Treasury Of Puppies - 2021 - Lollos Dagbok 7''

I Dischi Del Barone – IDDB044

 A diary normally promises sequence: a date, an event, a private thought entrusted to paper before another day begins. Treasury of Puppies take that familiar form and loosen every hinge. Lollos Dagbok, “Lollo’s Diary,” is divided across the two sides of a seven-inch, but the record does not behave like a story with a beginning and conclusion. It feels closer to finding two detached pages whose handwriting has begun producing its own weather. Voice, minimal electronics and damaged fragments of music surround one another without settling into the usual roles of narration and accompaniment. The diary is not merely being read. It is being entered, rearranged and made audible as a physical space.

These recordings were made in Gothenburg during February 2020, before Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson began the sessions that became Treasury of Puppies’ self-titled debut album. That chronology makes the single especially revealing. The duo’s working language is already present, but it has not yet been trained into recognizable songs or even into the slightly more elaborate sound collages of the LP. The two pieces retain the exposed quality of an initial experiment, when a voice, a small electronic gesture and an accidental noise can still carry equal importance. Nothing has been demoted to background. Every sound appears capable of interrupting the others.

Malmenholt and Karlsson emerged from a Gothenburg network in which home recording, visual art, noise, folk melody, spoken text and inexpensive electronic instruments continually cross-pollinate. Karlsson had already worked through projects including Facit and Fåglar I Bur, while Malmenholt had appeared within the connected worlds of Arv & Miljö and Monokultur. Treasury of Puppies gave them a place where those histories could become less identifiable. Their music does not sound like several genres carefully combined. It sounds as though the categories were left unattended overnight and fused together by morning.

The phrase “audio diary” is useful here because the recording preserves more than a composed object. It preserves proximity. Spoken language allows breath, hesitation, emphasis and the small distances between words to become musical information, even for listeners who do not understand Swedish. Meaning is carried twice: first through language and then through the physical behavior of the voice. A diary read silently remains internal, but once spoken and recorded it leaves the body, enters a machine and becomes available to strangers. Lollos Dagbok quietly explores that transformation without explaining who Lollo is or instructing us how literally the title should be taken.

The division into “part 1” and “part 2” is determined by vinyl as much as by composition. Each section lasts a little over four minutes, nearly filling one side of a 45-rpm single. Turning the record becomes an interval inside the diary. The listener must physically interrupt the voice, lift the disc, rotate it and search for the continuation. That pause creates a small uncertainty. Has time passed between the two entries? Are we hearing the same scene from another angle, or two pieces of material that have only been joined by the title? A digital copy removes the hand movement but cannot completely erase the structure. The two files still face one another like pages separated by a binding.

Treasury of Puppies refer to this music as both sound poetry and “broken music.” Broken does not mean unfinished or unsuccessfully played. It describes a method in which the familiar agreements holding a song together have been cracked open. Speech need not resolve into lyrics, an electronic tone need not become melody, and atmosphere does not have to remain behind the principal action. What might normally be edited away becomes connective material. Awkwardness, silence and domestic-scale sound are granted the expressive authority usually reserved for polished instrumental performance.

That approach places the duo near Sweden’s long history of text-sound composition, radio art and privately circulated experimental recording, but Lollos Dagbok wears no academic robes. Its scale is deliberately small, closer to a message left on an answering machine or a cassette recorded in a bedroom than to an institutional studio work. The intimacy is complicated by the duo’s humor and instability. Tenderness can become eerie without warning; a fragile arrangement can suddenly reveal the stubbornness of a primitive rock song buried beneath it. Their name carries the same double nature. A treasury suggests preserved valuables, puppies suggest softness and play, yet the band’s own description celebrates a little dog that can “fight like a demon.”

The sleeve extends this ambiguity through an image that initially appears almost aggressively harmless. A lavender field surrounds a decorative pastoral scene containing flowers, a cottage, water, birds and miniature rural figures. It resembles a mass-produced greeting card or a page from a child’s keepsake book, an object designed to communicate uncomplicated sweetness. Attached to the blank record sleeve, however, it begins to feel slightly displaced. Its prefabricated nostalgia becomes another found voice, as though the diary has selected its own improbable cover from a box of abandoned stationery. The image is not mocked. Treasury of Puppies understand that sentimentality can become mysterious when separated from its original owner.

That method was central to I Dischi Del Barone. Matthias Andersson’s label issued only seven-inch records, generally in editions of two hundred, using hand-stamped white labels, inserts and postcards or photographs attached to otherwise plain sleeves. Each release was a small manufactured object carrying visible evidence of somebody’s hands. IDDB044 follows that practice exactly: two hundred copies, no repress, a postcard affixed to the cover and an insert enclosed with the record. The label itself did not provide downloads, although Treasury of Puppies later made these recordings available digitally through their own Bandcamp page. The physical single and the artist’s files therefore belong to related but not identical routes of circulation.

That distinction becomes even richer here because more than one digital history now exists around the record. An earlier copy in this archive came from a purchased physical seven-inch and was personally transferred from vinyl. The files attached to this later post were downloaded elsewhere. One version carries the cartridge, turntable, recording level, software and listening decisions of a particular home transfer; the other carries an unknown chain that may originate from vinyl or from a digital source. Neither automatically cancels the other. They are separate encounters with the same small object, each preserving different information about how underground music travels once its original two hundred copies begin moving between owners.

Lollos Dagbok is easy to mistake for a miniature between two larger Treasury of Puppies statements, but its brevity is part of its force. These nine minutes contain the project before it had fully declared what it was. Voice is still deciding whether to become song, electronics are still deciding whether to become scenery, and the ordinary debris of recording is permitted to remain alive. The diary does not reveal a secret biography. It reveals the more elusive moment when private material changes state and becomes art, without losing the fingerprints, uncertainty and domestic strangeness of the life from which it came.

Isotope Soap - 2020 - An Artifact Of Insects

 

Push My Buttons – PMB020

Punk has always claimed some ownership of the future, but Isotope Soap sounds suspicious that the future was delivered by the wrong courier. An Artifact of Insects compresses ten songs into less than fifteen minutes, constructing a world of malfunctioning communication, compulsory productivity, synthetic solutions, alien encounters and boredom upgraded with new hardware. The record moves at hardcore speed, but its nervous system is electronic. Synthesizers flash instructions that cannot be followed, guitars arrive as bent metallic interruptions, drums keep imposing order, and the voice changes shape as though several defective authorities are attempting to use the same public-address system. Nothing lasts long enough to become comfortable. Even the album’s longer ideas behave as though somebody is already reaching for the power switch.
Isotope Soap began as Peter Swedenhammar’s return to making music alone after decades inside Swedish punk and hardcore. His history included Raped Teenagers and the microscopic eruptions of Pusrad, whose songs often ended before another band would have completed its count-in. Acquiring synthesizers gave Swedenhammar the productive disorientation of becoming a beginner again. The project was initially called Clockout before taking its permanent name from a Geza X and the Mommymen song, although Swedenhammar identified Devo, Punishment of Luxury, Iko ’83, Das Ding, Five Times of Dust and the Screamers among the more direct initial inspirations. Those references explain the available machinery, but they do not explain what Isotope Soap does with it. This is not an expert restoration of late-1970s synth punk. It is older punk experience being made strange again by unfamiliar tools.
That combination is crucial. An Artifact of Insects has the efficiency of someone who spent years learning exactly how little time a song requires, yet its electronics keep opening trapdoors beneath that discipline. Synthesizers are sometimes treated as futuristic decoration, a layer sprayed over conventional rock to make it glow under ultraviolet light. Isotope Soap uses them more aggressively. They interrupt rhythm, bend the apparent age of the human voice and introduce systems whose rules remain unclear. The machine is not a backdrop. It is another argumentative band member, one capable of changing a sarcastic punk song into a transmission intercepted from a failed administrative satellite.
The titles arrive like fragments from warning labels, software menus and damaged psychiatric files: “T-t-t-telepathic,” “Easy Readable,” “Silicon Solution,” “Hey, Karoshi!,” “Abortion/Suicide,” “Fragile Dream,” “Itchy Rain,” “New World Boredom,” “Zanfretta” and “Kioma.” Read consecutively, they resemble the vocabulary of a civilization that can still manufacture concepts but has lost confidence in their meaning. “Easy Readable” is itself linguistically unstable, promising clarity through language that has already developed a fault. “Silicon Solution” sounds equally like an advertisement and a medical diagnosis. The stutter built into “T-t-t-telepathic” turns direct mind-to-mind communication into another signal that cannot establish a connection.
“Hey, Karoshi!” places the Japanese term for death through overwork inside the chirpy punctuation of a greeting. That collision contains much of Isotope Soap’s method. Catastrophe is presented in the language of customer service, while despair arrives with enough rhythmic force to become briefly exhilarating. “New World Boredom” performs a related mutation on the familiar promise of a brave new world. Technology may increase speed, access and stimulation, yet the result is not necessarily wonder. It may simply produce boredom with a brighter interface. The album was released in January 2020, just before screens became an even larger portion of ordinary social existence, but its anxiety does not depend upon accidental prophecy. The technological exhaustion it describes was already present. Later events merely enlarged the display.
Most of the songs vanish in one or two minutes. “Easy Readable” lasts forty-four seconds, “New World Boredom” forty-five, and “Abortion/Suicide” fifty. This brevity does not reduce them to sketches. It removes the expectation that a worthwhile musical thought must be expanded until it resembles a conventional product. Swedenhammar’s hardcore background remains audible in that refusal of padding. A riff, synthetic pulse, altered voice or verbal idea enters, demonstrates its peculiar law and disappears. The record behaves less like a collection of miniature songs than a box of captured electrical organisms, each given only enough air to expose its particular movement.
“Zanfretta,” the longest piece at slightly over three minutes, changes the scale of the album simply by remaining present. Its title points toward Pier Fortunato Zanfretta, the Italian security guard whose claims of repeated extraterrestrial encounters became one of Europe’s stranger UFO narratives. That reference belongs naturally inside Isotope Soap’s universe. The alien is not a majestic visitor carrying cosmic enlightenment. It is another destabilizing intelligence encountered while someone is working a night shift, an impossible event entering through the routine obligations of employment. After so many compressed pieces, three minutes begin to feel like lost time aboard a craft. The record stretches, examines its surroundings and then deposits the listener back into the final short transmission.
The phrase An Artifact of Insects proposes several possible makers. It could describe an object discovered after humanity has disappeared, misidentified by whatever intelligence begins cataloguing our residue. It could treat human beings themselves as insects, collectively constructing enormous systems that no individual fully comprehends. It might also describe the record’s sound: small components moving rapidly, communicating through vibration, assembling a structure through collective activity rather than central command. Punk groups are often described through individual personality, but this music repeatedly behaves like a colony. Rhythm, voice, guitar and electronics carry separate pieces of information whose larger pattern only becomes visible through accumulation.
The cover places that colony inside a room whose ceiling has been removed to expose outer space. Two kneeling or standing human figures have been given labyrinthine insect heads, their bodies cut from mismatched printed matter. Keyboard diagrams cross through the Isotope Soap name at right angles, suggesting both musical instruments and the control panels of an apparatus nobody was trained to operate. A tiny television displays an insect while a pale animal-shaped construction occupies the foreground, assembled from text rather than flesh. The domestic room, laboratory, rehearsal space and spacecraft have collapsed into one location. It is funny before it becomes disturbing, which is generally where Isotope Soap is most effective.
Swedenhammar’s partnership with Benjamin Vallé gave the project another important connection to Stockholm’s contemporary underground. Vallé was also a founding guitarist of Viagra Boys, but Isotope Soap offered a less publicly legible machine, one where punk, primitive electronics, science-fiction jokes and hardcore compression could be wired together without concern for a stable genre identity. Vallé’s death in 2021 inevitably gives these recordings additional historical gravity, but An Artifact of Insects should not be converted retrospectively into memorial music. It is alive with invention, speed and ridiculous ideas. Its value lies partly in hearing experienced musicians behave as though experience has not granted them permission to become predictable.
Push My Buttons issued the record as PMB020 in an edition of three hundred black-vinyl copies with an insert that doubled as a lyric sheet and poster, while some direct orders included a larger promotional poster. Calling this the group’s first full-length album is technically accurate and delightfully perverse. Many bands would use fifteen minutes to introduce the first side of an LP; Isotope Soap uses it to build a civilization, accelerate its technological development, exhaust its workers, establish telepathy, encounter extraterrestrials and leave behind an object for insects to interpret.
The band has described itself as having no aims but possessing a clear vision of the future. That paradox explains why this record avoids the dead surface of retro synth punk. It does not imitate an era when musicians imagined what future control systems might sound like. It listens to those systems after they have become ordinary, portable and boring. The future here is not chrome architecture or flying vehicles. It is constant communication producing less understanding, infinite information reduced to slogans, and human beings required to adapt themselves to tools supposedly designed for their convenience. Against that condition, Isotope Soap offers fifteen minutes of concentrated malfunction. The bugs have entered the system, learned to play instruments and left us an artifact before the exterminator arrives.

Isotope Soap - 2019 - Monitored By Zu Tse

Emotional Response – ER83

 A compilation usually attempts to organize the past, but Monitored by Zu Tse behaves as though the past has been seized during an investigation. Seventeen songs from Isotope Soap’s first three records have been removed from their original sleeves, pressed together at high velocity and filed beneath a title that cannot keep its own spelling stable. Even the available evidence disagrees: some copies and listings say “Zu Tze,” others say “Zu Tse.” The uncertainty suits music built from scrambled instructions, synthetic panic, cosmic rumors and voices that sound as though the authorities have already entered the transmission.

The record gathers the five songs from 2016’s Frontal Disorder Post Mental Border seven-inch, the four songs from 2017’s The WOW! Signal seven-inch and all eight tracks from the Piñata Chaos twelve-inch. Heard separately, those releases documented Isotope Soap discovering what its equipment could do. Heard together, they become a compressed developmental history. The earliest songs are blunt electrical shocks. The middle section aims its antennas upward. The final eight tracks begin creating a broader universe of religious rescue missions, reversed cosmology, human invasions and impossible propulsion systems. There is growth, but no loss of urgency. Seventeen tracks occupy less than twenty-seven minutes, as though the group fears that remaining in one location too long will allow the monitoring system to determine its coordinates.

Peter Swedenhammar began Isotope Soap after decades inside Swedish punk and hardcore, including Raped Teenagers and the extraordinarily concentrated Pusrad. Acquiring synthesizers allowed him to become inexperienced again. That renewal matters more than any question of whether this is punk, hardcore, new wave or minimal electronics. The first Isotope Soap recordings preserve the excitement of someone discovering that an unfamiliar machine can reorganize instincts formed through years of guitar music. Hardcore supplies the compression, attack and impatience. The synthesizers supply wrong turns, unstable surfaces and a future that refuses to resemble its advertising.

“Pussy Riding Cowboy Buddhas” lasts thirty-nine seconds, but its title alone tries to collide sexuality, spirituality, Western mythology and souvenir-shop enlightenment before the music has finished starting. It is not an introduction so much as a forced entry. “Frontal Disorder Post Mental Border” then expands beyond two minutes, which already feels luxurious in this environment. Synth lines twitch against disciplined percussion while the voice seems to alternate between issuing orders and suffering their consequences. Isotope Soap’s songs frequently sound highly controlled and mentally uncontained at the same time. The rhythm section knows exactly where the exits are; every other element is throwing furniture in front of them.

“Hate” demonstrates that the group can sustain a recognizably shaped song without normalizing itself. The word is reduced from a grand moral force to a small, repeatable unit, something that can be transmitted, programmed and distributed. “Fancy Inbred Humans” returns to the sub-minute form, making humanity sound like an expensive defective product line. “Circle Jerk” closes the first sequence with the EP’s longest piece, but the title prevents any illusion of artistic grandeur. The circle can describe repetition, social agreement, subcultural self-congratulation or simply a loop that has forgotten why it continues. Isotope Soap understands that punk scenes are capable of exposing absurd systems while rapidly constructing miniature versions of those systems for themselves.

The WOW! Signal material points that suspicion toward outer space. The original Wow! signal was a powerful, unexplained radio event detected during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but Isotope Soap does not approach it with astronomical reverence. Space becomes another source of malfunctioning bureaucracy and grotesque possibility. “Magnetic Abortion of a Black Hole” treats cosmic physics as pulp surgery. “Dad Attack” turns domestic authority into a thirty-three-second emergency. “High on Wildlife” sounds like a nature program transmitted by a civilization that has never encountered an animal but remains chemically enthusiastic about the idea.

“The Wow! Signal” is the longest piece from either seven-inch and therefore receives enough room to construct something resembling suspense. The band’s science-fiction language is effective because it never becomes clean. Synthesizers in retro-futurist music often evoke sleek laboratories, computer grids and orderly machines. Isotope Soap’s equipment sounds sticky, overheated and operated by people who misplaced the manual. Their future has loose wires trailing across the floor. The extraterrestrial message may contain the answer to human existence, but somebody recorded over the first half with a rehearsal and labeled the cassette incorrectly.

The Piñata Chaos material occupies the second side and widens the project’s vocabulary without sacrificing its impatience. “I Saved You from Jesus” begins with the language of rescue but reverses the expected direction. Salvation itself becomes something from which a person may need to be extracted. The joke carries a serious punk instinct beneath it: any institution claiming permanent authority over the human mind deserves examination, especially when obedience is presented as love. “Reversed Big Bang” applies the same reversal to creation. Instead of matter expanding outward, the universe appears to be sucked backward through a damaged keyboard.

“The Roof” lasts only thirty-nine seconds, but on this record duration does not indicate importance. These miniature pieces function like emergency interruptions between longer broadcasts. “Human Invasion” then flips one of science fiction’s oldest fears. Humans are not awaiting invaders; we are the contaminating species arriving elsewhere. The title can describe colonization, environmental destruction, space travel or merely the effect of a person entering a room already functioning perfectly without them. Isotope Soap’s humor rarely settles into one target. Each absurd image rotates until the listener discovers that humanity remains visible from every angle.

“Trump des Willens” mutates Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will into a title carrying both political contamination and ridiculous linguistic damage. The song appeared in 2017, when the transformation of politics into perpetual media performance had become impossible to ignore. Isotope Soap does not answer propaganda with a lecture. The band makes authoritarian spectacle sound cheap, frantic and structurally unstable. The machine demands admiration, but its control panel is smoking.

“Piñata Chaos” presents disorder as a celebration engineered to release its contents through violence. “Radiated Head” offers the resulting medical condition in forty seconds. These titles work as compact speculative fiction, but they also resemble headlines encountered while moving too quickly through an information feed. Catastrophe, comedy, science and advertising arrive with identical visual weight. Nothing is given enough time to be processed before the next item appears. Isotope Soap anticipated the strange psychological condition of receiving too much information while understanding progressively less.

“EmDrive Thruster” closes the record at slightly over three minutes, making it the compilation’s accidental epic. The EmDrive was proposed as a propulsion system capable of producing thrust without conventional propellant, exactly the sort of disputed technological promise that belongs inside Isotope Soap’s world. It offers movement without visible expenditure, progress without fuel and escape without an agreed explanation of how the escape works. After sixteen songs of compressed human malfunction, the final track appears to search for propulsion. Whether the device launches, explodes or merely shakes convincingly on a laboratory table is left unresolved.

Benjamin Vallé’s presence in Isotope Soap connected Swedenhammar’s electronic mutations to another deep current of Stockholm punk. Vallé had played in Nine, Nitad, Pig Eyes and Viagra Boys, bringing a guitar language capable of abrasion without requiring conventional heaviness. Within Isotope Soap, guitar does not restore rock stability to the synthesizers. It becomes another unstable signal, sometimes slicing across the rhythm and sometimes disappearing into the machinery. Knowing that Vallé died in 2021 inevitably changes the historical frame around these recordings, but the music itself remains aggressively present. His contribution is not a shadow cast backward over the record. It is part of the energy still moving outward from it.

The cover resembles a surveillance file assembled by a machine with an unreliable understanding of human society. Newspaper strips, industrial equipment, reflective surfaces and a formally dressed figure have been cut together until information becomes texture. The person appears simultaneously official and partially erased. Machinery occupies the left side like an observation station, while the paper fragments on the right seem to be swallowing whatever explanation they once contained. Small type identifies the band and title with bureaucratic restraint, as though the image were ordinary documentation rather than evidence of a nervous breakdown inside the archive.

Emotional Response’s international release changed the scale of the object. The original material had appeared through small Swedish editions, including hand-numbered pressings, before these songs were collected and sent into wider circulation. This is what a thoughtful compilation can accomplish. It does not merely rescue scarce records from expensive secondhand existence. It reveals a larger design that was difficult to perceive while the pieces were arriving individually. Frontal Disorder Post Mental Border establishes the nervous system, Piñata Chaos constructs the unstable world around it, and The WOW! Signal aims the entire contraption toward whatever may be listening beyond Earth.

The sequence also demonstrates how quickly Isotope Soap developed a complete personality. The recognizable ingredients were available long before them: Devo’s mechanical satire, the Screamers’ keyboard hostility, Geza X’s mutated Los Angeles punk, ISM’s absurdist compression and Koro’s speed. Isotope Soap does not conceal those inheritances, but neither does the band become a historical reenactment. Swedenhammar and Vallé use older punk futures to examine a present in which many of those imagined control systems have already arrived. Constant monitoring, algorithmic repetition, technological salvation, information overload and paranoia are no longer exotic science fiction subjects. They are household utilities.

Monitored by Zu Tse therefore sounds less dated now than many records designed to appear futuristic. Its machines are clumsy, but its anxiety is precise. It recognizes that technology will not necessarily conquer humanity through a single dramatic event. It may simply surround ordinary life with enough instructions, screens, signals, promises and invisible observers that nobody can determine which voice deserves belief. Isotope Soap’s response is not retreat. The band accelerates the confusion until it becomes audible as confusion, then compresses it into songs small enough to smuggle through the system.

The record ends without proving whether Zu Tse is a person, machine, extraterrestrial observer, damaged reference to Sun Tzu or merely a name generated by the surveillance apparatus itself. That uncertainty is more useful than an answer. Somewhere, somebody is monitoring Isotope Soap. The band knows it, the listener knows it, and the machine probably knows that we know. Fortunately, the seventeen intercepted messages are too fast, funny and structurally disobedient to provide the observer with much practical intelligence.

Kungens Man - 2022 - Kungens Ljud & Bild

Kungens Ljud & Bild – KLBLP007

 Improvised rock is sometimes described as though a group merely begins playing and waits for something interesting to happen. Kungens Män make that explanation sound comically inadequate. Their music depends on spontaneity, but it also depends on six people recognizing structure at the instant it becomes possible. A bass note establishes gravity, a drum pattern suggests motion, one guitar discovers a doorway and another decides whether to enter, obstruct it or begin constructing a second room nearby. The composition does not exist before the musicians play it, yet it often sounds as though they are remembering something together. Kungens Ljud & Bild captures that collective memory being invented in real time.

The record arrived in 2022, ten years after a group of Stockholm friends began bringing instruments to their social gatherings. That origin remains audible. Kungens Män does not treat improvisation as an athletic contest or a solemn voyage undertaken by isolated virtuosos. The music still carries the social intelligence of people who know one another well enough to wander without repeatedly checking whether everyone is following. Hans Hjelm and Gustav Nygren occupy the guitars, Peter Erikson supplies synthesizer, Magnus Öhrn handles bass, Mattias “Indy” Pettersson plays drums, and Mikael Tuominen moves among guitar, six-string bass, voice and whatever connective tissue the moment requires. Their individual roles are identifiable, but their greatest instrument is the accumulated knowledge passing between them.

Kungens Ljud & Bild translates as “The King’s Sound and Image” or “The King’s Sound and Vision,” and it is also the name of the band’s own label. The title therefore folds several functions into one phrase. It names the album, the apparatus releasing it, and the meeting of audio with Magnus Öhrn’s cover art. It comes unusually close to being a self-titled record without simply repeating the group’s name. After a decade of releases spread across labels and formats, Kungens Män placed its music inside an object bearing the name of its own infrastructure. The king in question is not a person standing above the band. The only authority here is the sound that appears in the room and convinces six musicians to follow it.

“När piskan viner,” roughly “When the Whip Whines,” begins with a riff so direct that it almost appears to promise an ordinary heavy-rock song. The band members themselves imagined teenage metal rebels riding mopeds, unsuccessfully attempting to grow moustaches and advancing at half throttle with complete spiritual commitment. That humor is important. Kungens Män can believe in the transformational force of a riff without pretending that the riff is dignified. They grip it with exaggerated loyalty, allowing its repetitions to become both heroic and faintly ridiculous. The drums keep the vehicle upright while guitars gradually stop agreeing on the route. What first resembled a sturdy entrance riff becomes a launching structure, useful only until the music has generated enough lift to leave it behind.

The transition illustrates the band’s deepest skill. Kungens Män rarely signals change through a dramatic break. Instead, the meaning of the existing material is slowly altered. A guitar begins emphasizing a different portion of the rhythm. Synthesizer color spreads behind it. Bass pressure changes the perceived weight of the riff, and suddenly the music that seemed to be moving forward has begun moving outward. No member needs to announce the new section because there is no new section in the conventional sense. The original object is still present, but everybody has changed their relationship to it.

“Stora rummet,” “The Big Room,” makes that process the central subject of its fifteen minutes. The title is nearly architectural. Sounds enter one at a time and establish their own distances, as though the musicians are discovering the dimensions of an unfamiliar interior by making noise inside it. A guitar figure does not simply introduce melody; it reveals a wall. Synthesizer indicates the height of the ceiling. Bass and drums establish the floor’s stability, while another guitar begins locating passages that may connect this room to somewhere less measurable.

The piece is quiet enough to expose how active the musicians remain while apparently doing very little. Layers float above one another with slight disagreements in timing and direction. One figure seems circular, another diagonal, another almost stationary. Because the group does not force these movements into immediate alignment, the listener can hear several scales of time operating at once. From nearby, the instruments appear loosely scattered. From farther away, their combined shape becomes remarkably coherent. “Stora rummet” demonstrates why the phrase “instant composition” fits Kungens Män better than “jam.” A jam may revolve around an established pattern. This music constructs the conditions in which a pattern can be discovered, inhabited and eventually abandoned.

The room itself may also be the recording space. The album was made at Moderskeppet in Aspudden, with Tuominen recording and mixing the sessions. The Swedish word “moderskeppet” means “the mothership,” which gives the studio an appropriately cosmic identity, but the recordings avoid the sealed atmosphere of science-fiction polish. Amplifiers retain grain, cymbals move air, and the low frequencies feel physically produced rather than digitally illustrated. John McBain’s mastering preserves the dimensional character of the performances. The instruments can accumulate into density without becoming a single flattened wall. Space remains audible inside the pressure.

“I Hjalles kök,” “In Hjalle’s Kitchen,” moves from the large room into a much more specific social location. The band’s friend Björn Viking Hjalmar apparently possesses the sort of kitchen where nights out continue until five in the morning, where middle-aged men with large record collections arrive seeking friendship, release and the temporary meaning of life. That image brings the band’s origin story back into view. Kungens Män began through friends spending time together, and here the imagined site of transcendence is not a sacred mountain, fashionable club or expensive studio. It is somebody’s kitchen after the official evening should have ended.

Tuominen’s spoken performance is assembled from a document in which he collects possible song titles and stray phrases produced during rehearsals, meetings and travel. While the others improvised, he scrolled through the list and spoke fragments at random: German ninjas, beautiful pigs, eight hundred years of continuous change, eyes in noses, angry anatomical declarations and hard rock discovered in a bargain bin. These are not lyrics in the usual sense. They are accumulated verbal debris from the band’s shared life, temporarily arranged by voice and rhythm.

The result resembles beat poetry after several days inside a psychedelic garage, but its real value is structural. The words introduce another unpredictable instrument. Language naturally demands attention, yet the phrases refuse to form a stable narrative, leaving the listener suspended between meaning and sound. Tuominen’s delivery grows more urgent while the rhythm section maintains its forward motion, and the guitars begin making the kitchen feel increasingly too small for what is occurring inside it. The song captures a familiar late-night transformation. An ordinary room becomes the center of existence because the people in it have crossed beyond practical conversation and begun generating a private mythology.

That mythology is silly, but never disposable. Kungens Män understands that nonsense can preserve social history with peculiar accuracy. A phrase that means nothing to an outsider may contain an entire journey, rehearsal or friendship for the people who were present when it first appeared. By carrying their archive of possible titles into an improvised vocal performance, the band turns years of incidental speech into compositional material. The private joke does not need to be fully explained. Its energy survives the loss of context.

“Vaska lyckokaka,” translated by the band as “Scrap a Fortune Cookie,” begins from the feeling of discovering something active in the middle of the room and deciding to follow it. Bass and drums produce a loose, bodily swing, while guitars and synthesizer gather around the rhythm without immediately determining its destination. The early minutes possess restrained confidence. Nothing rushes, because the musicians trust that repetition will eventually reveal which element contains the exit.

The title’s treatment of the fortune cookie is appropriate for an improvising band. A fortune offers a prefabricated future, a sentence claiming to know where events are heading. Kungens Män throws it away. The value of the performance lies precisely in nobody knowing what comes next. Around the middle of the piece, the music begins slipping free of its earlier shape. Guitar tones brighten, fuzz thickens, synthesizer signals detach from the groove, and the journey becomes increasingly weightless. The band identified the space travel as beginning at 5:43, but the transition is too gradual to be measured with absolute confidence. By the time the listener realizes gravity has disappeared, the floor is already far below.

This is one of the album’s recurring pleasures. Transformation happens through attention rather than force. Kungens Män does not always need a crescendo, key change or sudden increase in volume to make one musical world become another. A small rhythmic adjustment can rotate the entire landscape. A tone introduced almost casually may become the central organizing force several minutes later. The musicians appear less interested in controlling the music than in noticing what it is asking them to do.

The cover visualizes that condition through two mirrored, many-limbed creatures surrounded by fields of white bubbles or cellular dots against deep blue. Their striped bodies meet near the center, beneath eyes formed from concentric circles, while the hand-drawn band name sits between them like a shared organ. They could be insects, microscopic organisms, dancers, musicians or two halves of one symmetrical nervous system. Limbs point in different directions, but the figures remain joined. The image contains the same balance of coordination and excess heard in the music. Individual movements proliferate while an underlying relationship keeps the whole structure from scattering.

It also resembles an inkblot test designed for people who spend too much time beside amplifiers. The viewer must participate by deciding what sort of beings are present and what activity they are performing. Sound and image operate through the same invitation. Kungens Män provides enough form to begin perception, but leaves the final organization open. The album never tells the listener exactly what its journeys represent. Inner space, outer space, friendship, memory and the physical pleasure of amplified repetition remain available simultaneously.

The European release was the band’s first vinyl issue through its own Kungens Ljud & Bild label, while Nashville’s Centripetal Force created a separate North American edition. This transatlantic arrangement quietly reflects the distance the group had traveled since friends first gathered with instruments in 2012. An informal social ritual had become a catalog of recordings, European touring history and an album distributed through the group’s own structure on one continent and a sympathetic independent label on another. Yet the musical method remained almost stubbornly unchanged. They still entered a room, listened and allowed the next decision to emerge from the previous one.

That continuity is more impressive than any attempt to manufacture progress through stylistic replacement. Kungens Män has absorbed psychedelic rock, Swedish progg, krautrock, drone, shoegaze, free jazz, noise and heavy rock, but the band does not line those influences up for inspection. They become possible behaviors inside a shared improvisational language. A session can lean toward a motorik pulse, dissolve into environmental drift, erupt through guitar distortion or produce half-mad spoken theatre without requiring the group to choose a permanent identity.

The names surrounding Kungens Män reveal how porous that language is. Hjelm, Tuominen and Nygren also intersect in Automatism, whose instrumental psychedelia often feels more polished and gliding. Tuominen, Erikson and Nygren appear in Fanatism, where psychedelic and progressive structures take different shapes. Tuominen and Nygren also participate in the freer, more abrasive Eye Make the Horizon. These projects are not merely side notes. They show musicians testing related instincts under altered social conditions. Change the people in the room, and the same player discovers another vocabulary.

Kungens Ljud & Bild may be particularly representative because it accepts several versions of the band within forty-five minutes. The opening track remembers the ridiculous glory of adolescent hard rock. “Stora rummet” becomes patient spatial construction. “I Hjalles kök” transforms friendship’s collected nonsense into psych-poetry. “Vaska lyckokaka” begins with earthly swing and eventually drops into unrestricted space. None of these approaches is presented as the definitive Kungens Män sound. The definitive sound is the transition itself, the moment when six people hear a possibility and move toward it together.

A digital edition also circulated with a shorter edit of “Stora rummet,” reducing a fifteen-minute environment to approximately six minutes. That edit presents an interesting secondary object. Improvised music develops meaning through duration, but editing can reveal another hidden composition inside the same performance. One version permits the room to be explored; the other creates a guided passage through it. Listeners who encountered different downloads or vinyl editions may remember the album’s proportions differently, which is another reason the files themselves deserve attention as circulating artifacts rather than transparent containers.

The band’s own title turns out to be exact. This is sound becoming image, and image becoming a method for hearing relationships. Riffs draw roads, drones alter the horizon, rhythms construct rooms, and absurd words populate a kitchen long after midnight. Kungens Män does not improvise because nothing has been planned. They improvise because the most interesting plan may not exist until everybody is already inside it. The record preserves four occasions when friendship became an instrument large enough to discover places none of its members could have reached alone.

Monolord - 2023 - It's All The Same

Relapse Records – none

 “It’s all the same” can be an accusation, a surrender, a reassurance or a statement of identity. Monolord manages to make it mean all four. After nearly a decade of building one of the most recognizable sounds in modern doom, the Gothenburg trio had reached the strange position where consistency could be mistaken for repetition. Listeners wanted the massive guitar tone, the glacial motion and the sensation of being physically leaned upon by the music, but a band cannot survive by continually rebuilding the same cathedral from the same stones. These two songs address that problem without pretending it can be solved through reinvention alone. The instruments, players and fundamental gravity remain familiar. What changes is the angle at which the weight enters the room.

The format is unusually well suited to that purpose. “Glaive (It’s All the Same)” and “The Only Road” occupy only twelve minutes and forty-two seconds, making this technically an EP, functionally a maxi-single and emotionally a two-part argument. Monolord explained that both songs had existed in unfinished states for some time before finally finding their proper shapes. That history can be heard in their compactness. Neither piece feels like a discarded album track or a riff extended merely because doom permits extension. They contain the density of songs that have survived repeated examination. Anything incapable of carrying weight has already been removed.

Monolord began in Gothenburg in 2013 with the same three musicians heard here: Thomas V. Jäger on guitar and vocals, Mika Häkki on bass and Esben Willems on drums. The continuity of that lineup is central to the group’s sound. A trio playing this slowly cannot hide weak communication behind constant activity. Every drum accent changes the dimensions of the guitar, every bass movement alters the apparent depth of the floor, and every pause becomes a jointly held decision. Over time, the band learned not merely how to sound enormous, but how to change the internal architecture of that enormity without reducing its scale.

“Glaive” begins by resisting the most obvious entrance. Rather than immediately dropping a monolithic riff onto the listener, the guitars open a wider and more melancholy space. Lead lines move with something close to classic hard rock grace, and Jäger’s Mellotron adds an aged glow behind the trio, giving the music the strange emotional coloring of sunlight entering a room containing very heavy furniture. The band is still unmistakably Monolord, but its heaviness is temporarily carried through anticipation, harmony and emotional pressure rather than blunt impact.

A glaive is a long-handled blade, built to place cutting force at a distance. The music behaves similarly. Its opening melody does not strike the listener directly; it circles, extends and finds vulnerable space from farther away. When the heavier guitar arrives, it feels less like the beginning of the song than the consequence of everything already suspended above it. Monolord’s great skill has always involved making a riff feel inevitable, but here inevitability is delayed long enough to acquire sadness.

Jäger’s voice reinforces that atmosphere. His singing has never attempted to overpower the guitar. It floats above the low frequencies in a thinner, almost disembodied register, making the human presence sound exposed rather than dominant. That contrast is especially effective on “Glaive.” The lyric addresses stagnation, self-deception, spectatorship and the belief that a new attempt will somehow escape an old pattern. The repeated title does not sound indifferent. It sounds exhausted by recognition. Someone has tried changing the surface while preserving the behavior underneath, then discovered the same destination waiting again.

That idea extends beyond the person addressed in the lyric. It can also be heard as a band examining its own position. After years of records, tours and expectations, what does musical progress mean for a group whose identity depends partly upon repetition? Doom itself is constructed from recurrence. The listener wants the riff to return because its return changes the body’s relationship to time. Monolord therefore does not escape sameness by abandoning its established sound. The band searches inside repetition for differences large enough to matter.

The bass and drums make that search physical. Häkki’s low end does not simply double the guitar. It enlarges the space beneath it, giving every chord an underground extension. Willems plays with the restraint necessary for very heavy music to breathe. His drums do not constantly announce power because the power is already present. Instead, each kick and cymbal placement determines when the accumulated pressure should advance. This gives “Glaive” a steady internal motion even when its surface appears suspended.

The Mellotron is an especially important addition. Its tones carry an association with progressive rock, early electronic simulation and orchestral grandeur, but Monolord does not use it to decorate the music with borrowed nostalgia. It creates distance. The instrument sounds like a memory of strings rather than strings themselves, which matches a song concerned with repeated experience and compromised renewal. The past is present, but filtered through machinery and deterioration.

“The Only Road” answers the first song by removing much of its open air. The guitar descends into the dense, saturated register most immediately associated with Monolord, and the rhythm becomes more foreboding. Where “Glaive” looks across a landscape and recognizes repetition, “The Only Road” enters the path anyway. Its title offers no intersection, alternative or escape route. Motion remains possible, but choice has narrowed to one direction.

This is where the band’s familiar heaviness becomes newly expressive. The fuzz is not simply an attractive guitar texture or evidence that the correct amplifiers were used. It obscures the edges of the notes until the riff seems larger than the individual actions producing it. Guitar and bass merge into a single geological movement while the drums supply scale. The listener does not merely hear three musicians playing slowly. The listener hears a mass discovering that it can move.

The song also demonstrates why Monolord’s tone has inspired so much imitation without becoming easy to reproduce. Volume and low tuning can create size, but size alone does not create consequence. Monolord’s riffs feel consequential because they are arranged around tension, release and the withholding of information. A chord is allowed to continue long enough that its decay becomes part of the composition. Silence is not empty space between attacks. It is the pressure left behind by the previous one.

“The Only Road” does not abandon melody. Jäger’s vocal remains clear enough to give the song a human center, and small guitar movements emerge from the surrounding distortion like details visible through industrial smoke. This balance has gradually become one of the band’s defining strengths. Early Monolord often overwhelmed through sheer physical scale, but later work increasingly allows vulnerability, harmony and atmosphere to remain audible inside the machinery. The crushing section becomes more powerful because something delicate has survived within it.

Placed together, the two songs form a concise model of Monolord’s development. “Glaive” leans toward spacious psychedelic and progressive rock, using Mellotron, melodic guitar and melancholy as structural materials. “The Only Road” returns to the severe gravitational force associated with the band’s earliest records. The EP does not ask the listener to choose between evolution and continuity. It demonstrates that both can occur inside the same twelve minutes. One song widens the structure; the other confirms that its foundation remains capable of supporting impossible weight.

Esben Willems mixed and mastered the release at Studio Berserk in Gothenburg. Having the drummer handle those stages makes particular sense for this music. The recording’s power depends upon preserving the relationship between impact and duration. Too much compression could turn the low end into a constant block, while excessive clarity might separate instruments that need to behave as one organism. The final sound allows the bass and guitar to merge without losing the drum kit’s authority. The music is enormous, but its movement remains readable.

That readability is one reason the record rewards loud playback without depending entirely upon it. At high volume, the low frequencies become architecture and the listener is temporarily housed inside them. At lower volume, the arrangements reveal their internal care: the guitar harmonies, the Mellotron’s haze, the timing of the drums and the subtle distinction between bass weight and guitar grain. Monolord makes music associated with physical extremity, but the songs are not merely delivery systems for loudness. Their construction survives when the walls are not shaking.

Error! Design’s cover translates the same balance into yellow, violet and black. An indistinct organic figure appears curled or folded within a rectangular field, rendered with enough visual damage that it could be an anatomical scan, a fossil, an embryo, an insect form or a body preserved inside corrupted data. The image seems both ancient and technologically processed. Its bright colors suggest heat and life, while the grain makes the subject appear already distant, reproduced through several generations of imperfect machinery.

The band name sits above the image in a distorted typeface that looks partly melted and partly excavated. The title is placed beneath it in much smaller lettering, almost as though the phrase “it’s all the same” were a laboratory conclusion appended after the experiment. The vinyl colors extended this palette through canary yellow, violet, black and clear variants. The object is visually loud, but the figure at its center remains difficult to identify. Recognition and uncertainty coexist, just as the music is instantly recognizable as Monolord while refusing to remain completely fixed.

The record was cut as a twelve-inch at 45 RPM, a format with more physical space than twelve minutes strictly requires. That excess is appropriate. A short record does not need to be a small record, and these songs benefit from a format capable of giving their bass frequencies broad physical grooves. The maxi-single presentation also separates the release from the expectation of an album-length statement. Monolord does not need to build an hour-long world every time it enters the studio. Two properly shaped songs can function as a complete message.

The title becomes increasingly clever the longer the record plays. At first, “it’s all the same” sounds like despair at repetition. By the end, it also describes the integrity of the band. Change the balance of melody and distortion, introduce Mellotron, shorten the format, widen the psychedelic passages or return to the oldest crushing instincts, and the underlying relationship between these three musicians remains intact. It is all the same not because nothing changes, but because the identity survives change.

In retrospect, the release also became a hinge. It followed 2021’s Your Time to Shine and remained Monolord’s final new recording until Neverending arrived in 2026. During that interval, these two songs had to carry the unanswered question of where the group might go next. “Glaive” suggested greater openness and melodic reach; “The Only Road” insisted that the primordial riff still had work to perform. The later album could proceed because this small record had already tested whether expansion and continuity could occupy the same body.

There is something quietly defiant about a successful band releasing only two songs after listeners have learned to expect entire album cycles. The modern music economy rewards constant visibility, repeated announcements and an uninterrupted stream of content. Monolord instead waited until these pieces had found their final shape, released twelve minutes and allowed them to stand. The gesture matches the music’s temporal values. Slowness is not an absence of activity. It is a refusal to confuse speed with importance.

It’s All the Same ultimately concerns the difference between repetition and permanence. Repetition reenacts the past without necessarily understanding it. Permanence carries an identity through alteration. Monolord’s riffs return, the tempos remain heavy and Jäger’s voice still floats above a landscape of fuzz, but every familiar element has acquired new relationships. The band has not escaped itself, nor does it need to. These songs suggest that the more difficult task is to remain oneself without becoming a copy.

Blod - 2023 - Dar Ska Barnet Vara

Discreet Music – 13

 

Där Ska Barnet Vara sounds like a hymnbook that has passed through too many hands to remain doctrinally tidy. Some pages have been torn out, others carry pencilled corrections, and somewhere between church, home, school assembly and private grief, the distinction between sacred song and damaged folk music has begun dissolving. Gustaf Dicksson does not approach faith as a polished system whose questions have already been answered. He approaches it as lived material: inherited phrases, imperfect voices, childhood memories, communal rituals, fear of abandonment, flashes of peace and the knowledge that every human attachment eventually encounters death.

The title, which can be translated as “There the child shall be,” immediately contains both tenderness and authority. It might be spoken by someone placing a child safely among family, community and God. It could also be an instruction delivered by an institution that has already decided where the child belongs. The words promise shelter while quietly raising a harder question: who chose the place? Across the record, Blod keeps returning to that unstable border where care can become control, belonging can become exposure, and faith can be both a home and the beginning of a lifelong argument with the home’s architecture.

This was the second of two closely connected albums inspired by Swedish Christian parish culture, following Pilgrimssånger in 2022. That earlier record explored solitude, anxiety, fellowship and hope within a life structured by belief. Där Ska Barnet Vara continues the inquiry but sounds less settled inside it. The recording is rougher, the arrangements looser and the emotions closer to the exposed wire. If Pilgrimssånger entered the church through its public doors, this album wanders into the rooms behind the sanctuary: the storage cupboard, fellowship kitchen, children’s classroom, empty hall after everyone has left and graveyard visible through a rain-streaked window.

Dicksson has said that his central intention with Blod is simply to make beautiful music, and that playing functions as relief from stress and anxiety. Beauty in this project is rarely smoothness. It is the moment something vulnerable survives its circumstances. A wavering voice remains beautiful because it wavers. A melody played with limited technical certainty can become more moving because every note sounds discovered rather than guaranteed. Där Ska Barnet Vara takes the modest musical abilities, worn instruments and emotionally direct performances that commercial recording usually tries to correct, then treats those supposedly inadequate materials as evidence that a real person was present.

“Intro/Kom Helige Ande Från Höjden” begins with an existing Swedish hymn, number 286 in the modern Swedish hymnal, whose title means “Come, Holy Spirit, from above.” Opening with an invocation places the entire album inside a request rather than a declaration. The music does not announce that the spirit has arrived. It calls upward and waits. The distinction matters. Prayer is most revealing before any answer comes, while the person speaking still has to decide whether faith means certainty or the willingness to address silence.

Blod’s treatment refuses the architectural grandeur usually associated with sacred music. The hymn is not elevated by a cathedral acoustic, trained choir or victorious organ. It enters through unstable recording, human-scale instrumentation and voices that retain the grain of ordinary life. This does not diminish the sacred material. It brings it closer. The Holy Spirit is not summoned into an acoustically perfect sanctuary but into a room containing hesitation, poor wiring, physical exhaustion and the accumulated history of everyone who has ever sung because they needed the words to be true.

The title song follows as a more intimate form of placement. A child is not an abstract symbol in religious life. The child is the person brought into the community before possessing the language to understand what the community believes. Songs, prayers, images, fears and promises enter early, becoming part of the child’s internal landscape before they can be examined. “Där Ska Barnet Vara” carries the warmth of belonging but also its permanence. Once somebody has shown you where heaven, death, sin, rescue and eternity are located, it can take a lifetime to redraw the map.

Dicksson’s melodies are particularly suited to this subject because they often feel remembered rather than newly written. They resemble fragments that might have been heard at a school ceremony, on an old private-press Christian LP, through a church loudspeaker or from an adult humming while completing some household task. Yet the melodies never settle fully into nostalgia. The recording disturbs them. Instruments sag, tempos loosen, and familiar emotional signals arrive with slightly altered faces. Childhood is not reconstructed as a lost paradise. It is revisited as the period when meaning first entered without asking permission.

“När Din Väg Känns Lång,” “When Your Road Feels Long,” adopts the language of encouragement common to hymns and devotional songs. The road is one of Christianity’s most durable images: pilgrimage, moral path, suffering, endurance, return. Blod makes the road feel less symbolic than bodily. Length is experienced through fatigue. Faith does not shorten the journey; it supplies a song someone may be able to carry while walking it. Astrid Øster Mortensen’s presence on voice and flute adds another human current, introducing breath into music concerned with how a person continues when certainty has become difficult to maintain.

The song’s importance lies partly in its refusal to separate spiritual endurance from ordinary loneliness. A person may believe completely and still find the road long. That is not necessarily failure. It may be what belief looks like once the initial promise has worn down into daily practice. The album repeatedly values faith not as a shield against despair, but as one of the languages people use while despair is happening. Hope is not presented as the cancellation of darkness. It is a small object carried through it.

“Skolavslutning Askim 03” shifts the setting to a school end-of-term ceremony in Askim in 2003. Swedish school graduations and summer closings often retain songs, hymns and communal rituals whose religious origins remain audible even when the event itself is understood as secular. The title transforms a specific local memory into an archaeological site. “03” makes it sound like a home recording, a mislabeled MiniDisc or a digital file recovered from an old computer. Suddenly the album is not only composing parish-inspired music but examining how sacred melodies persist inside civic childhood, detached from explicit theology yet still carrying its emotional grammar.

The piece also complicates the idea of innocence. A school ceremony celebrates completion and movement toward the future, but every adult listener knows that the gathered children will eventually be dispersed into lives containing illness, betrayal, love, work, fear and death. The beauty of children singing together comes partly from that knowledge. Their voices occupy a moment before the future has revealed its price. Blod does not need to turn this into tragedy. The tenderness already contains it.

“Små Ögonblick Av Frid,” “Small Moments of Peace,” may be the album’s most accurate theology. It does not promise permanent peace, complete healing or a final explanation. It offers moments. The phrase accepts that peace may arrive briefly, almost accidentally, before ordinary pressure resumes. That smallness gives the song credibility. A person living with grief or anxiety may be unable to believe in a permanently repaired world, but a few minutes of relief can still be received as grace.

The first side therefore moves from invocation to placement, pilgrimage, childhood ceremony and temporary peace. Its sequence resembles a condensed education in belief. The spirit is called, the child is assigned a place, the road becomes difficult, communal ritual provides a memory, and peace appears only in intervals. Nothing is resolved, but a vocabulary has been established for entering the second side, where death and resurrection become explicit.

“Jesus Vår Son, Uppstånden Är” is a startling title. Christian speech normally identifies Jesus as the Son of God, yet “Jesus, our son, is risen” draws him into human parenthood. The incarnation is made intimate enough to hurt. Jesus is not only the distant figure whose resurrection guarantees doctrine. He is somebody’s child, loved in a body that can be injured, lost and mourned. Calling him “our son” distributes the parental relationship across the community. His death becomes not an abstract mechanism of salvation but the death of a child belonging to everyone.

The song’s length gives this thought room to unfold. Resurrection cannot erase crucifixion without emptying love of cost. If the life was precious, the loss remains terrible even when the story continues beyond the tomb. Blod’s roughness protects that contradiction. A polished triumphant arrangement might force grief to disappear beneath victory. Here, faith and mourning are allowed to occupy the same sound. The risen son remains the son who died.

This is where the album’s strong presence of death reveals its deeper purpose. Death is not included to make religious imagery darker or more provocative. It establishes the stakes of attachment. A faith without death might remain an attractive philosophy; love without mortality could remain emotionally inexpensive. Once every person is understood as irreplaceable and temporary, devotion gains its price. The loss of life is not made good merely by being given meaning, but meaning refuses to let the life become nothing.

“Förbannelsen,” “The Curse,” follows resurrection with a title that restores danger immediately. Easter has not purified the world into harmlessness. A curse remains active. It might be inherited sin, family damage, illness, institutional authority, fear of divine punishment or simply mortality itself. Blod leaves the word large enough to contain several possibilities. What matters is that belief has not eliminated it.

The arrangement’s looseness belongs to the subject. A curse does not always announce itself through spectacular evil. It can work as repetition, something passed through generations because everybody mistakes it for the natural order. The child is placed where the child is supposed to be, inherits the community’s language and eventually discovers that protection and damage may have arrived through the same door. Yet the record does not flatten religion into accusation. The curse exists within a world that also contains peace, resurrection, music and people trying sincerely to care for one another. Its power comes from refusing the simpler verdict.

“Påskhelgen,” “Easter Weekend,” places Christianity’s central drama inside the ordinary calendar. Not merely Easter as doctrine, but the weekend: travel, meals, family gatherings, church services, children, exhaustion, silence and Monday waiting nearby. The title domesticates resurrection without trivializing it. Sacred history is experienced through scheduled days, familiar rooms and annual repetition. Each year the story is told again, not because the participants have forgotten the ending, but because repetition allows a person to encounter the ending from a different point in life.

A child hears Easter as wonder. An adult may hear sacrifice. Someone grieving hears the promise of reunion. Someone disillusioned hears the machinery of an institution. Someone returning after years away discovers that the melodies survived inside the body. The ritual remains formally the same while the listener changes around it. This is one reason Blod’s mixture of hymn, folk song and deteriorated home recording is so effective. The music seems ancient and newly wounded at once.

The album closes with “Ge Mig Upp,” “Give Me Up,” attached to “Coinleach Glas An Fhómhair,” an old Irish-language song whose title refers to the green stubble fields of autumn. The traditional song concerns love, separation and the wish that two people might marry or sail away together. Its appearance here extends the album beyond Swedish parish culture into another oral tradition where melody has carried longing across generations without requiring a known author.

“Give me up” is an extraordinary closing request after an album concerned with where a child belongs. At the beginning, the child is placed. At the end, the adult asks to be released. The phrase might be directed toward a lover, family, congregation, God or the self that can no longer continue carrying its inherited identity in the same form. Yet “give me up” also contains surrender. It can mean abandonment, but it can also mean being handed upward.

The Irish melody gives that ambiguity an autumnal body. Fields after harvest are not dead landscapes. Something has been removed from them, but the ground remains, holding evidence of what grew there and preparing invisibly for another season. The album ends in a similar condition. Faith has been harvested of easy certainty, leaving stalks, soil and memory. Nothing looks complete, yet the emptiness is not nothing.

Astrid Øster Mortensen, Anna Johannesson and Magnus Jäverling help prevent the record from becoming a sealed autobiographical chamber. Their voices, flute, saxophone, piano and organ allow other people to enter Dicksson’s spiritual landscape. This matters because parish faith is never entirely solitary. Even private belief is assembled from communal language, melodies learned from others and rituals performed in groups. The additional musicians do not create a conventional band around Blod. They appear more like witnesses, relatives or fellow congregants entering particular scenes.

The unevenness of the performances makes that community believable. Trained perfection would place the listener outside the music as an admirer. These recordings invite participation because they retain the feeling that another uncertain voice could join. This is how much private Christian music functioned before collectors reclassified it as outsider art: ordinary people made records because the message mattered enough to exceed their ability. The gap between intention and execution became the place where sincerity could be heard most clearly.

Discreet Music’s presentation continues that logic. Each copy was screenprinted and assembled using an old record sleeve, so the album’s physical body already had a previous life. Wear, marks and occasional splits were not manufacturing errors to conceal but traces permitted to remain. The plain front carries only a handful of small musical notes, while the back resembles the sleeve of a local religious private pressing: an institutional building, track list, blunt typography and four individual portraits identifying the people responsible.

The building is particularly haunting. It does not look like a grand cathedral capable of overwhelming doubt through architecture. It resembles a parish hall, school, clinic or municipal structure, somewhere faith would be practiced under fluorescent lights with coffee nearby. The musicians’ photographs are equally direct. They are not styled as mystics. They appear as people whose names and modest contributions have been documented because somebody understood that the record might outlive the gathering that produced it.

Using discarded sleeves is more than an appealing DIY gesture. The previous record remains physically underneath the new one, even if its identity is hidden. That is how inherited faith often works. A new life is built over an older structure whose outlines continue affecting the surface. Blod does not erase the underlying object. He gives it another purpose while allowing its age and damage to remain active.

Där Ska Barnet Vara is not an argument for or against Christianity. It is closer to a study of what happens when belief enters deeply enough that it cannot simply be accepted or discarded. Faith becomes memory, melody, fear, consolation, social structure and a way of understanding death. Even doubt must speak in the language it learned there.

The album’s deepest insight may be that love and mortality cannot be cleanly separated. The child is placed somewhere because someone cares where the child will be. The road feels long because there is a destination worth reaching. Peace matters because it does not last. Resurrection matters because death has taken someone irreplaceable. The plea to be released matters because belonging once carried enormous weight.

Life is not made meaningful by death, but death reveals the meaning that was already attached to life. Blod allows that revelation to remain painful, awkward and unresolved. These songs do not conquer death. They surround it with voices, old melodies, fragile instruments and people continuing to sing. Perhaps that is what the child’s place finally becomes: not a fixed location chosen by authority, but a place among others where no life is permitted to vanish without leaving music behind.

Liszt, Messiaen - Fredrik Ullén - 2012 - Piano Works

 

BIS – BIS-CD-1803

A recital program can behave like a shelf, one composer placed beside another because their names fit the available space. Fredrik Ullén’s Liszt and Messiaen program behaves more like a stained-glass window assembled across a century. Light enters through Catholic faith, birdsong, virtuosity, terror, consolation and the piano’s ability to suggest things it cannot literally contain. Liszt’s saints speak to birds and cross violent water. Messiaen’s birds interrupt human time with their own rapid, irregular proclamations. Between them stand six quiet consolations, a vision of disaster and a rhythmic construction whose language seems to have arrived from several civilizations at once. Ullén does not argue that Liszt and Messiaen sound alike. He demonstrates that they kept asking the same instrument to carry messages from beyond its ordinary human scale.
The connection becomes visible before the disc begins. Its cover reproduces the familiar Assisi image of Saint Francis addressing a congregation of birds beneath a tree. Francis extends his hand toward creatures that cannot answer in spoken language, yet the scene assumes communication is taking place. That is also the premise of the recording. Music crosses distances that ordinary explanation cannot. Liszt translates a saint’s sermon and the birds’ response into nineteenth-century piano writing. Messiaen listens to actual birds, transcribes their calls and treats them as musicians whose praise existed before human composition. Ullén then places the two acts of translation beside one another, allowing a medieval miracle, Romantic imagination, twentieth-century ornithology and a modern recording studio to occupy the same listening space.
The program opens with Liszt’s “Sancta Dorothea,” a small devotional piece composed late in his life. It does not begin with the public brilliance most commonly attached to his name. There are no crashing octaves announcing the arrival of the greatest travelling piano celebrity of the nineteenth century. Instead, Ullén gives us a few minutes of poised, luminous writing, closer to a prayer card than a monument. The piece establishes that Liszt’s religion was not merely an ornamental subject added to virtuoso music. In his later years, faith increasingly altered the scale, harmony and social purpose of what he wrote. The piano could still produce grandeur, but it could also kneel.
“Sancta Dorothea” is especially effective as an entrance because it makes attention small before the larger miracles arrive. Ullén plays it without exaggerating its innocence. The melody is clear, the harmonies are allowed to glow and fade, and the silences retain enough weight to prevent the piece from becoming decorative sweetness. Liszt’s devotional miniatures can sound fragile beside his large works, but here fragility is their purpose. A prayer does not become more sincere by being shouted.
The first of the two Franciscan legends, “Saint Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds,” begins with the piano discovering how to become an aviary. High-register figures flicker and repeat, not as a generalized pastoral atmosphere but as distinct small presences, each moving according to its own nervous intelligence. Liszt was not attempting scientific transcription in Messiaen’s later sense. His birds belong partly to nature and partly to religious narrative, but the piano writing already recognizes something important: birds do not organize sound according to human song form. Their phrases begin suddenly, repeat unevenly, scatter and reappear from another point in the air.
When Saint Francis enters, the register and rhetorical weight change. The piano acquires a human speaking voice beneath the activity of the birds, and the piece becomes a conversation between unlike orders of creation. Liszt’s virtuosity serves a narrative rather than a circus. Rapid figuration is not displayed merely because the pianist can execute it; it creates the living field through which the saint’s message must travel. Ullén keeps the bird figures crisp without making them mechanical, while the heavier chordal writing arrives with warmth instead of institutional authority. Francis does not command the birds into silence. He joins their praise.
This is where the album’s central idea becomes more than an ingenious programming trick. For both Liszt and Messiaen, birds represented a form of music that could be heard as spiritually meaningful without needing human words. Liszt’s saint recognizes them as fellow beings capable of receiving and returning praise. Messiaen would later regard birds as master musicians, sources of color, rhythm, joy and divine evidence. The composers differ enormously in method, yet both refuse the assumption that human language possesses exclusive access to meaning.
Messiaen’s first robin follows Liszt’s sermon almost as though one of the birds has stepped forward to provide its own account. The sudden transition is astonishing. Liszt’s feathered ornaments give way to a far more angular and concentrated creature. Messiaen’s bird is not a charming melody perched politely above accompaniment. It occupies the keyboard through sharp attacks, brilliant chordal colors and compressed gestures that seem to alter direction before the ear has finished registering them. The piano is no longer imitating a bird from a human distance. It is being reorganized around the bird’s perception of time.
Ullén then begins interweaving Messiaen’s six “Petites esquisses d’oiseaux” with Liszt’s six “Consolations.” This decision dismantles the sealed integrity of two established cycles in order to reveal a third structure hidden between them. A robin calls, then Liszt answers with a short inward song. A blackbird enters, followed by another consolation. Later movements arrive in pairs, but the general alternation remains: wild utterance and human reflection, feathered urgency and lyrical rest, a world that does not need us followed by music created to soothe us.
The “Consolations” are among Liszt’s most accessible piano works, but accessibility can disguise their strangeness. These pieces do not solve suffering. They create temporary rooms inside it. Their melodies often seem simple enough to have existed before the composer found them, yet their harmonies produce slight changes of emotional gravity beneath the surface. Ullén resists turning them into sentimental postcards. He keeps the lines moving, allowing tenderness without drowning the music in perfume.
The first two consolations are brief enough to feel like responses spoken by someone who understands that too much language can damage comfort. After Messiaen’s abrupt birds, Liszt’s phrases seem almost impossibly patient. Time returns to the scale of breath. Yet the juxtaposition also changes Liszt. What might ordinarily sound like conventional Romantic repose begins to resemble the human nervous system recovering after contact with another mode of existence.
Messiaen’s blackbird is darker, more abrupt and more theatrical than the robin. Chords act as flashes of color rather than merely harmony, and the bird’s call appears to carve openings into them. Messiaen often heard harmony visually, associating combinations of pitch with highly specific colors, but even without sharing his synesthetic experience, a listener can sense that the piano is being treated as a source of illuminated surfaces. Ullén’s precision matters because a blurred attack would change not only the rhythm but the apparent color of the event. Each note must arrive with the force and exact placement of a mark in a mosaic.
The second consolation then returns with slightly more motion, as though the human reply has acquired confidence from listening. This is one of the recital’s quiet achievements. The alternation does not merely reveal similarities between composers. It changes how each is heard. Messiaen makes Liszt sound more modern, exposing the unusual harmonic implications beneath his singing lines. Liszt makes Messiaen sound less forbiddingly modern, revealing that his compressed birdsong still participates in older traditions of depiction, devotion and ecstatic pianism.
The third robin and the song thrush are heard consecutively, creating a miniature habitat before Liszt’s third and fourth consolations arrive together. The robin returns throughout Messiaen’s set, but repetition does not produce a stable character. Each appearance changes according to surrounding chords, register and density. The bird becomes a recurring witness, present at different points in the landscape rather than a theme undergoing conventional development.
The song thrush offers another kind of pattern. Its repeated fragments can sound obsessive to human ears, yet the repetition is alive with tiny changes of placement and intensity. Messiaen understood that natural sound is not the opposite of structure. Nature is full of structures that do not care whether they resemble human composition. His achievement was not simply to copy bird calls, but to allow their rhythmic behavior to challenge inherited ideas about what musical continuity should feel like.
Liszt’s third consolation, the famous D-flat-major Lento placido, supplies the broadest lyrical release in the interwoven sequence. It is often compared to a Chopin nocturne, and the resemblance is audible in its floating melody and gently articulated accompaniment, but Ullén prevents it from becoming an imitation of someone else’s intimacy. Coming after Messiaen, its flowing line sounds almost miraculous. Human melody reappears not as a default language but as one possible form among many.
The fourth consolation is shorter and more restrained, functioning almost as an afterimage of the third. Together they suggest that consolation can arrive in different proportions. Sometimes it unfolds as a full song, giving emotion enough time to breathe. Sometimes it is a small gesture that does not remove distress but places a hand beside it.
Messiaen’s final robin and skylark then reopen the sky. The skylark is especially important because its song is inseparable from vertical movement. The bird rises while singing, and Messiaen’s music seems to circle an invisible high point, repeatedly punctuated by heavier notes that alter the scale beneath it. The piano cannot fly, but it can make altitude audible. Ullén’s control allows the bright upper-register activity to remain articulate even as the writing becomes intensely concentrated.
Liszt’s fifth and sixth consolations complete the central exchange. By now the word “consolation” has changed meaning. At the beginning, it might have suggested private comfort after grief. After the birds, it begins to sound like a human attempt to remain in relationship with a creation that exceeds human understanding. The final consolation’s gentle singing quality does not conquer the wild rhythmic world Messiaen has revealed. It accepts a place within it.
The program could have ended there as an elegant meditation on birds, prayer and repose. Instead, Ullén opens the ground beneath it with “Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.” This late Liszt piece appears to come from a different century than the “Consolations,” although it emerged from the same composer’s final years. The title accumulates words for calamity, an ill star, something sinister, disaster, and the music refuses the expected comforts of Romantic harmony. Tritones, whole-tone movement, blunt repeated figures and unstable tonal relationships create a landscape in which the piano no longer sings reassuringly about suffering. It has entered the machinery of dread.
Late Liszt can feel prophetic because he abandoned many of the devices that had made his earlier music publicly persuasive. Harmony becomes bare, motion becomes awkward, endings cease to provide secure arrival. “Unstern!” does not sound as though Liszt has discovered twentieth-century music ahead of schedule through clever prediction. It sounds as though age, grief and spiritual uncertainty forced him to remove anything he could no longer believe.
Ullén plays the piece without smoothing its ugliness into atmospheric modernism. The attacks retain their severity, and the repeated material feels stubborn rather than grand. This matters because “Unstern!” is not simply a dramatic contrast inserted before Messiaen. It reveals the fracture inside Liszt himself. The same musician who composed consolations and miracles also imagined a world whose harmonic stars no longer provided navigation.
Messiaen’s “Cantéyodjayâ” follows, and the recital’s carefully cultivated garden erupts into rhythmic architecture. The title is assembled from terms associated with Indian musical theory, and the piece draws on Messiaen’s long study of Hindu rhythmic patterns. Yet it should not be heard merely as an exercise in imported rhythmic material. Messiaen takes sequences, durations, accents, recurring blocks and violently contrasting textures, then organizes them according to a logic that refuses ordinary narrative development. Material returns because it has ritual identity, not because it has been smoothly transformed.
The piece contains passages of almost cartoonish force beside crystalline flashes and dense chordal monuments. It can sound ceremonial, mechanical, ecstatic and physically awkward within seconds. Ullén’s experience in technically extreme modern repertoire is essential here. The challenge is not only playing the notes. It is preserving the independent identity of several kinds of musical time while preventing the whole structure from collapsing into generalized complexity.
“Cantéyodjayâ” also exposes a fascinating difference between Messiaen and Liszt. Liszt often makes virtuosity sound like transformation: an idea begins in one state, gathers force and arrives somewhere enlarged. Messiaen can make virtuosity sound like simultaneity: several complete realities exist beside or on top of one another, and the pianist must reveal their collision without pretending they form a single smooth journey. Ullén is convincing in both systems. He can shape Liszt’s long rhetorical rise, then switch to Messiaen’s block-like constructions without forcing one composer’s grammar upon the other.
The pairing of “Unstern!” and “Cantéyodjayâ” becomes the album’s dark central furnace. Both pieces reject comfortable continuity, but they do so for different reasons. Liszt’s discontinuity feels like a world losing its former order. Messiaen’s feels like the arrival of an order too complex to be measured by familiar means. One looks into disaster; the other assembles time from materials that seem ancient, modern and outside history at once.
The final work returns to Liszt and Saint Francis, but not to the gentle congregation of birds. “Saint Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves” depicts a miracle of passage. According to the legend, the saint was refused transport across the Strait of Messina, so he spread his cloak upon the water, used his staff as a sail and crossed without the boatman’s help. Liszt converts the story into an enormous increase of resistance and faith. The water is not a decorative backdrop. It surges through repeated figures and escalating waves of sound, while the saint’s theme persists against it.
This is virtuosity restored to its most public scale, but the narrative changes its meaning. The pianist’s labor becomes the sea’s resistance. Repeated notes, octaves and accumulating sonority are not trophies placed before an audience. They are the material through which steadfast movement must occur. Ullén maintains enough rhythmic clarity that the waves remain active rather than becoming a continuous roar. The miracle is convincing because the obstacle is allowed to feel powerful.
Ending with this legend completes the recital’s spiritual geography. It began with a small saintly image, moved into communication between species, entered human consolation, confronted disaster, passed through a massive rhythmic construction and finally stepped onto unstable water. Faith is not represented as passive certainty. It is attention, endurance and movement across conditions that do not promise support.
The two Saint Francis pieces also frame different relationships between holiness and nature. In the first, Francis listens and speaks to birds, joining a living chorus. In the second, he confronts an element that could destroy him. Nature is neither sentimentalized nor treated as an enemy. It contains praise and danger. The spiritual person is not removed from creation but placed more deeply inside its demands.
Ullén’s own position adds another quiet dimension. He is not only a pianist associated with exceptionally demanding repertoire but also a neuroscientist who has studied musical training and the brain. It would be too easy to turn that biography into a slogan, claiming that science explains his playing or that performance proves his science. More interesting is the fact that this recital repeatedly asks how different systems of perception can coexist. Human song, birdsong, prayer, color, rhythmic mathematics, bodily technique and recorded sound all meet through the nervous system of one performer.
The recording was made at Nybrokajen 11 in Stockholm during sessions in April and June 2009, although BIS did not release it until 2012. The recorded piano has clarity without clinical coldness. Individual attacks remain sharply legible in Messiaen, while Liszt’s sustained harmonies are given enough surrounding air to bloom. This balance is crucial to the concept. Too much reverberation would blur the birds and rhythmic structures; too little would deprive the consolations and legends of spiritual space.
The three-year distance between recording and release also gives the album the feeling of a carefully considered object rather than a quickly documented recital. Its seventy-two minutes have been sequenced as one large composition made from separate works. The listener is not merely invited to compare two composers. The listener passes through a designed alternation of scale and consciousness.
What the program finally reveals is not simple influence. Messiaen did not need to resemble Liszt in order to continue a possibility Liszt had opened. Both composers treated the piano as more than a mechanism for producing notes. It could become an orchestra, chapel, landscape, aviary, storm, color field and machine for testing the limits of time. Both joined extreme technical knowledge to religious imagination. Neither believed that spiritual music had to be quiet, polite or reassuring.
Their faith also did not protect them from darkness. Liszt’s late catastrophe remains catastrophe. Messiaen’s radiant Catholic certainty coexists with violence, dissonance and rhythmic structures capable of making ordinary human time feel unstable. Belief here is not an escape from complexity. It is the reason complexity must be faced.
The cover’s birds therefore do more than advertise the most charming portion of the program. They represent creatures receiving a message that human beings cannot verify in ordinary terms. Did they understand Saint Francis? Does the piano resemble their songs? Can a composer translate divine joy into rhythm and color? The album does not prove any of this. It makes a space where the questions become audible.
Ullén’s greatest contribution is his refusal to explain the pairing through performance gimmicks. Liszt remains Liszt, with his rhetoric, lyricism, theatrical scale and late harmonic corrosion. Messiaen remains Messiaen, with his birds, colors, discontinuities and ritualized rhythm. The bridge is created through placement, touch and listening. One piece changes the atmosphere into which the next is born.
By the final waves, the recital has made consolation itself feel less like safety and more like the courage to continue hearing. The birds sing whether we understand them or not. Disaster interrupts the map. Rhythm exceeds the body. Water refuses to become a road. Yet Saint Francis steps forward, and the pianist follows him across.