The Sonic Dawn - 2017 - Into The Long Night

Heavy Psych Sounds – HPS053

 The Sonic Dawn wrote Into the Long Night by day and recorded it at night while spending a month in isolation near the North Sea. That working method gives the album more than a convenient title. Its sequence genuinely feels like movement through darkness, beginning with the bright, immediate rush of “Emily Lemon,” passing through anxiety, violence, greed and uncertain intimacy, then emerging into the long closing light of “Summer Voyage.” The production is warm and inviting, but the songs keep revealing darker shapes behind their colorful surfaces. This is psychedelic rock built around memorable writing rather than endless effects.

“Emily Lemon” is the album’s instant doorway, driven by lively bass, sparkling guitar and a character who seems assembled from Dylan mythology, fairy tale and countercultural liberation. “On the Shore” softens into romantic uncertainty, while “As of Lately” compresses paranoia and social pressure into less than three minutes. The band’s great strength is this ability to move between moods without losing its identity. Sitar, recorder, vibraphone and keyboards widen the trio’s sound, but they never feel like museum props placed there to prove the group has studied the 1960s. Each color enters because the song needs another emotional temperature.
The middle of the album turns noticeably heavier. “Six Seven” uses western imagery and ghostly horsemen to confront the machinery of war, while “Numbers Blue” places blood beneath financial figures and asks what endless accumulation finally costs. These songs prevent The Sonic Dawn’s vintage beauty from becoming escapism. Their psychedelia is not a retreat into paisley wallpaper. It is a way of looking at the present from a slightly altered angle, making familiar systems appear as strange and morally distorted as they actually are.
The rhythm section keeps that vision grounded. Fuglede’s bass often carries the melody and forward motion at once, while Waaben’s drumming can move from compact pop propulsion to open, almost jazzy space. Bureau sings with enough softness to draw the listener closer, then lets the guitar sharpen or drift according to the story. “Lights Left On” is especially effective because it places images of church bells, morgues, darkness and renewed movement inside one concise song. The night may contain fear and death, but it also creates the possibility of emerging changed.
“L’Espion” brings intimacy and suspicion together, stripping away the privacy people use to protect themselves. The final “Summer Voyage” then opens the record outward for more than seven minutes. Its horizon, foreign words, spinning clouds and blue sunrise turn travel into a form of awakening. The band does not conclude with a huge acid-rock explosion. It gradually allows the long night to become another place, where uncertainty can be accepted rather than defeated.
Into the Long Night draws openly from late-1960s pop, blues and acid rock, but its real achievement is emotional continuity. The instruments may evoke an earlier era, yet the loneliness, fear, economic unease and longing for another life remain immediate. The album begins with a miraculous imagined woman capable of loosening the noose of adulthood and ends with a traveler realizing that the world can still expand. Between them lies one carefully shaped night, dark enough to expose what daylight had allowed everyone to ignore.

Civilistjävel! - 2022 - Järnnätter

FELT – FELT001

 Järnnätter takes its title from a Swedish expression for the long, severe nights when frost damages crops and plants. That meaning immediately joins the sound to Rebecka Holmström’s extraordinary cover: a soft, sepia-toned form suspended in an almost empty field, resembling a seed, curled animal, stone, cell or damaged photograph depending on how long it is observed. The image never resolves into one object, and neither does Civilistjävel!’s music. Bass, percussion, drones and small melodic figures emerge through haze, become briefly recognizable and sink back into a surface that feels simultaneously organic and industrial. The sleeve does not illustrate a frozen landscape. It seems to show something attempting to survive inside one.

Civilistjävel! is Thomas Bodén, a Swedish musician whose first releases under the name drew largely from electronic recordings made between 1995 and 2001. Järnnätter was mostly recorded during the 2020 lockdown, although Bodén has said that one of its pieces is the oldest recording he has released. That mixture of eras helps explain the album’s peculiar relationship with time. It carries the submerged dub and austere electronics associated with Chain Reaction, Biosphere and early ambient techno, but nothing announces itself as a careful historical recreation. Old and new recordings inhabit the same climate until their dates become irrelevant.
The seven tracks are identified only by their vinyl positions, from “A1” through “B4,” removing language before the music begins. “A1” opens gently, with low tones and faint melodic movement drifting through a large amount of empty space. The eleven-minute “A2” provides the album’s clearest pulse: a slightly funky arpeggiated bass line, tom-like percussion and a mournful flute-shaped synthesizer figure that gradually wilts into echo. The materials are extremely simple, yet they keep altering one another. Rhythm becomes atmosphere; melody begins sounding like weather; silence turns into another instrument waiting between the notes.
Bodén records much of his own music live directly to a stereo track, valuing emotion and interesting texture above conventional studio perfection. That method is essential here. The sounds do not sit in separate polished compartments. They rub against one another, distort slightly and appear affected by the same cold air. Industrial clicks and rough mechanical pulses sometimes suggest abandoned machinery starting itself in the night, but sparse melodies derived from Bodén’s interest in psalms and early Swedish folk music keep a small human presence alive inside the system. The devotional quality is buried rather than declared, like somebody quietly humming in another room of an empty factory.
The second side becomes colder and less reassuring. Its rhythms feel cracked, the low frequencies deepen and the softer melodic traces are increasingly surrounded by hiss, impact and unstable machinery. “B3” lasts barely more than a minute, functioning like a sudden opening in the fog, while “B4” closes with snarling bass, frosted synthesizer and a whipping mechanical rhythm. The album has moved from suspended beauty toward something more predatory, but it never resorts to a dramatic climax. The frost simply thickens until the landscape that looked gentle at the beginning reveals how dangerous prolonged exposure can become.
The name Civilistjävel!, meaning approximately “civilian bastard,” came from Bo Widerberg’s film Ådalen 31, about the Swedish military killing striking workers in 1931 near the region where Bodén grew up. That history gives the project’s apparent anonymity another dimension. This is not electronic music presenting technology as clean progress or private luxury. Its machines seem worn, cheap, isolated and haunted by landscapes where labor, weather and memory overlap. Järnnätter is beautiful because it never separates beauty from damage. Like the cover’s mysterious object, the music remains curled around something private, preserving a little warmth while the surrounding night turns iron.

Monolord - 2021 - I'm Staying Home

Relapse Records – none

 “I’m staying home” became one of the defining sentences of 2020, repeated as instruction, reassurance, resignation and fear. Monolord turn it into something much heavier than public-health etiquette. Thomas Jäger’s narrator is not comfortably sheltering from danger but rotting inside a tomb, surrounded by broken bodies, unanswered prayers and institutions that offer authority without rescue. The chorus briefly reaches toward daylight, yet home remains both protection and confinement. That doubleness fits doom perfectly. Safety has weight, isolation has walls and the place keeping death outside may begin to resemble a grave from within.

The song itself was left over from the sessions for 2019’s No Comfort, but Jäger rewrote and re-recorded the vocals to suit the new reality. Nothing about the music feels opportunistically attached to the pandemic. Monolord’s enormous low end, patient drumming and slowly bending guitar were already designed to make enclosure physical. Mika Häkki’s bass and Esben Willems’ drums establish a floor that feels several feet thick, while Jäger’s guitar spreads above it in dense waves. His clean, mournful voice provides the human scale inside that mass. The band’s power comes from contrast: the instruments sound capable of crushing a room, but the singer sounds like somebody still trapped inside it.
Monolord are masters of letting one riff reveal several emotional conditions. The central figure first feels punishing, then hypnotic and eventually almost consoling. Repetition does not stop time so much as give the listener somewhere stable to stand while the lyrics describe religious failure, absent fathers and private collapse. Willems’ mix and mastering keep the recording huge without turning it into one shapeless cloud. The bass remains distinct beneath the guitar, the drums move air and the vocal survives without being artificially lifted above the band. This is doom as architecture, every frequency helping construct the enclosure.
The second side changes the meaning of isolation by returning to a crowd. “The Bastard Son,” recorded live at Freak Valley Festival in 2019, begins with audience noise and expands into nearly ten minutes of public volume. Its placement is quietly powerful: the new song belongs to closed doors and interrupted plans, while the live recording preserves the communal world that had suddenly become inaccessible. The performance is rougher and more spacious than the studio title track, with amplifiers, stage and open air enlarging the trio’s sound. The crowd is not merely background evidence. It represents physical togetherness, the missing ingredient around which the 2021 release was built.
That contrast makes this brief record feel complete rather than like one new track padded with a live B-side. The studio piece says stay home because danger is everywhere; the concert recording remembers why people eventually need to leave home again. One side turns solitude into crushing interior space, while the other preserves a room full of bodies receiving the same riff together. Monolord never romanticize either condition. Crowds can disappear, homes can become tombs and faith may fail to answer, but music remains capable of making isolation audible enough to be shared.

Violin - 2022 - ST

 

La Vida Es Un Mus – MUS260

Calling a hardcore project Violin is an excellent piece of false advertising. No bowed strings arrive, no ornate melody softens the impact and nothing resembles the polite precision the name might suggest. Instead, Lindsay Corstorphine and drummer Jonah Falco produce seventeen minutes of hardcore so compressed that each song seems to begin at the point where another band would still be counting in. The joke becomes part of the attack: a delicate name attached to music built from panic, distortion and blunt physical momentum.
Corstorphine draws from several generations of hardcore without arranging them into a history lesson. The speed and abrasion recall Swedish groups such as Totalitär and Headcleaners, while the heavier accents carry the force of early Boston and New York hardcore. Falco’s drumming gives the record enormous drive, but he never reduces it to one continuous blur. Sudden stops, rolling fills and short stomping sections make the fastest passages feel even faster when they return. Corstorphine’s guitar is harsh without becoming indistinct, and his vocals sound less like a leader addressing a crowd than somebody being dragged through the same emergency as the instruments.
The record’s brevity is one of its strengths. “Spell,” “Rapture,” “Parasite,” “Snake” and “Last Breath” state their ideas, damage the room and disappear before repetition becomes routine. Yet Violin is not merely a speed exercise. “Empty Mind” begins with discordant noise, settles briefly into a swinging middle pace and then breaks into frantic hardcore before an eerie synthesizer appears where no sensible arrangement would place one. “Chaos at the Seance” also slows the body down without reducing the menace. These interruptions reveal that Corstorphine understands strangeness as well as aggression. The songs are concise because they have been edited toward impact, not because the project lacks ideas.
The lyrics and titles form a claustrophobic vocabulary of spells, parasites, betrayal, rotten truth and holes in the head. There is no detailed political program or narrative connecting them, but the emotional world is consistent: thought has become contaminated, relationships feel predatory and reality keeps revealing another ugly layer beneath the previous one. The voice rarely pauses long enough to explain the crisis. Hardcore works here as compressed psychological reporting, catching the nervous system before it has converted fear or disgust into orderly sentences.
Daniel David Freeman’s stark black-and-white artwork gives the record an appropriately uncertain face. Its abstract shapes are severe without offering one obvious image to decode, much like the name Violin itself. The project repeatedly places refinement and ugliness beside one another, then lets the ugliness win without becoming stupid. Even the crudest moments are arranged with care. The recording is huge and clearly separated, yet remains unpleasant in exactly the right ways. Every guitar scrape, drum strike and vocal rupture is audible, but none has been cleaned into respectability.
Violin is a solo construction animated by one extraordinary drummer, but it does not feel isolated or synthetic. Corstorphine has absorbed enough punk history to recreate the social pressure of a full band without pretending the record appeared from nowhere. The result is primitive in method but contemporary in its anxiety, a record that understands hardcore as both inherited language and immediate bodily reflex. Eleven tracks pass before the listener has fully adjusted to the first one. Then silence arrives, leaving the strangely elegant band name behind like a label attached to the wrong weapon.

Langendorf United - 2023 - Yeahno Yowouw Land

Sing A Song Fighter – none

 Yeahno Yowouw Land begins with rhythm already in motion, as though Langendorf United have opened a door onto music that was continuing before the listener arrived. Lina Langendorf’s saxophone does not simply solo over a backing group. It announces melodies, pushes against the groove, disappears into the ensemble and returns carrying another emotional temperature. Beneath her, Ole Morten Vågan’s bass lines function as the album’s supporting pillars, while Andreas Werliin’s drumming keeps the long pieces physically alive through shifting accents rather than brute force. Daniel Bingert and Martin Hederos fill the surrounding air with keyboards, guitar and viola, giving the group enough color to move from earthy dance music into cosmic jazz without breaking the spell.

The music’s Ethiopian influence grew from Langendorf’s time in Addis Ababa, where she studied the scales and tonalities associated with artists such as Mulatu Astatke, Getatchew Mekuria and Hailu Mergia. Those sources are treated as musical knowledge rather than decorative exoticism. “Selam New” and “Ethiopiaye - Two Steps Closer” carry the tense, instantly recognizable pull of Ethiopian modes, but the arrangements also contain Scandinavian melancholy, spiritual jazz, psychedelic keyboards and the heavier repetition of Afrobeat. The result is not a Swedish imitation of a vintage Addis record. It is a conversation shaped by travel, listening and the understanding that traditions remain alive by entering new relationships.
“Bismillah” builds patiently around a dark, rolling groove, with the keyboards producing an almost electrical glow behind Langendorf’s horn. “From Guramayle to Le Hogon” connects Ethiopia with Mali, allowing East African tonalities and West African rhythmic ideas to share the same road. Langendorf had also spent time working in Mali, and the record repeatedly crosses that distance without turning the journey into a geography lesson. “Vieux” carries an obvious gesture toward Vieux Farka Touré, but the tribute is expressed through movement and atmosphere rather than quotation. The album’s Africa is not one generalized sound. Ethiopia, Mali, Mandinka traditions and Afrobeat remain distinct currents that meet inside the band without losing all of their individual character.
The twelve-minute “Hiyaw - Life’s Tides and Currents” is the album’s great center of gravity. It begins with enough restraint for every instrument to establish its position, then gathers force until the group seems to be breathing as one body. Langendorf’s saxophone can sound lyrical and welcoming one moment, then raw enough to tear open the arrangement. The keyboards move between organ warmth and stranger electronic patterns, while bass and drums maintain a groove strong enough to support both meditation and eruption. This balance runs throughout the album. The music invites dancing without becoming background entertainment, and it welcomes deep listening without demanding that the body remain politely still.
The closing stretch expands the record’s emotional vocabulary. “Nafekegn” is gentler and more openly yearning, while “Hymn” brings gospel and New Orleans funeral-procession colors into the group’s already crowded musical world. Yet the album never feels like a sampler displaying nine separate styles. Langendorf’s melodic instincts and the rhythm section’s physical confidence hold everything together. Even the freest passages retain a memorable figure, while the catchiest themes contain unusual intervals that prevent comfort from becoming predictability. These musicians possess immense technique, but virtuosity is used to strengthen the shared atmosphere rather than create a parade of individual demonstrations.
Yeahno Yowouw Land feels joyful because the musicians sound delighted by what becomes possible when their histories meet. Its playfulness does not reduce the seriousness of Langendorf’s study, and its respect for African musical traditions does not make the playing timid. The record is sensuous, forceful and unusually generous, creating room for Ethiopian modes, Mali blues, Scandinavian sadness, spiritual jazz and psychedelic electricity to move together. It is music for dancing, traveling, thinking and briefly inhabiting a country that exists only while these five people are playing.

Klara Lewis & Simon Fisher Turner - 2018 - Care

Editions Mego – emego253

 Care is an unusually gentle title for an album filled with rupture, distant voices, corrupted rhythms and sounds that occasionally resemble machinery or weapons. Yet care is exactly what allows Klara Lewis and Simon Fisher Turner to assemble such unstable material without reducing it to chaos. Every harsh interruption has been positioned against silence, air or fragile melody; every found voice is given enough space to retain some trace of the life from which it came. The record’s four long pieces continually move between threat and shelter, making care feel less like softness than sustained attention to damaged or displaced things.

Lewis and Turner share a cinematic approach without supplying a fixed film. Turner’s long history includes soundtracks for Derek Jarman and other filmmakers, while Lewis developed her manipulation of field recordings partly through making short videos. On Care, environmental sound is not used as straightforward documentation. Voices, birds, street noise, radio fragments and musical quotations are cut away from their original settings, transformed and placed into new relationships. The listener recognizes human activity but cannot locate it securely. Each track becomes an imaginary place assembled from evidence gathered elsewhere.
“8” establishes that disorientation immediately. Swirling drones and near-silence are suddenly torn open by bass-heavy, machine-gun-like bursts, mangled dance fragments and flashes of conversation. The piece refuses to settle into either ambience or noise. Beauty appears, is interrupted and later returns altered by the interruption. “Drone” is comparatively patient, building a circular haze from dense rhythmic hiss and melodies that carry an almost medieval character. Its title sounds generic, but the track demonstrates that a drone is never truly motionless. Small changes in texture, pressure and distance keep reshaping the atmosphere from within.
“Tank” is the album’s darkest construction. Children’s chanting, rattling reverberation, stressed strings, radio static and Arabic-language singing pass through a landscape repeatedly disturbed by violent electronic impacts. None of these elements remains long enough to explain itself. They arrive like fragments of broadcasts received from several locations at once, leaving the listener to sense connections among childhood, tradition, urban life and warfare without being handed a documentary message. Lewis and Turner do not turn suffering into spectacle. The track’s power comes from how much remains unresolved and how carefully the human material is preserved inside the disturbance.
The closing “Mend” changes the emotional direction without pretending the preceding damage can simply be erased. Faraway voices and swelling synthesizer tones gradually create warmth, while the harsher collage techniques recede. To mend is not to restore an object to an untouched condition; the repair remains part of its history. That idea gives the entire album a hidden shape. “8,” “Drone” and “Tank” fracture sound into unstable pieces, while “Mend” discovers a way for fragments to coexist without disguising their seams. Its hope feels earned because it arrives after the record has acknowledged how easily environments, memories and people can be torn apart.
Care brings together two artists from different generations without assigning one the past and the other the future. Turner’s decades of soundtrack, pop and experimental work meet Lewis’s precise digital editing and transformed field recordings on equal ground. The result resembles neither artist simply visiting the other’s territory. It is a shared language of interruption, atmosphere and emotional montage, where an anonymous street recording can matter as much as a synthesized chord. The album keeps removing the listener’s location, but never abandons them there. Its deepest movement is from disorientation toward repair, carried out not through explanation but through the patient arrangement of sound.

Klas Trollius - 2021 - Sanger Till En Manniska

Discreet Music – 04

Sånger Till En Människa feels less like an album performed for an audience than a private route somebody has allowed us to walk. Klas Trollius places acoustic guitar, glockenspiel, flute, drum, voice, wind, birds and environmental sound inside the same living space, without establishing a firm border between music and location. A bird is not decoration behind the song, and the wind is not atmospheric wallpaper. They behave like additional musicians whose entrances cannot be completely controlled. The five pieces preserve the feeling that Trollius is listening to his surroundings at the same moment we are listening to him.
The opening “Över Ett Fält” began in an earlier form around 2010 and loosely interprets John Martyn’s “Over the Hill,” but Trollius does not treat the source as a composition to be faithfully covered. He reduces it to a remembered melodic gesture, a few quietly repeated words and the physical act of moving through a landscape with a guitar. The result resembles a song being recalled while walking rather than performed after rehearsal. Field recordings continually widen the frame, making the human voice seem small but not insignificant. Trollius is one body crossing a much larger field, briefly placing melody into an environment that will continue after he has passed through it.
The descriptive track titles reveal the album’s working method. “Gitarr, Klockspel, Delay, Sång: Två Stämmor” identifies guitar, glockenspiel, delay and two vocal parts as plainly as somebody might label the contents of a drawer. That plainness removes the usual pressure to transform modest materials into a grand artistic statement. Echo becomes especially important throughout the record. Trollius is known in Gothenburg as an eclectic DJ, and his affection for dub can be heard in the way sounds leave trails behind themselves. King Tubby’s presence in the album’s dedication therefore makes emotional and musical sense. Dub is not copied as a genre here; its understanding of space, absence and afterimage quietly enters acoustic folk music.
“Gitarr, Klockspel Och Isdemoner” moves further away from conventional song form. Guitar and small points of chiming sound coexist with an environment that seems capable of interrupting, swallowing or redirecting them. The repeated image of “ice demons” gains another possible meaning from the album’s dedication to Swedish poet Elsa Grave, whose work included the wonderfully titled För isdemoner är fan en snögubbe, roughly “To ice demons, the Devil is a snowman.” Whether or not Trollius intended a direct quotation, Grave’s mixture of nature, menace, dark humor and strange symbolic life belongs comfortably beside this music. The landscape is beautiful, but it is never reduced to a harmless pastoral postcard.
“Koltrast,” meaning blackbird, comes closest to a compact pop song. Trollius cited Razorcuts’ “Sorry to Embarrass You” and shoegaze as influences, and the track carries the fragile immediacy of independent pop remembered through distance. It does not abandon the album’s field-recording world so much as allow a recognizable song to materialize briefly inside it. The contrast makes its melody feel unusually precious. After the wandering structures around it, a three-minute song with a clearer center resembles a small house encountered in open country, its light visible before the path moves onward.
The closing “Isdemoner För Flöjt, Trumma Och Vind” gives wind equal billing with flute and drum. That title explains the album better than any genre category could. Trollius is not using nature to authenticate his music or prove some romantic purity. He is accepting that a location contributes rhythms, textures and accidents beyond the musician’s authorship. Parts of the album were also recorded in his apartment on Hisingen, so interior privacy and open landscape continually overlap. A room contains the outside through recordings; the outdoor pieces retain the closeness of someone working alone.
The record is dedicated to Trollius’s father, King Tubby and Elsa Grave, three presences that suggest family memory, spatial imagination and poetry without explaining how they connect. That unanswered relationship is part of the album’s beauty. Sånger Till En Människa, roughly Songs to a Human Being, does not address a market, scene or ideal listener. It sounds directed toward one unknown person at a time. Its world remains personal without becoming sealed, and experimental without requiring the listener to admire its cleverness. Trollius simply opens the door, points across the field and lets the human voice find its temporary place among everything already sounding there.

Mats Gustafsson & Joachim Nordwall - 2023 - Their Power Reached Across Space and Time - To Defy Them Was Death - Or Worse

 

Thrill Jockey – THRILL 577

Mats Gustafsson is often associated with the explosive possibilities of the saxophone, but Their Power Reached Across Space and Time begins by withholding that expected eruption. This is deliberately slow, low-dynamic music, built from breath, friction, electronics and carefully preserved empty space. Joachim Nordwall does not provide a conventional background for Gustafsson to attack. He constructs an unstable environment around the reeds, using analogue synthesis and processed sound to make the room itself feel active. Something always appears to be approaching, but the album rarely grants the release of a full collision.
That restraint makes every small sound unusually physical. Gustafsson’s saxophones, clarinet and flute can resemble distant calls, curling smoke, mechanical scraping or percussion produced by breath and keys. Nordwall answers with electrical vibration, low-frequency pressure and surfaces that seem to shift position around the horn. Acoustic and electronic sources gradually become difficult to separate. A rough saxophone tone may feel synthetic, while an oscillator begins to breathe like an organism. The record occupies the border where instruments stop behaving according to their official identities.
The pair describe the album as the result of decades of friendship and artistic respect, and its real subject may be the act of listening itself. Neither musician appears interested in conquering the available space. Gustafsson leaves openings for Nordwall’s electronics to alter the atmosphere; Nordwall allows the reeds to redirect the scale and density of his constructions. Their improvisation does not resemble a contest between two forceful personalities. It is a conversation in which each participant changes because the other has spoken. In an era filled with simultaneous voices trying to overpower one another, the patience here feels almost radical.
The elaborate titles deepen the album’s science-fiction atmosphere without explaining the music. The English phrases were drawn from Cordwainer Smith’s Space Lords, producing statements such as “There Are Some Worlds Where All Dreams Die,” “Their New Life Was Their Final Life” and “Oh, Said the Strange Mind, You Want Me to Think for You.” Swedish cartoonist Gunnar Lundkvist, creator of Klas Katt, supplied the brief Swedish phrases placed in parentheses. These are not translations. Cosmic declarations are paired with ordinary or uneasy responses such as “a happy moment,” “everyday life,” “panic,” “lost,” “boring,” “it never gets better” and finally “end.” The titles perform the same call and response as the musicians, placing vast imagined worlds beside small human conditions.
The contrast prevents the album’s darkness from becoming grandiose. Its science fiction does not depend on spaceships or cinematic spectacle. It comes from hearing familiar materials behave according to unfamiliar laws. Breath hangs in an artificial atmosphere; electronic hum acquires the weight of architecture; time stretches because there is no beat insisting that it advance normally. Even the longest piece, “There Are Some Worlds Where All Dreams Die,” feels less like a journey toward a destination than entry into a zone whose dimensions keep changing around the listener.
Their Power Reached Across Space and Time rewards the same kind of private listening that unfamiliar downloaded music can inspire. It does not supply a story so much as alter the conditions under which thought occurs. The slow pacing leaves room for associations to form, while its ambiguous textures keep the mind from settling on one secure interpretation. Gustafsson and Nordwall called it “organic sci-fi,” and that phrase captures its strange life perfectly. The album sounds futuristic without sounding clean, ancient without imitating ritual, and ominous without revealing what threat may be coming. It remains suspended beneath its black star, listening carefully to whatever answers from the other side.

Wau Wau Collectif - 2021 - Yaral Sa Doom

Sahel Sounds – SS-062

 Yaral Sa Doom begins with tiny sounds: whispered percussion, closely recorded strings, a voice entering softly and a rhythm that seems to assemble itself from objects being touched by hand. Then the music opens outward. Flutes, saxophone, synthesizer, percussion and call-and-response singing appear as if the walls of the recording have disappeared, revealing a much larger gathering behind them. Wau Wau Collectif’s debut is full of these expansions. Intimate details keep leading into communal space, while the communal music continually makes room for one vulnerable voice, one instrument or one child to step forward.

The project began in 2018 when Swedish musician and producer Karl Jonas Winqvist traveled to Toubab Dialaw, a former fishing village near Dakar that had become an important Senegalese arts community. Working with multi-instrumentalist and engineer Arouna Kane, he recorded improvisations with local musicians, percussionists, poets, singers and beat makers at Kane’s Ridial World Studio. Winqvist later returned to Sweden, where additional parts were recorded and files were exchanged with Kane through WhatsApp. That unusual construction can be heard in the album’s floating architecture. Sounds from different rooms, countries and years do not always sit together in conventional studio perspective, yet the slight dislocation becomes part of the beauty.
“Yaral Sa Doom” is a Wolof phrase meaning “educate the young,” and the album treats education as something larger than formal instruction. It includes teaching through music, memory, spiritual practice and participation. Children’s voices are not added merely to produce sweetness. On “Mouhamodou Lo and His Children,” the contrast between an older voice and a child’s voice makes knowledge feel physically passed between generations. Elsewhere, chants and responses suggest that learning occurs by joining the sound, repeating it and discovering where one’s own voice belongs inside the group.
The music draws from Senegalese traditions, Sufi praise songs, spiritual jazz, dub and electronic production without becoming a display cabinet of influences. “Thiante” centers Jango Diabaté’s xalam, whose bright, intricate lines are surrounded by flute and gentle keyboards. “Salamaleikoum” places Arouna Kane’s welcoming vocal against the curious breath of Winqvist’s Omnichord. “Riddim Rek Sa Niouy Mom” moves through bass, scratchy guitar and delayed voice with a dub producer’s attention to depth, while “Si Tu Savais Juste” introduces playful electronic tones around Ndongo Faye’s drums and Henry Moore Selder’s organ. These combinations feel exploratory rather than calculated. The musicians sound pleased by what happens when their materials meet.
That pleasure does not prevent the album from addressing serious subjects. Education, immigration and contemporary Senegalese social conditions run through the words, while “Gouné Yi” carries a darker, processional weight. Yet even the heaviest ideas are held inside music that remains generous. The album rarely pushes one singer or instrumentalist toward the role of commanding star. More than twenty contributors move through it, and the arrangements allow leadership to change from moment to moment. Sometimes a voice directs the piece, sometimes percussion, sometimes a flute line, and sometimes an electronic texture added thousands of miles from the original session.
“Legui Legui” closes the album by making this shared authorship especially clear. Ousmane Ba’s flute and Kane’s bass establish one relationship, then Annarella Sörlin’s flute and Lars Fredrik Swahn’s piano enter from the Swedish side of the project. The performance does not ask the listener to decide which country, tradition or production stage owns the finished music. Each contribution changes the others. Winqvist and Kane’s editing preserves that movement instead of forcing the sessions into one uniform style.
The album’s warmth comes partly from this refusal to make collaboration sound neat. Yaral Sa Doom remains a little dreamlike, with voices hanging in reverb, instruments appearing through mist and rhythms changing shape beneath them. But its softness is not vagueness. At the center is a clear belief that music can carry knowledge between people who are separated by geography, language and circumstance. A village session becomes a Stockholm overdub, which becomes a WhatsApp message, which returns to Senegal and eventually reaches another unknown listener. The title asks that the young be educated; the record demonstrates one possible method by allowing everyone involved to teach, answer, listen and add something of their own.

Hills - 2013 - Live

Cardinal Fuzz – CFUL011

 A live record suits Hills because their music does not depend upon songs remaining fixed. The Gothenburg group formed around groove, rhythm, sound and improvisation rather than conventional structures, using repetition to create a space in which small changes can acquire enormous weight. This 2013 release contains only two pieces, each occupying an entire side, but it never feels deprived of material. The music keeps turning the same objects in the light: bass cycles, metronomic drums, wah guitar, organ haze and occasional details that appear briefly before being swallowed by the central pulse.

“Frigörande Musik,” meaning “Liberating Music,” begins with the kind of riff that could theoretically continue forever. The rhythm section does not treat repetition as an absence of imagination. It uses constancy to free every other sound around it. Guitar phrases scrape against the groove, disappear and return in slightly altered forms, while the drums maintain forward motion without forcing the piece toward a conventional destination. After patiently deepening the pattern, the band lets it collapse into a quieter region of organ drone, scattered guitar and an uncertain wind-like sound before the rhythm reassembles with greater determination. The release comes not from abandoning the groove but from discovering that the groove had more rooms inside it than first appeared.
The second side is darker and heavier. “Kristallen Den Fina” takes its title from a traditional Swedish folk song whose history reaches deep into the country’s musical memory. Harvester had also arranged the song in 1970, providing an important link between folk melody, communal improvisation and the Swedish psychedelic underground that followed. Hills do not present their piece as a museum restoration. The familiar title becomes an entrance into a slower, doomier environment where distorted guitar and cycling bass gradually erase the distinction between ancient melody and amplified trance. Something associated with longing and romantic beauty is placed inside a much heavier body, as though the old crystal has been buried underground and is now glowing through several feet of soil.
The live setting matters even though the record is not crowded with applause or stage chatter. What is preserved is the physical negotiation between musicians: the moment somebody adds pressure, the instant another player withdraws, and the collective decision to remain with a pattern after a normal rock arrangement would have moved on. Hills’ improvisation is not a sequence of individuals taking turns to demonstrate ability. The band behaves as one listening organism. Bass and drums establish the terrain, guitar tests its boundaries, and keyboards widen the atmosphere until the performance seems larger than the room that contains it.
An earlier cassette edition of Hills Live appeared in 2012 with “Improvisation Till Joakim S” paired with “Kristallen Den Fina.” Cardinal Fuzz replaced that first piece with “Frigörande Musik” for the 2013 vinyl edition, turning the LP into a related but distinct object rather than a simple reissue. That small mutation feels appropriate for a band committed to music that changes through performance. Even the album itself refuses to possess one final form. The title remains the same while the contents move, preserving two different views of Hills during a period when their reputation was beginning to travel beyond Sweden.
There is something especially fitting about finding this record inside your SWEDEN folder. Hills create freedom from limited materials, cold space, prolonged attention and trust between people. The music does not demand constant novelty because it believes transformation can occur through staying with something long enough. A repeated rhythm becomes a landscape; a traditional title becomes a tunnel into the present; a live recording becomes evidence of several people creating an opening together. Hills do not explain where that opening leads. They simply keep the pulse alive until the walls begin to move.

Hills - 2011 - Master Sleeps

 

Transubstans Records – TRANS075

Where Hills Live captures a band discovering how long a groove can remain alive in public, Master Sleeps shows them shaping the same instincts into a carefully ordered studio album. The music still feels capable of wandering beyond its assigned boundaries, but each track has its own climate and purpose. Six pieces form two rising and falling arcs, with the shorter “Claras Vaggvisa” and “The Vessel” meeting near the center while the longer performances surround them. Hills are not merely recording jams and cutting them off when the tape runs out. They are arranging different states of motion, density and consciousness into an album that breathes as one object.
“Rise Again” enters through a heavy motorik pulse, but the rhythm does not feel cold or mechanically exact. Hanna’s drumming has swing inside its repetition, while layers of fuzz, bass, organ and buried vocals keep accumulating around her. The groove resembles a road that remains straight while weather continually changes above it. Hills clearly understand the propulsion of Neu! and Can, yet the guitars are thicker and less orderly, pushing the music toward space rock and shoegaze without abandoning its forward movement. The voice is mixed as another texture rather than a narrator standing in front of the band, making the song feel collectively dreamed rather than individually explained.
“Bring Me Sand” continues the movement but loosens the machinery. Its rhythm feels earthier, with guitars circling and scraping rather than simply piling upward. The title suggests dryness, burial or the desire to be covered, and the music carries a strange mixture of exhaustion and momentum. Hills repeatedly discover that heaviness need not come from speed or aggression. A bass figure held for long enough begins changing the listener’s sense of time, while a guitar phrase that initially seems decorative gradually becomes the center of attention. Repetition is not the destination. It is the tool that allows perception to move.
“Claras Vaggvisa,” or “Clara’s Lullaby,” gives the first side a small clearing. Xylophone-like tones, organ, percussion and distant voices replace the larger riffs with something fragile and suspended. The track is not a conventional lullaby so much as the memory of one heard through several walls. It demonstrates how much Hills can achieve when they reduce their volume. The quieter space makes every vibration feel exposed, and its placement prepares the listener for “The Vessel,” where organ and drums suddenly reignite the album. That piece begins as a compact rush, then seems to melt its own structure before gathering around a more peaceful guitar figure.
The nine-minute title track carries the album’s most relaxed confidence. A softly rolling beat supports guitars and keyboards that stretch outward without losing their physical groove. There is swagger in the performance, but little of the theatrical domination that usually accompanies psychedelic guitar music. The musicians sound less interested in displaying authority than in observing what the shared pattern will permit. The master may be sleeping because nobody is controlling the journey from above. Rhythm, repetition and group listening determine the direction, allowing the music to become disciplined without sounding governed.
“Death Shall Come” closes the record with drone, chant and a patient sense of approaching consequence. After several minutes of restrained preparation, the band gathers into a heavier ritual movement, but even here the expected grand explosion is withheld. Hills let the guitars intertwine, thicken and recede without turning death into melodrama. The album ends by joining two impulses that run throughout it: the desire to move forward and the desire to dissolve. Drums and bass provide a body, while organ, voice and guitar keep trying to escape it.
The trio responsible for the album’s core sound used a broad palette despite the apparent simplicity of the music: Hanna played drums, organ, xylophone and percussion; Kalle handled guitar, bass, organ, flute, vocals and keyboards; and Pelle played guitar. The record was written and produced by Hills, with Linus Andersson mastering the original release. That concentration of roles helps explain why instrumental identities constantly blur. Nobody is confined to supplying one permanent layer, so a rhythm can become atmosphere and a background texture can quietly seize control.
Master Sleeps feels fully awake to the possibilities inside limited material. It was made before Hills’ international reputation and before the later live performances stretched some of these pieces into even larger forms, but the group’s language is already complete. Cold Swedish space, warm analogue distortion, folk-like mystery and communal pulse coexist without being announced as separate influences. The album asks the listener to stay with each movement long enough for its internal doors to become visible. Once they do, six tracks begin to resemble an entire hidden landscape.

David Stackenäs - 2000 - The Guitar

Häpna – H.3

The Guitar is almost comically plain as an album title, but David Stackenäs uses that plainness as a challenge. There is one player, one familiar instrument and no ensemble available to disguise an empty idea. Instead of treating the acoustic guitar as a vehicle for songs, chord progressions or virtuoso display, he approaches it as a small wooden machine full of strings, surfaces, collisions and resonating air. Notes still matter, but so do the noises surrounding them: the scrape before a pitch settles, the knock of a hand against the body, the quick decay after a string is stopped and the silence that reveals how much sound has just disappeared.
The pieces were built from sketches, compositional ideas and improvisation, which explains why they feel shaped without becoming rigid. Stackenäs does not simply turn on the recorder and document whatever happens. Each track develops its own proportions, repetitions and exits, but retains the alertness of something being decided in the moment. “Plect-Plucked” opens with a title that points directly toward physical action, while longer pieces such as “Santa Coloma” and “Salbastia” allow small gestures to branch into more complicated structures. The music can be sharp and angular, yet it rarely feels hostile. Curiosity is stronger than severity.
Stackenäs often separates the guitar into several apparent voices. High notes dart or ring above lower strings that behave like a second player, producing counterlines, interrupted patterns and compact bursts of rhythm. At other moments he reduces the instrument to isolated tones or percussive contact, making its wooden body as important as its fretboard. These techniques could easily become a demonstration of unusual methods, but the record avoids that trap. The sounds remain connected by pacing and personality. Even when the guitar briefly stops resembling a guitar, it still feels guided by the same hands and listening mind.
That balance between raw sound and refined form is the album’s central pleasure. The recording does not smooth away the instrument’s resistant edges. Strings buzz, attacks land hard and pauses arrive without apology, but the sequence is controlled enough that the roughness never becomes random debris. Stackenäs moves at a generally brisk pace, giving most pieces forward momentum rather than the frozen solemnity sometimes associated with solo improvisation. He can stop suddenly, reverse direction or repeat a figure until its meaning changes, yet the record continues to feel conversational, as though the instrument has raised an objection and he has decided to hear it out.
The final “Zeromountain” strips the language down further, giving repetition and separated notes greater importance. After the denser movement of the earlier tracks, this reduction makes the closing piece feel less like a conclusion than a view of the basic materials left on the table. The mountain in the title may be zero, but the landscape is not empty. A single pitch contains attack, vibration, decay and the memory of the silence before it. Stackenäs has spent the album showing that the guitar’s supposed limitations are really matters of attention.
Released as the third title on the newly formed Häpna label, The Guitar also captures an important moment in Swedish improvised music. Mats Gustafsson recognized in Stackenäs a rock attitude joined to highly responsive technique and unusually open listening. That description remains useful because the album never behaves like polite academic experimentation. Its energy comes from play, stubbornness and a desire to make the world’s most familiar instrument speak in a personal accent. The title promises only a guitar. By the end, that modest object has become rhythm section, percussion box, miniature orchestra and landscape, while never ceasing to sound like wood, wire and one person discovering what else they can do together.

Brainbombs - 2013 - Disposal Of A Dead Body 2xLP

 

Skrammel Records – SKRAMMEL-016

Disposal of a Dead Body is Brainbombs at almost absurd scale: twenty-four songs, nearly two hours, and four sides of primitive riffs hammered until they become less like compositions than unpleasant conditions. The recordings were accumulated between 2009 and 2012, with each year roughly occupying its own side, so the album also functions as a four-year sediment core. There is little obvious development from beginning to end, but that resistance to development is the point. Brainbombs have spent decades reducing rock music to a few stubborn components: a riff, a stiff beat, badly behaved guitar noise, occasional trumpet and Peter Råberg’s drained voice describing humanity from its lowest imagined position.
The title feels strangely appropriate for a record assembled from several years of unreleased material. This is not a carefully polished double album announcing a grand new stage in the band’s career. It resembles a sealed container emptied all at once. Yet the quantity exposes small variations that might disappear on a shorter record. “The Savior” and “True Master” tighten the repetition until the band begins to sound nearly mechanical, while “Prepared” and “The Clown” use wah guitar without producing anything conventionally psychedelic. The pedal does not open a colorful portal. It makes the room feel dirtier and more confined.
Drajan Bryngelsson’s drumming is essential to that confinement. He rarely gives the riffs the dramatic lift that another rock drummer might supply. The beat plods, repeats and remains almost indifferent to whatever ugliness the vocal is describing. Guitar and bass operate with similar bluntness, often circling one figure long after the listener has understood it intellectually. That duration moves the music from recognition into physical experience. A riff stops being an idea and becomes pressure. Dan Råberg’s trumpet occasionally enters like an alarm played by somebody who has forgotten, or rejected, the correct notes.
There are disruptions inside the formula. “Agony” is instrumental and briefly reveals that the band’s basement-rock sound can be forceful without the vocal persona dominating it. “Jealous” and “Jealousy” present related material in two forms, one closer to damaged rockabilly and the other dragged through heavier sludge. Songs such as “Don’t Go Near the River” and “Nowhere” allow the instruments to fall away, exposing the voice without its protective wall of repetition. These moments do not humanize the narrator so much as reveal his weakness. Beneath the declarations of control is wounded pride, humiliation, resentment and a desperate need to make power sound convincing.
That distinction matters because Brainbombs’ lyrics are deliberately vile. They repeatedly adopt the first-person voices of killers, abusers and sexual predators, offering almost no visible signal that tells the listener how safely or ironically to interpret them. The words should not be mistaken for neutral atmosphere, but neither do they make the music powerful merely by being offensive. What gives the record its lasting unease is the collision between those fantasies of domination and a band that sounds shabby, repetitive and emotionally stunted. The supposed monster is not majestic. He is pathetic, trapped inside the same riff, repeating his authority because the music continually reveals that he possesses none.
“Woke Up This Morning” bends a familiar blues opening into another scene of contamination, while religious references recur through titles such as “Libera Me Domine,” “I.N.R.I.” and “The Savior.” Salvation is invoked only to be mocked, denied or dragged through the same dirt as everything else. Even “Picking Flowers” and “In My Garden” turn innocent language into suspicious scenery. Brainbombs repeatedly place ordinary phrases beside implied horror, making the everyday world feel capable of concealing something rotten without warning.
The great risk of a record this long and intentionally limited is exhaustion. Brainbombs answer by treating exhaustion as part of the form. Four years pass, twenty-four songs accumulate, and the same damaged machinery keeps restarting. Disposal of a Dead Body does not reward the listener with growth, redemption or a final explanation. Its achievement is more severe: it sustains one diseased atmosphere long enough for brutality to lose any glamorous surface it might have possessed. What remains is repetition, loneliness and a voice trying endlessly to turn its own emptiness into power.

The Janitors - 2017 - Horn Ur Marken

 

Cardinal Fuzz – CF666

The Guitar is almost comically plain as an album title, but David Stackenäs uses that plainness as a challenge. There is one player, one familiar instrument and no ensemble available to disguise an empty idea. Instead of treating the acoustic guitar as a vehicle for songs, chord progressions or virtuoso display, he approaches it as a small wooden machine full of strings, surfaces, collisions and resonating air. Notes still matter, but so do the noises surrounding them: the scrape before a pitch settles, the knock of a hand against the body, the quick decay after a string is stopped and the silence that reveals how much sound has just disappeared.
The pieces were built from sketches, compositional ideas and improvisation, which explains why they feel shaped without becoming rigid. Stackenäs does not simply turn on the recorder and document whatever happens. Each track develops its own proportions, repetitions and exits, but retains the alertness of something being decided in the moment. “Plect-Plucked” opens with a title that points directly toward physical action, while longer pieces such as “Santa Coloma” and “Salbastia” allow small gestures to branch into more complicated structures. The music can be sharp and angular, yet it rarely feels hostile. Curiosity is stronger than severity.
Stackenäs often separates the guitar into several apparent voices. High notes dart or ring above lower strings that behave like a second player, producing counterlines, interrupted patterns and compact bursts of rhythm. At other moments he reduces the instrument to isolated tones or percussive contact, making its wooden body as important as its fretboard. These techniques could easily become a demonstration of unusual methods, but the record avoids that trap. The sounds remain connected by pacing and personality. Even when the guitar briefly stops resembling a guitar, it still feels guided by the same hands and listening mind.
That balance between raw sound and refined form is the album’s central pleasure. The recording does not smooth away the instrument’s resistant edges. Strings buzz, attacks land hard and pauses arrive without apology, but the sequence is controlled enough that the roughness never becomes random debris. Stackenäs moves at a generally brisk pace, giving most pieces forward momentum rather than the frozen solemnity sometimes associated with solo improvisation. He can stop suddenly, reverse direction or repeat a figure until its meaning changes, yet the record continues to feel conversational, as though the instrument has raised an objection and he has decided to hear it out.
The final “Zeromountain” strips the language down further, giving repetition and separated notes greater importance. After the denser movement of the earlier tracks, this reduction makes the closing piece feel less like a conclusion than a view of the basic materials left on the table. The mountain in the title may be zero, but the landscape is not empty. A single pitch contains attack, vibration, decay and the memory of the silence before it. Stackenäs has spent the album showing that the guitar’s supposed limitations are really matters of attention.
Released as the third title on the newly formed Häpna label, The Guitar also captures an important moment in Swedish improvised music. Mats Gustafsson recognized in Stackenäs a rock attitude joined to highly responsive technique and unusually open listening. That description remains useful because the album never behaves like polite academic experimentation. Its energy comes from play, stubbornness and a desire to make the world’s most familiar instrument speak in a personal accent. The title promises only a guitar. By the end, that modest object has become rhythm section, percussion box, miniature orchestra and landscape, while never ceasing to sound like wood, wire and one person discovering what else they can do together.

Jens Lekman - 2017 - Life Will See You Now

Secretly Canadian – SC339

 Life Will See You Now imagines adulthood as a waiting room. Its characters sit with their doubts, relationships and unfinished decisions until somebody finally opens the door and announces that their appointment with life has arrived. Jens Lekman called it a “thirties-crisis disco album,” and that contradiction explains its emotional machinery. The arrangements are bright, rhythmic and full of movement, while the people inside them hesitate, hide from intimacy, question their choices and wonder whether they have understood their lives correctly. The music keeps dancing because stillness has already become dangerous.

Lekman reached this album after creative paralysis. He completed another record in 2014, decided it sounded defeated and abandoned it. His response was the 2015 Postcards project, which required him to write and release one song every week. The deadline prevented endless polishing and returned spontaneity to his work. Two of those weekly songs became “Postcard #17” and “How We Met, the Long Version,” but the larger inheritance was freedom. He also surrendered some of his usual control to producer Ewan Pearson, allowing electronic percussion, horns, strings, disco, calypso, samba and bossa nova rhythms to enter songs that might otherwise have remained restrained guitar pop.
“To Know Your Mission” introduces a teenage Jens meeting a young Mormon missionary in 1997. Neither fully knows what his mission is, but Lekman recognizes an impulse that will guide his work: in a world crowded with people speaking, he wants to listen. That idea runs through the entire album. He appears in these songs not only as protagonist but as witness, confidant and collector of stories. “Evening Prayer” follows a friend who carries a three-dimensional model of his removed tumor, yet the deepest anxiety belongs to the narrator, who cannot determine whether male friendship permits him to express tenderness openly. Loulou Lamotte’s buoyant vocal and the crisp programmed rhythm do not trivialize the fear. They prevent pain from claiming the whole song.
The album repeatedly places troubling thoughts inside music that invites movement. “What’s That Perfume That You Wear?” builds its rush of memory around steel pans sampled from Ralph MacDonald’s “The Path,” turning scent into a trapdoor through time. “How We Met, the Long Version” borrows from Jackie Stoudemire’s obscure 1983 disco recording “Don’t Stop Dancin’,” surrounding an awkward romantic origin story with strings, piano and celebratory momentum. Lekman understands that happiness can be made more convincing when it admits embarrassment, coincidence and uncertainty. These relationships are not ordained by the universe. They are assembled by people making strange excuses, taking chances and later giving the accidents a meaningful shape.
Tracey Thorn appears on “Hotwire the Ferris Wheel,” joining Lekman in a nocturnal fantasy of breaking into an amusement park and forcing a silent ride back into motion. The scene is whimsical, but its underlying need is serious: two adults attempting to feel alive by briefly stepping outside their established identities. “Our First Fight” discovers that conflict can be another form of introduction, the point where a polished romantic image cracks and the actual person begins emerging. “Wedding in Finistère” places commitment beside the fear of paths not taken. Across these songs, adulthood is not portrayed as certainty finally achieved. It is the age when decisions become real enough to cast shadows.
“How Can I Tell Him” returns to male friendship with even greater directness. Lekman lists the mundane qualities that make his friend beloved, then confronts how unnatural the simple declaration of that love has been made to feel. The sparse arrangement gives the hesitation nowhere to hide. The song belongs beside “Evening Prayer” because both recognize emotional restriction as an inheritance passed quietly between generations of men. Lekman does not solve that history through one confession. He makes the difficulty audible, which is already a movement toward freedom.
“Postcard #17” brings the album’s private crisis nearest the surface. The songwriter sits before the page bargaining with himself, trying small rituals and mental tricks in hopes that language will begin moving again. Handclaps and rhythm continue beneath the self-doubt, turning creative paralysis into something that can still be carried by a body. “Dandelion Seed” then closes the album with a gentler confrontation between hope and defensive pessimism. Lekman recognizes how easily a person can construct shelter beneath every dream, preparing for disappointment so thoroughly that the dream never receives open air.
Klara Wiksten’s cover artwork presents human figures with the same mixture of awkwardness, vulnerability and beauty found in the songs. She created a separate portrait for every track, giving the album’s waiting room a visible population. Life Will See You Now never claims that optimism means escaping fear, illness, regret or failure. Its optimism comes from participation. Life eventually calls each person’s name, but they still have to stand up, enter the room and speak honestly about why they came.

International Harvester - 2018 - Remains 5xLP

 

Silence – SRSBX 3500

Remains does more than enlarge International Harvester’s catalog. Across five records it restores a period when the group’s name, political understanding and musical language were all changing at once. They had begun in 1967 as Pärson Sound, became International Harvester in 1968, shortened that to Harvester in 1969, and soon transformed again into Träd, Gräs och Stenar. Those names were not cosmetic branding. Each marked a slightly different relationship with experimental composition, rock music, Swedish folk traditions, collective living and the political pressures of the late 1960s. Remains catches the group in motion before any one identity could harden around them.
The central lineup was Bo Anders Persson on guitar, Thomas Tidholm on voice, saxophone and flute, Arne Ericsson on cello, Urban Yman on violin, Torbjörn Abelli on bass and Thomas Mera Gartz on drums. It is an unusual rock ensemble, but the strangeness comes less from the instrumentation than from how democratically the musicians use it. Guitar does not automatically lead, strings do not provide tasteful decoration, and the saxophone is not confined to soloing. Everyone contributes to one evolving field of sound. A repeated bass figure, bowed note, drum pattern or vocal phrase may remain almost unchanged while the other musicians gradually alter its surroundings.
The 1968 album Sov Gott Rose-Marie immediately demonstrates how broad that field could become. “Dies Irae” begins with a small brass pattern and birdsong, allowing the record to appear half-awake before the band has properly arrived. “There Is No Other Place” moves closer to direct rock, while “It’s Only Love” reduces pop sweetness to something bare and strangely suspended. “It’s Getting Late Now” lurches with a heaviness that later generations might recognize as proto-metal, but the album refuses to settle into one genre long enough to be claimed by it. Political songs, environmental grief, free improvisation, short melodic pieces and extended repetition coexist without being organized into separate departments.
Hemåt, released the following year under the shortened Harvester name, moves closer to Swedish folk material and collective ritual. “Kristallen Den Fina” takes a traditional melody and opens it into a slow communal trance, while “Nepal Boogie” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” sound as though familiar blues and rock forms have been carried outdoors, passed among a group of people and worn down through use. The performances are loose without being careless. Their looseness allows humor, error and bodily movement into the music, resisting the idea that serious experimental work must sound cold, technically immaculate or socially elevated.
The three archival live LPs reveal that the two original albums were only partial reports. “Harvest Times” spends roughly twenty-five minutes moving from a relaxed pulse into a huge convergence of horns and guitar, yet the transformation occurs so gradually that no single moment announces the change. “Streets of Stockholm” builds another complete world from sustained repetition, while “Dada Babble Boogie” and “Blowing the Wind” expose bluesier and more cinematic sides of the group. These are not scraps included merely because the box required bonus material. They show that live performance was the true workshop, where simple ideas could be stretched until they discovered forms nobody had planned in advance.
International Harvester’s method depended upon listening rather than command. A pattern was allowed to evolve from inside itself as each musician answered, filled space or deliberately left it open. That principle gives the recordings their continuing freshness. The group rarely relies on complicated chord movement, polished virtuosity or carefully staged climaxes, yet the music never feels empty. Staying with one figure long enough reveals changes in pressure, attention and group feeling that conventional songwriting often hurries past. Their repetition is not passive. It is a collective instrument for discovering what six people can become when none insists upon controlling the result.
The name International Harvester referred to the famous agricultural machine, chosen partly as a criticism of industrialized farming, commercial expansion and Western ideas of progress. That tension runs through the music. Electric amplification and experimental techniques are used not to celebrate technological power but to search for something organic, shared and environmentally conscious inside modern life. Remains preserves that search without pretending it reached a final answer. Five records document musicians repeatedly changing names, forms and surroundings while trying to build a freer relationship between sound and society. What remains is not a completed monument but evidence of people listening their way toward another possible life.

Assiko Golden Band De Grand Yoff - 2023 - Magg Tekki

Mississippi Records – MRI-203

 Magg Tekki begins as though the listener has arrived in Grand Yoff after the celebration is already underway. “La Musique Du Cœur” surrounds its call-and-response singing with interlocking drums, bright horn lines and voices declaring that Assiko is music from the heart and a source of pure joy. The word “collective” is important here. No single instrument commands the recording for long. A lead singer calls, the chorus answers, one drum pushes forward while several others alter the ground beneath it, and the entire group seems capable of expanding beyond the limits of the room.

Assiko Golden Band de Grand Yoff had been playing for roughly twenty years before making this debut album, performing at weddings, baptisms, political gatherings, secret parties and neighborhood celebrations. The group also operates as a form of mutual aid and intergenerational education within Grand Yoff. Older players teach younger musicians not only rhythms but discipline, responsibility and participation in community life. That social purpose can be heard in the music’s construction. These are not arrangements designed to isolate a charismatic star from anonymous backing players. Leadership moves among singers, percussionists and instruments, reinforcing the sense that the group itself is the central voice.
Assiko’s history reaches from the Bassa people of Cameroon through Gorée and into Dakar’s working-class neighborhoods, gathering additional rhythms and instruments as it travels. On Magg Tekki, fourteen varieties of percussion coexist with balafon, flute, saxophone, accordion and kora. The abundance never feels like decoration piled onto a basic beat. Each instrument occupies a specific rhythmic position, producing layers that seem to rotate inside one another. A listener may first follow the lead vocal, then suddenly notice a lower drum pattern that has been carrying the entire performance from underneath.
“Bègue Bègue” demonstrates the group’s openness particularly well. Accordion answers the lead voice while kora and percussion keep the song in constant motion, creating a sound that is both rooted and happily porous. Assiko can absorb an instrument associated with another musical setting without surrendering its rhythmic identity. “Sama Néné” pushes the voices and drums into a denser communal surge, while the first short “Kora Interlude” clears the air. These interludes are the album’s only genuinely quiet passages, but they do not feel detached from the neighborhood around them. Faint environmental sound remains present, placing the strings near the Atlantic edge of Dakar rather than inside a sealed studio.
The title Magg Tekki has been explained by the musicians as meaning to grow and succeed. That idea concerns more than personal advancement. Growth here comes through taking root in inherited knowledge, then carrying it forward in forms that remain useful to the living community. The title track gives Djiby Ly room for poetry and flute, while the surrounding percussion keeps individual expression joined to collective movement. The album’s message repeatedly returns to uplift, cooperation and the possibility of building something together rather than waiting for recognition to descend from elsewhere.
“Xarritt” begins with a more meditative voice before the percussion and harmonies gather around the declaration, “We build our own country.” It is a powerful phrase because the country being imagined is not necessarily a government or territory. It can be the temporary social world created by rhythm, shared labor and mutual responsibility. “Mix Louange” expands that world through Christian praise, massed singing and an exuberant exchange between drums and kora. Elsewhere, Sufi Mouride teachings and other spiritual traditions enter the songs without being forced into one uniform doctrine. Devotion is heard as another communal practice, carried through voices responding to one another.
The album was recorded during a single weekend in May 2021 at Karantaba Records in Grand Yoff. Swedish and Senegalese collaborators then coordinated a small number of overdubs, including saxophone, accordion, bells and kora, partly through WhatsApp. The distant additions are subtle enough that the album never sounds rebuilt in Europe or separated from its origin. Karl-Jonas Winqvist and the Stockholm musicians support the existing performances rather than treating the Dakar recordings as raw material awaiting outside refinement.
That restraint preserves the extraordinary sense of place running through Magg Tekki. The performances retain the looseness, noise and forward momentum of music created among people rather than assembled for private studio inspection. Even the sequencing respects the movement of a long gathering: collective intensity, temporary quiet, renewed singing, devotion and another surge of drums. The closing “Borom Darou” does not seal the event with a dramatic conclusion. It feels like one section of a much longer neighborhood performance continuing beyond the edge of the record.
Magg Tekki succeeds because it documents more than a musical style. It captures a system of transmission in which rhythm carries history, young players learn beside elders, celebration strengthens social bonds and outside collaboration can enlarge the circle without occupying its center. The Swedish connection explains how the music reached this particular record and eventually your folder, but Grand Yoff remains its heartbeat. The album travels internationally while keeping its feet planted firmly in the sandy streets where Assiko continues to bring people together.

DSR Lines - 2015 - Analogie Van De Dageraad

 

Jj funhouse – JJ006

Coming directly after the Assiko Golden Band, this record makes an unexpectedly exact handoff. The drums disappear, but the organizing intelligence of repetition remains. David Edren replaces a neighborhood percussion ensemble with Buchla and Serge modular systems, yet the result never feels like humanity retreating into machinery. Pulses gather, separate, wobble against one another and grow new limbs. Analogie van de Dageraad means “Analogy of the Dawn,” but this is not electronic music pretending to paint a sunrise. It constructs a model of awakening from voltage. Darkness does not abruptly switch off; it is slowly perforated by rhythm, color and movement until the entire field has changed without a single dramatic announcement.

Edren recorded these eight pieces as live improvisations during an intensive stay at ElektronMusikStudion in Stockholm. That word “live” is essential. Although there are no singers, lyrics or conventional instrumental gestures, every sound results from decisions being made in passing time. A modular synthesizer can be programmed into perfect obedience, but Edren had deliberately been moving away from the heavily predetermined computer and MIDI work of his earlier years. He had grown tired of composing events in advance and then merely watching them occur. Improvisation returned physical consequence to electronic music: turn something too far and the patch may collapse; introduce one voltage and several apparently unrelated processes begin behaving differently. Analogie van de Dageraad preserves that alertness. Its structures feel cultivated rather than assembled, more botanical than architectural, though one occasionally encounters a staircase or transmission tower growing among the leaves.

The enormous Buchla 200 and Serge systems at EMS were not simply prestigious vintage equipment borrowed for atmosphere. Their patchable construction encouraged Edren to treat pitch, pulse, duration and tone color as parts of one circulatory system. A sequence can alter a filter, a slowly changing voltage can bend a rhythm, and a signal intended as control information may become audible material. Cause and effect develop side passages. The listener hears sounds behaving less like notes placed along a timeline and more like organisms responding to weather. This also explains the album’s peculiar warmth. Analogue warmth is often discussed as though it were a coating applied by old circuitry, but here it comes from behavior: frequencies rub together, timing loosens and contracts, and repeated figures return with slightly altered weight. The machines do not imitate human expressiveness. They develop their own vulnerable form of it.

“Ontwaakt (startraag)” establishes the album’s slow ignition, giving nearly nine minutes to the act of becoming awake. The brief “Sphinx I” follows as a compact riddle, while “Gamla Png” places what resembles an old digital filename inside all this organic morning imagery, a tiny relic from the computer world lodged among dew, light and electrical vegetation. “Ochtendgloren” brings the first side toward morning glow, but Edren avoids the predictable ambient vocabulary of a horizon gradually becoming brighter and prettier. His dawn has gears, insects and uncertain weather. The second side begins with “Dauwdaling,” moves through the rotational mechanism of “Rotor,” and returns to the Sphinx in a much longer second appearance. The two Sphinx pieces are strikingly unequal, as though the first question has continued developing while the cassette was turned over. “Verstrooiing” finally suggests dispersal, distraction or scattering. Nothing resolves into noon. The energy simply spreads beyond the frame.

This progression gives the cassette a quiet narrative without turning it into program music. The track names provide hints, but the real subject is the way perception reorganizes itself over forty-five minutes. A small pulse that initially sounds incidental may become the center of a passage after another frequency recedes. A drone reveals an internal rhythm. A pattern that seemed fixed begins leaning forward, and what appeared to be background suddenly feels close enough to touch. Edren does not use repetition to hold the listener in one location. He uses it to make tiny changes legible. The music’s apparent patience increases its sensitivity, much as remaining still outdoors eventually reveals movements that were present all along. There are passages of deep suspension, but also blunt beats and bright melodic openings that prevent the record from becoming tasteful ambient wallpaper. At moments its electronic color approaches the joyful strangeness of Franco Battiato’s early synthesizer work, where experiment and pleasure are not required to occupy separate rooms.

The record also joins two important parts of Edren’s life in electronic music. One is the institutional history contained within EMS and its extraordinary instruments. The other is the social, handmade culture of Antwerp spaces such as Scheld’apen, Het Bos and the orbit around Ultra Eczema. He did not approach Stockholm as an academic composer arriving to demonstrate mastery over a famous machine. He arrived as someone formed by bands, artist-run spaces, small labels, posters, cassettes, concerts and years of practical involvement in a local underground. That background keeps the album from becoming a showroom demonstration. Its technical sophistication remains playful. Even the most abstract passages seem to understand that electronic sound can be serious without becoming solemn, and that a complicated patch is worthwhile only when it produces an experience more interesting than the explanation of how it works.

The original Jj Funhouse edition made this philosophy physical. A military-grey C-45 cassette with black printing was placed inside a black library case, accompanied by a two-color risographed sleeve and individually numbered as one of only one hundred copies. It resembles a technical document retrieved from an imaginary municipal archive, perhaps the operating instructions for a dawn that the city stopped using decades ago. The gridded artwork can be read as a patch diagram, a floor plan or an unfinished system of windows, while the handwritten DSR Lines logo curls freely across its straight divisions. That tension between system and gesture is exactly what happens in the music. The grid provides repeatable relationships; the hand refuses to behave identically twice. Later vinyl and cassette editions allowed the album to keep circulating, but the original library-case object remains especially suited to music that feels discovered, catalogued and then quietly returned to the shelf for someone else to activate.

Analogie van de Dageraad ultimately proposes that awakening is not a single event. It is a gradual increase in relationships. One pulse notices another. A low tone changes the meaning of a high one. Rhythm emerges from something previously heard as stillness. David Edren’s achievement is not merely that he made expressive music with historically important synthesizers, but that he allowed the machines’ internal relationships to become the composition. The album never asks the listener to admire equipment. It asks us to hear attention itself taking shape. Anyone who worked with the Buchla or Serge systems at EMS, witnessed Edren’s performances around this period, or remembers the original cassette entering circulation may recognize behaviors and histories that the recording only partially reveals. Those memories would extend the analogy: another faint light arriving, another portion of the structure becoming visible.