the disappearance of everything capable of hearing it.

“Dans För Döda,” “Dance for the Dead,” refuses to make the final human gesture passive. The dance may be performed for those who have already died, among them, or by the dead themselves. It could be ceremonial remembrance, bodily panic or the last remaining action whose purpose does not depend upon tomorrow.

Dance matters because it turns mortality back into movement. A dead body cannot dance, but the living body can carry rhythms received from people no longer present. The gesture becomes both celebration and evidence. The dancer shows that another person’s life entered them deeply enough to continue moving through muscle, timing and memory.

This is where Ondskans Frö briefly touches the same truth Goat approached on Oh Death, though by almost opposite musical means. Goat answers mortality with communal percussion, masks and bright physical excess. Blod stands alone in a ruined landscape and makes a much smaller movement. Both understand that death does not make life meaningless. It reveals why every living motion had value.

The album ends with “Ingen Gryning,” “No Dawn.” The final darkness is not followed by renewal, resurrection or a new generation emerging after the damage. The twenty-four-hour structure has completed itself, but the cycle does not begin again. Time reaches the place where repetition should occur and finds nothing available to repeat it.

The phrase “ingen gryning” also has a biblical shadow. In Swedish versions of Isaiah, those who have abandoned divine instruction and wandered hungry through darkness are described as having no dawn. Whether Dicksson intended that precise echo or not, it belongs naturally beside the religious language carried forward from the previous Blod records. Dawn is not merely morning light. It is revelation, mercy and the possibility that history still has somewhere to go.

Denying the album a dawn is therefore more severe than ending with death. Death can still belong to a religious cycle of resurrection, reunion and eternal life. No dawn suggests the disappearance of the framework within which those promises were understood. The church room, child, pilgrim and last witness have all been removed. Even the person waiting for God may no longer be present when light would normally return.

Yet the record itself survives the ending it describes. This is the productive contradiction inside all imagined apocalypse art. Somebody composed the last day, recorded it, pressed it onto vinyl and sent it into a future assumed to contain listeners. The physical object contradicts its narrative by believing in continuation. Dicksson says everything is gone, then manufactures five hundred messages for people who remain.

The reused sleeves deepen that contradiction. Each new cover is pasted onto an old record jacket, meaning the apocalypse is physically carried by an object that has already survived one identity. Beneath the devastated landscape lies another album, another design and another history concealed but not erased. The end of one world becomes the material supporting a second.

This has been central to several Blod releases. Reusing jackets is economical and consistent with the anti-commercial DIY culture surrounding Discreet Music, but it also performs the music’s philosophy. No object begins from purity. Every new statement is made upon inherited material. Damage, belief, art and responsibility arrive from somewhere before us.

The anonymous photograph functions the same way. We are not told exactly where the landscape is or what destroyed it. That missing context allows it to become several places at once: forest after fire, battlefield after vegetation returns, land stripped for industry, or a future remembered through the faded color of an old print. The image looks both documentary and prophetic.

Its border is almost polite. The photograph sits inside white space like a scenic postcard, while the blunt hand-cut title beneath it identifies the horror. This creates the feeling that somebody visited the end of the world, took a picture and mailed it home. The message arrived, but perhaps too late to alter the destination.

Ondskans Frö differs from Pilgrimssånger and Där Ska Barnet Vara not by abandoning their religious concerns, but by testing what remains after the social structure of faith disappears. The earlier albums contained churches, children, hymns, guest voices and inherited ritual. This one asks whether faith can still function when there is nobody left to affirm it.

The answer is not delivered doctrinally. The solitary figure continues locating paths through sunlight, stars and the idea of home. Those are old spiritual coordinates. Even after evil has entered nature and society, the speaker still interprets light as guidance. Belief may have lost its community, but its language remains embedded in perception.

That persistence can be comforting or frightening. Faith may survive because it is true, or because it entered so early that the mind cannot imagine reality without it. The child from Där Ska Barnet Vara has grown into the final witness, still naming the sky through the vocabulary inherited inside the parish room. The album never confirms whether anyone is listening.

This uncertainty allows beauty to remain honest. Dicksson has said that although the record concerns the end of the earth, he likes it and considers it beautiful. That is not necessarily a contradiction. Beauty is what makes destruction terrible. A dead world matters because it once contained light, trees, children, songs, trust and places people called home.

The music does not beautify catastrophe in order to excuse it. It gathers evidence of what is being lost. A mournful organ phrase, fragile guitar melody or drifting synthesizer tone becomes valuable because somebody was alive to make it and another person may still be alive to hear it. The album’s softness prevents the apocalypse from becoming entertainment.

Loud catastrophe can provide emotional distance. Explosions become spectacle, and the listener enjoys destruction from a protected seat. Ondskans Frö offers very little protection. It makes the ending quiet enough that the listener must inhabit the remaining hours rather than watch them from outside. There is no hero, enemy army or technological solution. There is only attention.

That may be the larger meaning of the seed. Evil does not win only when everything has been destroyed. It wins whenever relationships are treated as disposable, whenever the future is denied because it cannot speak for itself, and whenever a person decides that what happens outside immediate awareness carries no moral weight. The final day is grown from countless earlier moments in which attention could have been given and was withheld.

Still, the record gives attention. It notices the road beneath sunlight, the stars above darkness, the invitation to come home and the possibility of dancing for those already gone. It preserves the final day carefully enough that the imagined world does not disappear without testimony.

The last track says there is no dawn, but the listener eventually lifts the stylus, closes the file or returns to the room where actual daylight may still be present. That return is the album’s unspoken gift. The apocalypse has been rehearsed while time remains. The poisoned seed has been shown before every tree is infected.

The cover’s damaged roots are therefore not only an image of death. Roots exposed to view reveal how thoroughly life depended upon invisible connection. Water, soil, fungi, weather and neighboring plants participated in what appeared above ground as one tree. Humanity is no different. A person looks individual because most of the relationships sustaining them remain hidden.

Ondskans Frö imagines the moment those relationships fail. Its sorrow comes from understanding that they existed. Its beauty comes from listening closely enough to hear them before they are gone.

The Janitors - 2020 - Noisolation Sessions Vol.1

 

Cardinal Fuzz – CFLCR024

The cover shows a building losing confidence in its own dimensions. A doorway, wall or narrow interior passage has been submerged in cold blue, while a bright vertical strip of white and red appears to split the room open. The band name and title have been scratched across the image in thin angular letters, doubled by red and cyan shadows that resemble a damaged 3-D photograph viewed without the glasses. Nothing here looks abandoned exactly, but everything appears unoccupied. The building remains while the social purpose that once filled it has temporarily vanished.
That image is especially appropriate for a band whose name came from actual work. Jonas and Henric met while employed as janitors at a Stockholm museum, discovered a shared love of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, and started making the harsh noise and feedback that their other groups were not providing. Sixteen years later, a global emergency emptied museums, clubs, offices and public rooms across the world. The Janitors returned to a private building of their own, Helter Shelter Studio, and made an album inside the absence.
Noisolation is a clever word because it refuses to decide whether the “no” cancels isolation or intensifies it. The musicians were isolated from the tour network, the northern studio they had booked, their ordinary plans and the larger social world, but they were not isolated from one another or from the need to create. The title does not deny the reality of separation. It identifies sound as the small passage they managed to keep open through it.
The album had not been planned. In March 2020 The Janitors already possessed a different set of finished songs and intended to record them at Omnivox Studios in northern Sweden. When that became impossible, they initially went into their own studio to keep working on the material until ordinary time returned. Ordinary time did not return. Instead, they recorded Joy Division’s “Isolation,” the most obvious possible cover for that moment and therefore also the most dangerous. A lesser version could have become a quarantine novelty, meaningful for two weeks and embarrassing forever afterward.
Their version did something more productive. It slowed the song, removed much of its familiar synthetic propulsion and placed it inside the group’s own low-pressure system of fuzz, drone and psychic exhaustion. The response convinced them that the interrupted circumstances had produced a method worth following. Rather than continuing to polish the postponed album, they would begin with one idea each week, record it in one night, mix it during the following week and then declare it finished.
Those rules turned the absence of normal planning into a compositional tool. The band could not spend months deciding what a song ought to become after the world reopened, because nobody knew when that reopening would happen or what kind of world would be waiting. Each performance had to remain attached to the emotional weather of the week that produced it. A questionable note, unbalanced passage or lyric born from immediate anxiety would not be repaired out of existence. The songs became dated entries rather than predictions.
This makes Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 closer to an audio diary than a conventional studio album, though nothing about its sound is small or privately whispered. The six pieces run for more than forty-four minutes and arrive through enormous repetitions, scorched guitars, ritualistic percussion and voices that often seem to be calling from another part of the building. The diary has been written on the walls with amplifiers.
“Through the Storm Into Chaos” begins by reversing the usual promise of survival. We are accustomed to travelling through chaos toward peace, through darkness toward light, through the storm until clear weather appears. The Janitors move through the storm into chaos. The destination is not recovery but a condition even less legible than the one already surrounding them.
That title captures the first months of 2020 with uncomfortable precision. Every day seemed to pass through one emergency only to reveal a wider network of uncertainty beneath it. Medical danger became social isolation; isolation exposed economic inequality; public confusion opened new routes for political manipulation; private worry expanded until it became difficult to separate personal fear from the larger systems producing it. The song’s heavy cyclical motion does not provide a dramatic account of those events. It creates the feeling of being trapped inside their continuation.
Repetition is essential to The Janitors because their drones are rarely static. A riff returns until the listener stops hearing it as a sequence of notes and begins experiencing it as architecture. Guitar becomes wall, bass becomes floor, percussion becomes the movement of machinery somewhere beyond sight. The opening piece does not rush toward a revelation. It changes the pressure inside the room until the listener’s ordinary sense of proportion begins slipping.
This is the band’s version of psychedelia. It is not primarily decorative color, pastoral wonder or a collection of approved vintage effects. It is the destabilization of scale. A small figure becomes enormous through repetition. A background sound moves forward without noticeably increasing in volume. Something that first seemed heavy eventually becomes strangely calming because the body has adapted to living beneath it.
“High on God” enters through ritual chant and mesmeric percussion before dissolving into harsher frequencies. The title compresses religion and intoxication into the same phrase, continuing the band’s long suspicion of belief when it becomes authority, narcotic certainty or a mechanism through which one group claims moral permission to dominate another. Yet the music does not stand safely outside ritual. The Janitors understand its attraction too well.
A repeated drum pattern, collective voice and overwhelming volume can produce surrender without theology. The body begins obeying before the intellect decides what the gathering means. Rock music, religious worship and political spectacle all understand this process. Repetition turns individual uncertainty into shared force. “High on God” places the listener inside that force while allowing the surrounding noise to reveal its danger.
The title can therefore be heard as mockery, accusation and honest description. Spiritual ecstasy may be real to the person experiencing it even when institutions exploit the experience. The song does not attempt to settle whether transcendence comes from God, chemicals, rhythm, amplified frequencies or people temporarily becoming one organism. It concentrates on the unstable condition in which those possibilities become difficult to separate.
The Janitors’ politics are not added to the music as explanatory liner notes. They are embedded in its pressure. Earlier releases confronted the rise of the far right, religion used as control and the damage of neoliberal systems. During the Noisolation period, those public concerns became increasingly entangled with personal fear, family, mental strain and the welfare of people around them. The political and private could no longer be assigned separate tracks.
“Indifferent State” occupies ten minutes near the album’s center and turns emotional numbness into both a psychological condition and a form of government. An indifferent state may be the mind protecting itself by reducing what it can feel. It may also be the state as political institution, observing suffering while translating human lives into acceptable losses, economic figures and administrative language.
The piece loosens the album’s heavy rock structure through acoustic or folk-like color, unusual percussion and a darker devotional atmosphere. Instead of crushing the listener through immediate volume, it creates an uncertain landscape where each sound seems separated by a little more distance than comfort allows. The music feels suspended between campfire, empty sanctuary and something transmitted from a landscape beyond the city.
That ambiguity gives “Indifferent State” unusual power. Folk music is often associated with roots, place and continuity, but the song sounds uprooted. Familiar human materials remain, strings, hand-played rhythm, voice, but the community that would ordinarily give them social context appears missing. It resembles folk music after the village has been evacuated.
Indifference is not the same as peace. Peace implies that conflict has been addressed or temporarily resolved. Indifference can be the nervous system shutting doors because too much information has entered at once. During an extended crisis, the inability to react to each new disaster can look morally cold from outside while functioning as emergency survival within the person experiencing it.
The Janitors do not condemn that condition from a distance. They remain inside it for ten minutes, letting repetition reveal the difference between calm and depletion. Small instrumental changes acquire enormous significance because the emotional surface initially appears so level. The song becomes a study of what continues moving after the conscious mind has declared that it cannot process anything else.
“Thing Is Rising” returns to physical dread. The title’s refusal to identify the thing makes it more effective. A named threat can be studied, argued with or contained by language. A thing is whatever has not yet entered a useful category. It can rise from underground, from the body, from society, from accumulated fear or from the amplified signal itself.
The song builds steadily rather than arriving as an immediate explosion. Weight gathers by increments. A riff that initially appears manageable begins occupying more of the available air, while the rhythm keeps advancing with the patience of machinery that has no need to hurry. The rising thing does not chase anyone. It knows the room has limited exits.
In the context of 2020, possible identities multiply. The thing could be infection, authoritarian politics, conspiracy, unemployment, domestic pressure or the private mental collapse produced when every source of reassurance has become unreliable. The music wisely refuses to choose. The most honest representation of dread may be the stage before fear has decided which object deserves its full attention.
The cover’s doorway becomes relevant here. A doorway normally offers passage between states, but this one appears blocked by light, chromatic doubling and photographic distortion. We cannot determine whether the glowing vertical strip marks an entrance, an exit or a fault opening inside the image. “Thing Is Rising” creates the same uncertainty in sound. The threshold is visible, but crossing it may lead deeper into the pressure rather than away from it.
“The Mind Is a Terrible Thing” accelerates the album’s pulse without releasing its tension. The phrase is incomplete in cultural memory, where it usually continues into a statement about waste. Removing that conclusion leaves the mind itself defined as terrible: a magnificent instrument capable of memory, imagination and connection, but also a machine that can manufacture fear long after the immediate danger has left the room.
Isolation intensifies that machinery. Without ordinary contact, repeated routes and the incidental corrections supplied by other people, thought can begin feeding upon itself. A possibility becomes a prediction, the prediction becomes evidence and the evidence becomes another reason to withdraw. The Janitors answer that private loop with a collective one. Their repetition is external, loud and negotiated among several bodies.
The track’s faster movement recalls the pulse-driven lineage running from Spacemen 3 and The Heads through the band’s own history, but it does not feel like an exercise in psychedelic tradition. Speed becomes a symptom. The song keeps finding more detail inside the same forward motion, as though attention has become unable to stop scanning the environment.
This is one of the album’s larger paradoxes. The strict recording method prevented obsessive revision, yet the music itself often resembles obsession. Figures repeat, tones accumulate and the voice returns to an idea until it becomes difficult to remember what existed before it. The band protected the songs from studio perfectionism while allowing the performances to document the repetitive patterns of thought surrounding their creation.
The closing “Isolation” returns to the track that began the entire project. Chronologically it is the seed; structurally it becomes the destination. The album therefore ends at its own origin. Five later compositions gradually lead the listener back to the moment when The Janitors first recognized that the interruption could become material.
Joy Division’s original recording was already built around contradiction. Its rhythm moves with nervous energy while the title names separation. The Janitors remove much of that restless surface and expose a heavier interior. Slowed down, the song no longer sounds like someone attempting to outrun confinement. It sounds like the room itself has become aware of the person trapped inside it.
A successful cover does not simply reproduce a familiar song through another band’s equipment. It discovers an unrealized possibility within the composition. The Janitors find doom, drone and exhausted ceremony inside “Isolation.” The melody remains recognizable, but the surrounding emotional scale changes. What once moved through post-punk machinery is dragged into the long Swedish winter-night atmosphere the group uses to describe its own sound.
Placing the cover last also prevents it from functioning as a topical gimmick. By the time it arrives, the preceding tracks have constructed an entire language around isolation. Storm, religious intoxication, indifference, rising dread and the terrible activity of the mind have all become forms of separation. The borrowed song no longer needs the pandemic context to justify its inclusion. The album has made isolation its internal geography.
The original sleeve captures this with extraordinary economy. The image appears to show part of a studio, corridor or institutional room, but the red and cyan displacement makes the building look neurologically unstable. It resembles the kind of color separation once used to create depth, except no corrective lenses are supplied. The two images remain slightly apart, making the room feel as though reality has failed to align with itself.
That visual misregistration resembles life during the pandemic’s early phase. Familiar surroundings remained physically present, but their meaning had shifted. A doorway was still a doorway, yet crossing it carried new calculations. A workplace remained in place while work disappeared or became dangerous. A friend remained nearby geographically while becoming unreachable socially. Everything was recognizable and displaced at once.
The hand-drawn lettering refuses the clean graphic finish expected from a carefully prepared album campaign. It looks added urgently, perhaps directly onto the image or copied from an improvised sign. This fits recordings created under rules designed to stop revision. The cover is not advertising a polished account of crisis after everyone has agreed what the crisis meant. It is a label attached while the contents are still unstable.
There is another accidental resonance in seeing an empty institutional interior beneath the name The Janitors. Custodial workers understand buildings differently from the people who visit them for their official purpose. They encounter rooms before opening and after closing, when display, commerce and public identity have been temporarily removed. They know where the machinery is, which doors resist, what leaks and how much labor is required to make an apparently self-sustaining institution function.
The pandemic briefly forced much of society to see its structures from that angle. Buildings stood empty while the hidden systems sustaining ordinary life became visible: cleaners, delivery workers, health workers, food workers, transit workers and everyone whose labor could not be converted into a video call. The Janitors do not make an explicit occupational concept album, but their name and cover inevitably place this music near those emptied rooms and the people who continued entering them.
The album’s creation also rejects the fantasy that art emerges best through unlimited time and resources. Their cancelled studio booking initially looked like a pure loss. Instead, the smaller space and severe method produced material the band regarded as some of its strongest. Constraint did not magically improve everything, nor does crisis deserve gratitude for the suffering it causes. But people can create new forms inside damaged circumstances without pretending the damage was necessary.
The occasional wrong note is important for this reason. In a conventional album cycle, wrongness is identified retrospectively and corrected according to the imagined needs of a permanent object. Noisolation Sessions treats wrongness as evidence of presence. A person made a choice during one night in a disturbing week. Removing every uncertainty might have improved the technical surface while erasing the date stamped inside the performance.
This is close to the documentary value of a home recording, scene rip or amateur transfer. The imperfections disclose the route. They tell us that sound passed through a particular room, machine, level setting and human decision rather than descending into the archive from nowhere. The Janitors’ one-night rule protects the route from being polished away.
The transparent blue vinyl extends the cover’s frozen atmosphere into the physical disc. Blue can suggest distance, cold, police light, digital screens or the artificial tint of a room photographed after ordinary warmth has been removed. As the record turns, the color becomes motion. The object transforms the static blue enclosure into something capable of carrying sound outward.
Cardinal Fuzz and Little Cloud Records released the album across Europe and the United States, allowing six recordings produced under severe local limitation to enter an international network. This is another reason “Noisolation” works as a title. The band could not travel, but the artifact could. Musicians were restricted to their immediate environment while records, files, messages and packages continued constructing relationships beyond it.
The phrase “To create is to resist” appeared at the center of the band’s explanation. It can become an empty slogan if creation is treated automatically as morally valuable, but The Janitors use it more specifically. Their resistance lies in refusing the paralysis, isolation and narrowing of possibility produced by the moment. They make sound together, leave its irregularities intact and send it outward toward people undergoing related pressures elsewhere.
The music does not offer escape into a brightly colored alternative universe. Its resistance consists of giving dread a physical form large enough to share. Private anxiety becomes collective drone. A thought trapped inside one person becomes a riff several people must negotiate in real time. Noise stops being evidence that communication has failed and becomes the medium through which communication occurs.
Calling the release Vol.1 was initially more wager than plan. The band did not know whether the conditions would last long enough to require another volume, or whether this method would continue producing useful material. The numeral contains uncertainty about both the pandemic and the project. Two years later, a second Noisolation collection appeared, darker and made under less restrictive creative rules. The temporary response had become its own branch of the discography.
The album that was postponed in March 2020 did not simply vanish either. Songs were shelved, additional material accumulated during the Noisolation period, and portions of that expanding archive eventually contributed to An Error Has Occurred in 2024. The interruption changed the route but did not destroy the destination. One intended record divided into several possible futures.
That history makes Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 more than a pandemic artifact. It is the hinge on which The Janitors’ method turned. Before it, songs commonly began as riffs or ideas developed through longer preparation. Here the group learned what happened when it stopped protecting material from immediacy. They reached what they later described as a kind of endpoint with noise and drone, allowing the following album to recover clearer melodies, vocal harmonies and another relationship with restraint.
The record documents a band discovering that its most recognizable language could still surprise its speakers. After sixteen years, a group may become fluent enough to reproduce itself efficiently. The one-night rule removed some of that fluency’s safety. There was no time to convert every spontaneous gesture into an approved Janitors gesture. The band had to listen before habit supplied the answer.
That is why these tracks feel connected despite their different structures. They share a state of attention rather than a predetermined concept. “Through the Storm Into Chaos” enters sustained pressure, “High on God” turns ritual into overload, “Indifferent State” explores numb suspension, “Thing Is Rising” builds unnamed dread, “The Mind Is a Terrible Thing” accelerates mental repetition and “Isolation” returns everything to the moment of separation from which the experiment emerged.
Together they form a psychological sequence for a crisis nobody yet understood. Confusion becomes intoxication, intoxication becomes numbness, numbness senses something rising, the mind begins racing and the person finally recognizes the room as isolation. The album does not conclude with recovery because recovery had not occurred. It preserves the unfinished condition honestly.
The doorway on the cover therefore never needs to open. Noisolation Sessions Vol.1 is not about escaping the room. It is about discovering that a room can still transmit. Cables, microphones, amplifiers and human attention turn enclosure into an instrument. The band cannot restore the interrupted world, but it can strike the walls hard enough for someone outside to hear that people remain within them.

Hanna Hartman - 2019 - Gattet

Firework Edition Records – FER1127
 

The cover appears to contain almost nothing: a thick black square, an uncertain gray interior and hundreds of fine scratches spreading across the white field. Yet the longer it is examined, the less stable it becomes. The square could be a frame, gate, room, aperture, wound or crude enclosure. Its center does not open onto a clear image. It gathers density, as though repeated contact has gradually darkened the paper. Outside the border, thin marks escape in every direction, suggesting that whatever was meant to remain contained has already passed through the walls.

That is an excellent visual introduction to Hanna Hartman’s music. Her compositions begin with recognizable physical sources, breath, metal, liquid, machinery, birds, footsteps, friction, human cries and objects placed into motion, but recognition is never the final destination. A sound enters her archive carrying a history and practical identity. She removes it from that original situation, listens to its smallest internal behavior and places it beside something with which it was never expected to communicate. The resulting composition does not erase the everyday world. It rearranges the world until its hidden relationships become audible.

“Gattet” is the definite form of a Swedish word for an opening or narrow channel, especially a confined passage of water connecting larger expanses. The title can therefore describe the entire album’s method. Each piece is a constricted route between very different territories: instrumental performance and recorded material, recognizable event and abstract texture, microscopic detail and overwhelming physical force. Sound is pressed through the passage until it changes pressure. What enters as a bassoon, clarinet, impact or machine emerges carrying traces of several identities at once.

Hartman has spent decades collecting sounds and objects, not as a cataloguer trying to preserve a complete documentary record, but as a composer waiting for future correspondences. A recording may remain unused for years until another sound reveals the role it can play. This makes her archive less like a library organized by subject than a population of dormant materials. Each item contains behaviors that may only become visible when it meets the correct stranger.

That practice gives her music an unusual relationship with reality. Field recording is often presented as a transparent window onto a location, allowing the listener to imagine being transported into the environment where the microphone once stood. Hartman’s recordings do not behave transparently. The microphone does not merely preserve a place; it extracts pressure, texture, distance and movement from it. Once removed, those properties can be reorganized into an environment that never existed outside the composition.

“Black Bat” enters this world through the contrabass clarinet of Theo Nabicht. The instrument already occupies a threshold between categories. It can produce a clearly pitched note, but its lowest register contains so much air, key noise and bodily resistance that pitch begins dissolving into matter. Breath must travel through an enormous folded tube, and the mechanism required to control that tube becomes part of what the listener hears. The instrument seems less like a voice placed above the composition than a creature attempting to navigate inside it.

Hartman originally created “Black Bat” for the vast speaker system of Berghain. That origin matters because the piece is not simply loud music later amplified in a large room. Its scale was conceived through architecture. Berghain’s concrete interior and immense sound system allow a small event to become environmental. A scrape can cross the space like weather; a low tone can stop behaving as an object in front of the listener and become a condition surrounding the body.

The contrabass clarinet is therefore placed in a strange contest. It must remain physically human, Nabicht’s breath and fingers producing every instrumental sound, while entering a recorded world capable of exceeding human proportions. Hartman does not protect the soloist through the traditional concerto arrangement in which the surrounding material politely leaves room for an identifiable principal voice. Clarinet and loudspeaker environment contaminate each other. The instrument may resemble an animal, machine, respiratory system or damaged building, while apparently non-instrumental noises suddenly acquire phrasing and breath.

Birdlike calls, splatters, impacts, tears and abrupt cries pass through the piece without establishing a dependable landscape. The title encourages the mind to imagine an animal in darkness, but the bat never becomes an illustrated subject. Instead, the music adopts properties associated with one: rapid navigation through reflected information, sensitivity to a space the eye cannot clarify, and an existence organized around frequencies and distances that human perception only partly understands.

A bat’s map is created by sending sound outward and receiving its altered return. Hartman’s compositional process performs a related operation. She sends recorded objects into new surroundings and listens to what the collision reveals. Meaning is not located solely in the original sound or in the new context. It appears in the changed signal returning from between them.

“Black Bat” lasts less than eight minutes, yet it creates the impression of a much larger system briefly exposed. The short duration prevents the environment from becoming familiar enough to master. We enter after its forces have already begun and leave before learning their complete laws. The experience resembles finding an opening in a wall, seeing a strange ecosystem operating on the other side and losing access before the eye can identify everything moving there.

“Crush” removes the visible instrumental performer and places recorded sound itself at the center. Hartman built the piece from close-up recordings gathered in different parts of the world and material produced with the Buchla 200 modular synthesizer at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion. The title names both an act and its result: pressure applied until a structure changes, or an intense attraction that reorganizes attention around an object. Both meanings belong to the composition.

Close recording is a form of disproportion. A microphone placed extremely near an action hears details that ordinary spatial listening blends together or ignores. Surface becomes landscape. A slight crack becomes an architectural failure. Liquid movement acquires weight. The tiny mechanical prelude before an impact may become more interesting than the impact itself. Hartman’s microphone does not simply make quiet things louder. It changes their apparent size and social importance.

The Buchla enters without announcing a clean division between synthetic and documentary sound. Modular electronics can produce material with no direct counterpart in the physical world, but Hartman treats electronically generated tones and recorded objects as members of the same unstable ecology. A voltage-controlled event may resemble an insect, a stressed cable or liquid passing through machinery. A real-world recording may sound so unfamiliar that it appears electronically invented. Source identification becomes a game the composition repeatedly wins by changing the rules.

This uncertainty does not make the work vague. Hartman’s construction is extraordinarily precise. Events enter with exact weight and duration, often separated by spaces that sharpen their physical edges. The listener may not know what produced a sound, but can sense how carefully it has been positioned. Mystery is not created by indiscriminately piling noise together. It comes from the authority with which unrelated materials are made to occupy the same world.

“Crush” often feels like a sequence of impossible causes and effects. A brittle event appears to trigger a low movement that could not logically have come from it. A pressure builds in one register and releases somewhere else. Sounds seem to leave residue, with the following event entering an atmosphere already altered by what preceded it. Hartman creates continuity without relying upon melody or a stable pulse. The composition advances through material consequence.

The title also describes the treatment of scale. Entire environments appear compressed into short, concentrated gestures. The vast and microscopic trade places. Something that might occupy only a fraction of a second in daily life becomes a major structural event, while a large physical occurrence may be reduced to a thin flash. The composition crushes ordinary perspective, then uses the fragments to create another form of depth.

This is where Hartman’s background in radio becomes especially important. Radio composition cannot depend upon a performer’s visible gesture or an installation’s physical object to explain how sound is being produced. Everything must be communicated through duration, placement and the listener’s imagination. A radio work enters domestic space without bringing its original room. It may arrive through headphones, a kitchen speaker, a car or a small receiver late at night. The composition must build its architecture inside whatever listening environment happens to receive it.

“Crush” carries that invisible architecture. Its sounds feel tactile enough to touch, even though the objects responsible remain absent. A listener begins inventing mechanisms, rooms and organisms to account for what is heard. Hartman does not provide a narrative, but the mind generates provisional stories because the events seem too intentional to remain meaningless. Each imagined explanation survives only until the next sound changes the scale.

The piece was recognized with the Palma Ars Acustica prize, an award connected to radio art across Europe. That context fits the work beautifully. It is neither conventional instrumental composition nor documentary broadcast, but a form that treats loudspeakers as the location where a new material world comes into existence. The recording is not a representation of a finished performance. It is the composition’s body.

“Fracture,” the longest work, brings another acoustic instrument into this environment: the bassoon of Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. The bassoon’s cultural identity is unusually unstable. In orchestral music it may sound comic, pastoral, mournful, bureaucratic or ancient according to register and phrasing. Its long wooden body and doubled reed produce a tone rich in internal resistance. Air does not pass through it innocently. Every note contains pressure meeting material.

Vicente-Sandoval is especially suited to Hartman’s method because her playing explores the threshold between stable instrumental sound and the physical processes required to create it. Breath, key mechanisms, reed vibration and unstable resonance can be heard as compositional materials rather than technical debris surrounding the note. The performer does not merely supply bassoon melodies to an electronic backdrop. She gives Hartman another complicated object whose hidden facets can be opened.

“Fracture” sounds like a world being examined at the point where its surfaces fail. Footstep-like impacts, wind, crackle, hum, metallic collision and liquid or synthetic gurgling gather around the bassoon. The piece does not clarify which elements are recorded, electronically transformed or produced instrumentally. The fracture occurs between categories as much as within the sounds themselves.

A fracture is not necessarily a complete break. It may be a narrow fault that reveals the pressure previously hidden inside a structure. The cover drawing captures this distinction. The heavy square still exists, but the center and surrounding field have been worked over by countless thin marks. Damage becomes information. Every scratch reveals contact, direction and force.

The bassoon frequently appears to inhabit the same material family as the surrounding noises. A low instrumental tone can merge with machine hum; breath can become weather; key action can resemble small industrial mechanisms. At other moments the human performer emerges clearly, not as a heroic figure conquering the electronic environment but as another vulnerable body inside it. This movement between presence and absorption gives the piece much of its emotional power.

Hartman’s music is often discussed through objects, techniques and recording sources because those details are fascinating. One can learn about unusual microphones, potato starch, sprinklers, plant pots, bricks, air bags and objects accumulated over decades. Yet the work would become smaller if it were treated only as a puzzle asking, “What made that sound?” Identification may satisfy curiosity while closing a larger opening.

The more important question is what the sound becomes after Hartman has heard possibilities beyond its practical identity. Potato starch is no longer merely cooking material. A sprinkler is no longer simply irrigation equipment. An instrument is no longer a machine for producing approved notes. She does not pretend these objects lack histories, but she refuses to let usefulness exhaust their existence.

This gives her work an almost ethical attention toward matter. Everyday objects are normally valued according to service. Once damaged, obsolete or removed from their intended task, they become waste. Hartman listens after usefulness has ended. An object still vibrates, resists, resonates and enters relationships. Its capacity for meaning was larger than the function assigned to it.

That approach connects quietly with the title. A narrow channel is defined by what passes through it, but it also transforms whatever passes. Water accelerates, turbulence increases, pressure changes and the shores are shaped by repeated movement. Gattet treats composition as that sort of passage. Hartman provides boundaries precise enough to alter the behavior of sound without sealing it into one interpretation.

The album’s three-part structure creates another channel between increasingly different relationships with performance. “Black Bat” places an instrumentalist inside a compact, violent loudspeaker environment. “Crush” removes the performer and allows the recorded construction to exist independently. “Fracture” returns to instrumental presence at much greater length, now with enough time for the border between bassoon and fixed sound to be repeatedly built and broken.

The sequence can therefore be heard as body, disappearance and altered return. Nabicht’s contrabass clarinet enters as a dark physical protagonist. “Crush” leaves only organized matter and invisible causes. Vicente-Sandoval’s bassoon then reappears inside a world whose categories have already been destabilized. By the time a human breath returns, it can no longer be assumed to stand apart from machine, animal, weather or architecture.

The cover’s square resembles the boundaries of a loudspeaker cone, a screen, a stage or a page on which pressure has been concentrated. Hanna Hartman made the drawing herself, giving the package a direct continuation of her compositional method. The image is not polished into graphic neutrality. The hand remains present through irregular edges and accumulated marks.

Frans Gillberg’s restrained layout allows that drawing to dominate without explanatory decoration. The monochrome surface makes the eye perform a task similar to the ear’s work inside the album. At first the materials seem limited. With prolonged attention, differences proliferate: density, direction, texture, pressure, boundary and escape.

Firework Edition Records is an especially fitting home for the release. The label’s catalog has repeatedly treated experimental music as something that can remain physically direct, idiosyncratic and resistant to standard genre packaging. Gattet does not need to be translated into ambient music, noise, contemporary composition or electroacoustic demonstration. It occupies the narrow passage where those names meet and cease providing reliable guidance.

The album is demanding only if listening is understood as waiting for familiar musical rewards. There are no choruses, grooves or themes presented for easy retrieval. But it is deeply generous toward attention. Every few seconds offers a change in substance, depth or apparent scale. The music teaches the listener how to hear it by repeatedly demonstrating that nothing should be dismissed as incidental.

This is one of experimental music’s most useful gifts. Daily life trains people to ignore enormous amounts of sound in order to function. Ventilation, electrical systems, distant traffic, clothing, footsteps, doors and the small mechanics of the body are sorted into the background. Hartman reverses that hierarchy. Background becomes event, and the supposedly principal event may dissolve into texture.

The reversal does not require escaping ordinary life. It makes ordinary life larger. After hearing Gattet, a pipe, appliance, bird, damaged speaker or object dragged across a floor may briefly refuse to become background again. The record leaves the listening system slightly open, allowing unattended sounds to enter before habit closes the channel.

That opening is the true image inside the black square. It is not an empty center waiting to be filled. It is a passage worn into existence by repeated attention. The scratches do not destroy the frame. They show that sound has been crossing it.

Frida Hyvönen - 2021 - Dream Of Independence

RMV Grammofon – 732047024800

 The woman on the cover has entered the water dressed in white, but nothing about the scene offers baptismal innocence. She crouches rather than floats, alert and physically grounded, one hand pressing against a slab of broken marble while the water divides her body into solid form and wavering reflection. Her dress suggests ceremony, myth or surrender, yet her expression refuses passivity. She does not appear to be waiting for a god, lover or audience to explain what comes next. She is already working among the fragments.

Sara-Vide Ericson’s painting is called Marble Rhythm, a title that connects visual art to music before the record begins. The marble came from one of Ericson’s old paint palettes, weathered clean and then deliberately smashed for the preparatory photographs. In the finished image, its pieces resemble wreckage, unfinished tablets, pale geological forms or portions of a dam that can no longer hold back the water. Frida Hyvönen kneels among them as both subject and collaborator, not quite a goddess and not merely a woman posing as one. The myths have been broken, but their materials remain available.

Dream Of Independence performs a similar operation across eleven songs. Hyvönen takes several inherited myths apart: the completely autonomous artist, the naturally selfless mother, the genius awaiting divine inspiration, the woman whose meaningful romantic life belongs to youth, the family organized around one unquestioned head, and the idea that getting older is primarily a process of losing value. She does not replace these with a clean new doctrine. She examines their pieces, turns them over, and asks which fragments still contain truth.

The title itself initially sounds like an escape plan. Independence is commonly imagined as a sealed room, a private income, a departure from family or the ability to make decisions without interference. Hyvönen hears something less stable. A person can be strong enough to lead and still desire to follow. Someone who appears soft may be governed by rigid internal rules, while someone fiercely independent may repeatedly leave the gates open to people who should not have entered. Freedom is therefore not the elimination of dependence. It is the difficult ability to remain oneself while relationships continue applying pressure.

That tension had followed Hyvönen since adolescence. She left home at fifteen, lived independently and carried an early conviction that the world should be encountered directly. By the time of this album, independence no longer meant merely proving that she could survive alone. She was a mother, artist, partner and woman entering her forties, responsible both for protecting an inner life and for allowing other lives to matter inside it. The dream had not disappeared. Its meaning had become more complicated.

The record’s creation mirrors that problem. Dream Of Independence was the first album Hyvönen produced entirely herself. Self-production sounds like the purest expression of independence, the artist answering only to an internal vision, but she described the process as lonely whenever confidence weakened. A producer is not merely the person who interferes with autonomy. A good one can supply belief on the days when the artist has exhausted her own. Independence can remove obstruction while also removing encouragement.

Linn Fijal, the engineer at Riksmixningsverket, helped make that experiment possible by trusting that Hyvönen could guide the sessions herself. That trust became an invisible form of collaboration. The record’s independence was therefore not achieved by removing everyone else. It emerged because the surrounding musicians and engineer understood when to contribute and when to leave Hyvönen’s decisions intact.

The album had begun even earlier in a period of unusually intensive psychoanalysis. Hyvönen spent close to a year visiting a therapist almost daily, opening internal rooms whose contents did not immediately organize themselves into songs. After leaving the analysis and entering the first pandemic year, she returned to an old writing practice: filling three handwritten pages each morning with whatever thoughts arrived. The pages were not intended as a permanent diary. They were excavation, a way of bringing submerged material into daylight without requiring every sentence to become art.

That distinction is important because these songs feel autobiographical while resisting simple documentary reading. Hyvönen’s first-person narrators are constructed from memory, invention, emotional truth and dramatic arrangement. The singer may resemble the woman whose name is printed on the cover, but resemblance is not ownership. Writing in English again after the Swedish-language Kvinnor och barn gave her another layer of distance, enough space for lived experience to become slightly mythological rather than merely exposed.

The title song begins the album at the point where autonomy becomes physically exhausting. Piano and voice carry the argument with an apparent simplicity that gradually reveals how many opposing desires are being held together. The narrator has built barriers in order to function, but the barriers obstruct the same current that gives her life. Independence begins to resemble a dam placed inside one’s own nature, a structure created for protection that eventually requires enormous pressure to maintain.

Hyvönen’s piano has always worked especially well with this kind of emotional contradiction. It can be formal, almost upright in its posture, while her voice introduces impatience, comedy, sensuality or grief above it. She does not use the instrument as delicate singer-songwriter furniture. Chords may arrive with enough force to feel argumentative, as though the piano is another consciousness refusing to let the narrator simplify what she has discovered.

“A Funeral In Banbridge” moves from interior argument to a precisely inhabited public scene. Hyvönen travels to Northern Ireland for the funeral of an old friend and notices the details through which death becomes social reality: the pastor, the church, people from another period of life, a former romantic possibility and a mother facing the burial of her youngest child. The song understands that a funeral gathers several timeframes into one room. The dead person’s childhood, adulthood, relationships and unrealized future suddenly coexist among people who each possessed only one portion of him.

Anna Bergvall’s electric guitar adds color without turning the funeral into rock drama, while Anna Lund’s drumming gives the journey movement and restraint. The arrangement leaves enough space for the narrative details to remain the song’s true instrumentation. Hyvönen does not need to announce grief through orchestral inflation. A few correctly observed human gestures allow the loss to become enormous.

The song also demonstrates why her writing can resemble a short story without becoming literary music set obediently beneath prose. The melody decides which details rise and which remain nearly conversational. Repetition gives certain observations the force of memory, returning not because the narrator has failed to move forward but because the mind has discovered that one image contains more than it understood on first contact.

“Abyss At Bay” brings the danger closer to home. Its title suggests an impossible domestic task: keeping the abyss from entering, maintaining enough daily structure that a child, family or self can remain protected from what waits beyond ordinary routine. Parenthood intensifies this problem because love creates responsibility without granting control. A parent can prepare food, create rituals, watch closely and offer language, yet cannot guarantee that sorrow, fear or injury will remain outside the door.

The music holds anxiety inside a relatively composed surface. That restraint makes the threat more convincing. Panic does not always announce itself through chaos. It may operate beneath a functioning household, continually calculating the distance between safety and collapse while everyone completes the day’s practical tasks.

“Face Face” then attacks aging with the efficiency of a punk single. It lasts less than two minutes, uses guitar and drums more aggressively, and turns the unsolicited social observation that a woman looks tired into something funny, irritated and liberating. The face once treated as personal property has apparently become public evidence, open for inspection and commentary.

Hyvönen refuses both available clichés. She does not claim that physical aging is painless, nor does she accept that distress over appearance makes a woman shallow. The body changes, other people notice, and popular culture supplies very few intelligent stories through which women can understand that experience without either shame or compulsory positivity. Humor gives her another route. By making the panic perform for her, she prevents it from controlling the entire room.

“Head Of The Family” takes authority apart at household scale. A family can organize itself around the fantasy that one person naturally leads while everyone else receives protection in exchange for obedience. The title sounds official, almost administrative, but intimacy does not behave like an institution for long. Power moves through money, emotional labor, parenthood, sex, confidence, need and the person most willing to risk leaving.

The song’s drama comes from hearing a family definition crack while everybody involved remains inside it. There is no simple villain standing above innocent dependents. The structure itself has encouraged people to perform roles that may no longer fit. Hyvönen’s piano retains a stately quality while the guitar introduces rougher edges, allowing domestic order and emotional revolt to occupy the same arrangement.

“Thank You” closes the first side with a farewell to a former partner whose importance is not denied merely because love has ended. Gratitude, apology and departure become inseparable. Popular songs frequently treat the end of love as proof that the relationship was false, a mistake to be exposed or an injury requiring one person to be declared guilty. Hyvönen allows an adult relationship to be both finished and meaningful.

That possibility is more painful than anger because it removes the protective fiction that nothing valuable is being lost. One can thank another person sincerely and still know that remaining would require falsifying love. The song accepts that gratitude does not obligate continuation, and departure does not erase what was received.

The second side begins with “14 At 41,” the album’s expansive romantic center. The narrator arrives at a Stockholm festival, encounters someone she already knows slightly, sits on the grass during Lana Del Rey’s performance and experiences the body’s startling ability to recover adolescent electricity in middle age. The song makes the age explicit because pop music so rarely grants people over forty a present-tense romantic life. They are permitted nostalgia, settled companionship, divorce or comic desperation, but rarely the full instability of new love.

The title does not claim that the forty-one-year-old has literally become fourteen again. Her adult history remains active: divorce, parenthood, caution and knowledge of how badly intimacy can go. The teenage feeling arrives inside that accumulated experience, making it more rather than less intense. She recognizes the risk and moves toward it anyway.

Anna Bergvall’s harp gives the song a suspended, almost enchanted quality, while Linnea Olsson’s cello supplies bodily depth beneath it. The arrangement could easily have made the scene sentimental, but its duration permits nervousness, disbelief and relief to develop gradually. The lovers do not simply meet and receive a chorus confirming destiny. Time slows around the uncertain process of recognizing that the other person may be moving closer too.

“Flock” asks what happens after private attraction begins constructing a social body. A flock offers belonging, movement and protection, but also requires each member to negotiate individual direction with the group. This is the domestic continuation of the title track’s question. Independence may feel clear when one is alone; it becomes more difficult and more meaningful inside a household containing children, histories and competing needs.

The song does not present family as the surrender of the self. It hears family as a moving formation. Members draw close, separate, adjust their pace and depend upon signals that may not be spoken directly. The group survives not because everyone becomes identical, but because difference remains responsive.

“Sex” strips away another cultural division between adulthood and desire. Its placement after “Flock” is important. Sexuality is not sealed away from family life, emotional history, aging or practical responsibility. It exists among them, sometimes as pleasure, communication, reassurance, performance, conflict or proof that two overburdened people still possess bodies not completely consumed by their roles.

Hyvönen writes about sex without treating explicitness as automatic honesty. The deeper subject is exposure, the ways desire can dissolve or reinforce the boundaries built elsewhere on the album. Sexual independence is not merely the freedom to act. It includes the freedom to want, refuse, initiate, follow and remain psychologically present while another person comes close enough to alter one’s sense of self.

“New Vision” confronts menopause and the fading of fertility with a mixture of relief, fear and absurdity. The reproductive body can feel like a factory whose shift has lasted for decades, complete with cycles, blood, possibility, responsibility and the constant knowledge that biology is operating whether or not the person welcomes its schedule. The prospect of clocking out should represent liberation. Instead, freedom arrives carrying grief for a capacity one may not have wanted to exercise again.

This is one of the album’s most generous insights. Loss does not have to be rational in order to be real. A door can matter after one has decided never to walk through it. Fertility may have been exhausting, frightening or finished in practical terms, yet its disappearance changes the body’s relationship with time. Hyvönen refuses to reduce menopause either to tragedy or empowerment. It is a biological transition large enough to hold both.

The arrangement remains bright enough for humor to survive. Rather than lowering the lights and presenting middle age as solemn decline, the song gives bodily panic melody, movement and theatrical personality. Hyvönen argues that older women’s experiences deserve not only serious representation but wit, spectacle and great pop songs.

“Painter” closes the album by dismantling the myth of artistic destiny. The narrator wonders whether the incomplete body of work can be explained by having chosen the wrong medium, possessing the wrong temperament or failing to receive the complete gift from the muses. Beneath the excuses sits the ordinary terror that the artist may simply not have done enough.

The song rejects the romantic picture of genius as a person continuously visited by inspiration. Hyvönen’s own process supplies another model: showing up, writing pages that may be discarded, waiting patiently for a song’s true subject, revising and producing until the work finally resembles the internal vision. Inspiration may arrive, but it prefers to find someone already at the desk.

This makes “Painter” the perfect companion to Ericson’s cover. The painting did not descend fully formed from mythology. Two artists exchanged ideas and demos, selected a location, found clothing, staged reference photographs, introduced an old marble palette, smashed it and transformed the physical labor of mixing and applying pigment into an image. The goddess is constructed through work while the work exposes the goddess as a myth.

Hyvönen’s reflection in the painted water makes this especially clear. The reflected figure resembles her but cannot preserve the whole person. A song works the same way. Listeners encounter a version of the artist formed from selected experience, melody, performance and narrative. The image may appear more coherent than the life that produced it, encouraging outsiders to mistake reflection for complete access.

Dream Of Independence repeatedly resists that mistake. Its songs are intimate without becoming evidence files. Hyvönen gives specific ages, locations, bodies and relationships, but the artistic arrangement protects the people inside them from total possession. We are invited into the emotional truth of the funeral, romance, separation and changing body without being handed authority over every biography involved.

The four musicians preserve that balance throughout the album. Hyvönen’s voice and piano remain the narrative center, but Anna Bergvall’s electric guitar and harp, Anna Lund’s drums and Linnea Olsson’s cello expand the rooms around the stories. None of them arrives to prove that this is now a bigger, more mature production. Their contributions respond to the particular emotional physics of each song.

Bergvall’s guitar is especially revealing because Hyvönen had previously shown little interest in incorporating electric guitar into her own music. She was drawn to the raw emotion in Bergvall’s playing rather than to the instrument as a symbol of rock force. The guitar can therefore scratch against the piano in “Face Face,” add unease to “Head Of The Family” and illuminate “A Funeral In Banbridge” without reorganizing the album around itself.

Lund’s drumming also avoids the assumption that narrative piano songs merely need a polite beat. Her playing determines how quickly a scene can move and how much pressure can gather beneath Hyvönen’s phrasing. A small rhythmic decision can turn an observation into an accusation or allow a painful statement to pass without being melodramatically underlined.

Olsson’s cello and Bergvall’s harp appear sparingly enough to retain consequence. Their entrance into “14 At 41” allows the romantic scene to expand beyond ordinary time, but because the surrounding album remains relatively restrained, the beauty feels earned rather than applied as decoration.

Recording at Riksmixningsverket places these personal stories inside a studio established by Benny Andersson, a songwriter who understands how apparently direct pop can hold complex emotional architecture. Yet Dream Of Independence does not attempt ABBA-scale gloss. The recording preserves the pressure of fingers against piano keys, the blunt shape of Hyvönen’s delivery and the breathing room required for language to remain central.

Her singing is wonderfully uninterested in becoming universally pretty. She can be severe, conversational, theatrical, vulnerable and funny within a single song. Certain words are presented with almost physical bluntness, while others appear to be discovered as she sings them. That irregularity prevents the narratives from becoming tasteful literary objects. A living person keeps interrupting the polish.

The album’s return to English also creates a subtle form of independence. Swedish listeners had embraced the apparent directness of Kvinnor och barn, sometimes treating its narrators as transparent access to Hyvönen herself. English allows her to become less locally legible and therefore more artistically mobile. The language is not a disguise so much as a different stage, one where autobiography can acquire distance before it reaches the audience.

The physical LP extends the water imagery through transparent marbled-blue vinyl. The disc resembles something fluid made temporarily solid, an apt container for songs concerned with dams, reflection, bodily cycles and the instability of fixed identity. The record rotates while the painted water on the cover remains still, each medium contradicting the other slightly.

Dream Of Independence does not conclude that independence is impossible. It proposes that independence becomes most real when it no longer requires pretending that other people have no power over us. Love changes the course of a life. Children reorganize time. Death summons old relationships into one room. The body follows biological laws the conscious self did not write. Art depends upon collaborators, listeners, engineers, instruments and the work of people who came before.

The independent person is not untouched. She is the person capable of being changed without disappearing.

That is the strength in Ericson’s portrait. Hyvönen is surrounded by broken material, water and unstable reflection, but she has not dissolved into them. Nor does she stand dry and invulnerable above the scene. She kneels inside it, one hand holding the marble, her body touching the water and her gaze meeting whoever approaches. The defences have been breached. What remains is not weakness, but presence.