Arv & Miljö - 2021 - Ensam Är Nattens Rymd Över Vita Vägar

 

Discreet Music – 06

The title translates approximately as “Lonely Is the Night’s Expanse Over White Roads,” a line taken from Karin Boye’s poem “Vinternatt.” Another track, “Gnistrande Och Knarrande,” echoes the poem’s opening image of hard snow crust glittering and creaking underfoot. Mattias Andersson is not simply borrowing beautiful winter language for decoration. The entire album inhabits Boye’s idea of winter as something severe, purifying and slightly frightening, a darkness capable of hiding the stars while revealing truths that warmer seasons leave comfortably buried.
This was the third installment in Arv & Miljö’s four-album cycle of seasonal ambient music, following the Swedish summer of Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid and the spring atmosphere of Himmelsvind. Winter changes the method as well as the mood. The earlier records often shimmered; here Andersson returned to a rudimentary analog four-track process, allowing hiss, overloaded signals and awkward joins to remain visible. The result resembles music heard from inside a snow cave, with the outside world reduced to muffled movement, distant voices and light refracted through layers of ice.
Andersson began Arv & Miljö in much harsher noise territory, and that history prevents the record from becoming harmless seasonal ambience. Its drones contain grit, tones scrape against one another and small disturbances pass through the mix like cold air entering beneath a door. Yet the aggression has been slowed until it becomes environmental. Noise is no longer an attack arriving from outside the composition; it is part of the weather. Fragile keyboard melodies, acoustic sounds, field recordings and failing electronics keep appearing through the murk, creating warmth without ever pretending the landscape is welcoming.
The album flows as two long sides rather than eleven neatly separated miniatures, so individual titles function like half-buried signposts. “Kristallfragment,” “Sagoland,” “Värnandet Av Kyla” and “Tystnaden Djup I Decembers Mitt” suggest crystal fragments, fairy-tale country, the preservation of cold and silence deep in the middle of December. These phrases make winter feel both physical and remembered. This is not pristine wilderness recorded by an outdoor documentarian. It combines childhood winters that seemed endless with adult walks through Gothenburg streets where snow has already become gray slush. Memory preserves the white road while daily life supplies the wet pavement.
Helen Johnstone’s voice on “In I Vinternatten” enters like a person heard through walls or blowing weather, briefly placing human breath inside the frozen electronics. P Wits’ guitar later brings another recognizable touch without breaking the record’s suspended state. Andersson is skilled at using guests without allowing them to become featured attractions. Their appearances feel like shapes encountered during a solitary walk, close enough to confirm that other lives exist but distant enough that the listener remains alone with the night.
One of the loveliest titles, “En Strimma Hav Som Glimmar Grå,” comes from Edith Södergran’s poetry and means a strip of sea glimmering gray. Its presence beside Boye’s winter imagery widens the album beyond one season or one poet. Andersson’s work often feels like a collage assembled from Swedish landscape, old books, private memories, inexpensive electronics and sounds overheard in ordinary places. His goal is less to reproduce nature than to recover the atmosphere surrounding the memory of nature. The four-track haze performs the work of recollection: details fade, emotional temperatures remain and unrelated moments slowly freeze together.
The album eventually reaches “Extas,” but its ecstasy is not a grand release from winter. It is the heightened perception produced by remaining inside the cold long enough for small changes to become enormous. A faint melody, a clearing in the tape fog or one warmer frequency can feel radiant because the music has taught the ear to survive on very little. Ensam Är Nattens Rymd Över Vita Vägar is bleak without being hopeless and nostalgic without trying to restore a lost Sweden. It recognizes that childhood snow, city slush, poetry and damaged tape can all occupy the same remembered landscape. Winter does not stop the world here. It strips the world down until its hidden sounds begin glowing.

VA - 2022 - Frälst! A Selection Of Swedish Christian Grooves 1969-1979

 

Subliminal Sounds – none

Frälst means “saved” in the religious sense, but Swedish can also use it for somebody who has become completely captivated by an interest. That double meaning suits a compilation devoted to Christian records that later created another congregation among psychedelic and rare-groove collectors. Between 1969 and 1979, Swedish Free Church musicians absorbed the sounds surrounding them and redirected those sounds toward faith: wah-wah guitar, heavy organ, folk harmonies, funk bass, congas, gospel choruses and homemade psychedelia. The results were usually pressed in small quantities for churches, youth groups and local distribution rather than the commercial rock market. Decades later, those private records became difficult artifacts whose musical imagination often exceeded the modest worlds for which they were produced.
What makes this collection valuable is that it does not treat Christian music as one uniform genre. Siw Sjöberg’s “Hallelujah” carries the confidence of polished gospel-pop, while Tomas Ernvik’s “En Hippie” places the counterculture directly inside a religious conversation. Sambandet’s wonderfully odd “I Am Free” sounds as though evangelical theater, funk and homemade progressive rock have all squeezed onto the same small stage. “Boppe” Bengt-Olof Perhamn’s “Om du ber” moves with a smoky, unhurried groove, and Humlans Funkykapell’s “Tågung” lets rhythm and electric texture stretch beyond anything required by a simple devotional song. Faith provides the shared subject, but the musicians keep finding radically different vehicles for carrying it.
These recordings developed beside Sweden’s progg movement, and the overlap is fascinating. Both worlds valued community, inexpensive production, collective singing, justice and the possibility that music could help reorganize everyday life. The difference was not always musical. Progg groups often located transformation in socialism, anti-imperialism or counterculture, while these musicians placed Christ inside the same hopes for fellowship and change. Shepherds’ haunting “Halva världen svälter,” meaning “Half the World Is Starving,” makes that connection especially clear. Its concern with global hunger could easily belong to a political folk record, but here social responsibility is understood as a demand of faith. The division between sacred and radical music becomes much less tidy than either camp’s mythology might suggest.
The amateur character of some performances is part of their force. Voices occasionally sound more committed than trained, arrangements take improbable turns and fuzz guitar may appear where no responsible church committee would have requested it. Yet these supposed imperfections preserve people trying to make the message emotionally immediate with whatever instruments, studio time and technical knowledge were available. The records were not designed as future collector trophies. They were practical objects used at meetings, concerts and services, which is why the strangest moments feel so sincere. Obadja’s “Testa,” Sånggruppen LIV’s “Tron - en kamp” and Janne, Roberth and Willy’s transformation of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” all sound less like products than documents of small communities discovering what modern music allowed them to express.
The second half grows increasingly shadowy. Tillsammans’ brief “Kom till mej” carries a brooding intensity far removed from cheerful Sunday-school music, while Ingegerd’s English-language “The Road Back” and Freedom’s “Vem var han” bring private uncertainty into the collection’s larger declarations. Mission Possible close the digital edition with their own title song, a magnificent organ-heavy piece whose darkness makes salvation sound neither easy nor decorative. Throughout the set, doubt remains close to belief. These musicians sing because the world is troubled, people are lonely and faith must be continually chosen rather than merely inherited. The grooves attract the modern listener, but the emotional seriousness keeps the compilation from becoming a cabinet of amusing religious curiosities.
Subliminal Sounds has assembled the album so skillfully that twenty unrelated private recordings begin to resemble one lost scene. The selection moves from accessible gospel and folk into funk, hard rock and increasingly peculiar psychedelia without forcing the artists into a false uniformity. It also preserves a history that ordinary rock narratives tend to miss: young Christians heard the same amplifiers, records and social unrest as everyone else, then built their own parallel underground. Frälst! neither mocks their devotion nor asks listeners to share it. Instead, it reveals what happened when belief met the adventurous musical climate of 1970s Sweden. The collection may begin as an excavation of rare Christian vinyl, but it ends as evidence that creative energy rarely respects the cultural borders drawn around it.

Oceanlord - 2023 - Kingdom Cold

 

Magnetic Eye Records – MER104

Oceanlord call their music “stoner gloom rock,” which neatly describes the climate of Kingdom Cold without trapping it inside one genre. The Melbourne trio works with the familiar foundations of doom, huge bass, slow drums, scorched guitar and clean vocals, but gives them a strong sense of movement and atmosphere. These songs feel heavy because they carry distance, not simply because they move slowly. Guitar notes rise through the distortion like signals from another ship, while the rhythm section supplies the dark water beneath them. The nautical and Lovecraftian imagery ties the album together, but the sea is more than lyrical scenery. It becomes a model for the music: immense, hypnotic, beautiful and capable of concealing something hostile below its surface.
The band formed in 2019 when guitarist and singer Peter Willmott and bassist Jason Ker found common ground in doom after coming from different musical backgrounds. Drummer Jon May brought experience in punk, rockabilly, country-folk and swamp blues, which may help explain why the album never feels imprisoned by one heavy-metal vocabulary. Willmott likes to begin with a simple fuzzy bass line and build layers around it, and that method is immediately audible in “Kingdom.” Ker’s opening rumble establishes the weight while Willmott’s guitar curls above it with an almost whale-like cry. Each part remains relatively uncomplicated, but their combination creates depth. Oceanlord do not clutter the songs to make them sound monumental; they let tone, pacing and repetition enlarge the space.
“2340” brings out the group’s classic-rock instincts, joining a thick central riff to guitar playing that occasionally recalls the melodic openness of Neil Young and Crazy Horse or Wino. Willmott’s voice is especially important here and throughout the album. He does not bark over the riffs or compete with them through theatrical metal force. His plain, slightly haunted delivery draws the listener into the stories and gives the record a human scale. “Siren” pushes that quality further, allowing clean guitar, melancholy vocals and a rubbery bass line to drift patiently before the heaviness returns. The song demonstrates that Oceanlord understand contrast: a crushing riff becomes far more powerful after the listener has been allowed to float.
The album grows darker through “Isle of the Dead,” its slowest and most oppressive passage. Discordant guitar and mammoth percussion create dread without allowing the eight-minute piece to lose its shape. “So Cold” then tightens the structure and introduces more bluesy movement, showing how effectively the trio can change emotional temperature without abandoning its central sound. The mix by Esben Willems is a major strength. As drummer and producer for Monolord, he understands that doom requires both mass and definition. Ker’s bass remains enormous, May’s drums have physical impact, and Willmott’s multiple guitar textures can spread outward without turning the whole recording into undifferentiated fuzz.
Kingdom Cold was created during an unusually enclosed period. Melbourne experienced 263 days of pandemic lockdown, during which Willmott built the home studio where the band eventually recorded the album in 2022. That isolation seems to have entered the music indirectly. The songs describe ships, sirens, submerged terrors and impossible distances, but beneath those images lies the recognizable feeling of being cut off from ordinary life while the outside world becomes strange. The closing “Come Home,” expanded from the band’s 2020 demo, gathers that feeling into the album’s longest psychedelic journey. Its warped guitars and echo-heavy final stretch make home sound less like a safe geographical location than something being searched for through fog.
For a debut, Kingdom Cold is remarkably complete. The band already knows when a riff deserves another cycle and when it should give way to melody, empty space or a guitar solo. Their doom is approachable without becoming lightweight, and richly atmospheric without dissolving into shapeless jamming. Oceanlord borrow from Sabbath, Trouble, psychedelic rock and the Swedish school of melodic doom, but those influences are submerged inside a world of their own. The album’s great strength is that it invites the listener onto the ship before revealing what may be following beneath it. By the time the final echoes of “Come Home” disappear, the voyage has felt both enormous and strangely intimate.

Skiftande Enheter - 2019 - ST

Levande Begravd Records – LBR08

 A single-sided twelve-inch is an extravagant container for fourteen minutes of deliberately uneconomical punk. Half the record remains silent, while the playable side crams eight songs together as though Skiftande Enheter might be evicted from the studio at any moment. That physical imbalance fits the music perfectly. These songs are rough, impatient and slightly antagonistic toward the expectation that a proper record should contain more material, more polish or some grand explanation of itself. The unused side is not missing content. It makes the little eruption on the other side feel even more temporary, like graffiti sprayed across one wall of an otherwise empty building.

Skiftande Enheter emerged from a remarkably interconnected Gothenburg underground. Julius Pierstorff and Elin Engström also worked together as Monokultur, while Engström created her shadowier solo music as Loopsel. Hugo Randulv appeared in Makthaverskan, Amateur Hour and Enhet För Fri Musik, among other projects. None of that surrounding sophistication makes this record sound refined. The quartet deliberately returns to the practical discoveries of first-generation DIY punk: learn what the song requires, play it before self-consciousness interferes, and leave the useful accidents intact. Levande Begravd connected the record to Desperate Bicycles, crude 1960s garage and Sweden’s early punk compilations, but Skiftande Enheter do not sound like collectors carefully arranging references. They sound like those records have been absorbed into muscle memory.
“33” opens with a melody unexpectedly close to early American hardcore, but the performance is too loose and strangely buoyant to become macho. The keyboard needles the guitars rather than filling out the harmony, giving parts of the record the hostile carnival quality associated with the Mummies. “Fel på er” means roughly “something is wrong with you,” while “Vem bryr sig” asks “who cares?” These titles establish a vocabulary of accusation, alienation and emotional exhaustion without requiring elaborate manifestos. “Verklighetens klor,” or “reality’s claws,” may be the clearest statement of the album’s condition: everyday life is not merely dull but something capable of gripping and scratching. The brief songs respond by refusing to behave responsibly.
The group’s sloppiness is productive rather than careless. Drums push ahead, guitars arrive with frayed edges, voices strain against the melody and the keyboard sometimes sounds as though it belongs to another song happening in the next room. Yet the hooks survive every collision. “Ett djur,” “Idiot” and “Om du sett mig nu” have the economy of playground chants or private insults repeated until they become communal. The final “Jävla Rock’n’Roll” stretches past two and a half minutes, practically an epic here, and turns the album’s primitive method into a small declaration of loyalty. Rock and roll is not being defended as a respectable cultural institution. It is the troublesome noise still available when society, adulthood and good taste have all become impossible to tolerate.
Later in 2019, Snubblar genom drömmar revealed a more spacious version of the band, with jangling guitar, organ, post-punk melancholy and an acknowledged love of Felt and the Velvet Underground. Hearing that development can make this first mini-album resemble an early sketch, but its limitations are actually complete. The band did not outgrow these songs because they were unfinished. They discovered that the same directness could survive inside a wider musical language. The short punk bursts provided the skeleton; later records changed the clothing, lighting and emotional weather around it.
This self-titled record captures Skiftande Enheter before those possibilities had spread outward. Its world is square, irritating and full of people who cannot cope with it, yet the music responds with energy rather than defeat. Thirteen minutes are enough to create an identity, empty the room and leave the silent side of the record staring back. Anyone who heard the group during this early, scrappier stage may remember whether the songs became even faster or less stable live. The record sounds as though it was designed to survive through exactly those fragments of memory.

People Skills - 2023 - I Will Not Die

 

Altered States Tapes – AST156

I Will Not Die sounds less like a declaration shouted from a mountaintop than a sentence repeated quietly to keep it true. Jesse Dewlow’s People Skills recordings have always placed small, recognizable songs inside damaged environments, where guitar, voice, rhythm and tape residue remain visible but never completely stable. The seven pieces here feel retrieved from a building after its occupants have vanished: melodies remain in the rooms, words pass behind walls and every sound carries a faint shadow of whatever preceded it. This is often described as hauntological music, but Dewlow’s ghosts have personality. Beneath the fog are carefully shaped songs whose emotional directness survives every layer of distortion.
Dewlow began People Skills by improvising with homemade instruments and found or freely obtained materials, deliberately working along the uncertain border between art and amateur activity. That practice gives I Will Not Die its peculiar authority. The recording never asks expensive equipment or technical polish to certify its importance. “Blue Dusk” and “The Soul of the Hotel Thief I Long to Be” drift through dim guitar figures, obscured singing and hesitant rhythms that seem to construct themselves while playing. The titles suggest disappearance, trespass and borrowed identity, yet the music remains warmer than its spectral surface initially implies. These are private pop songs viewed through dirty glass, not abstraction performed to keep the listener outside.
“Chipping Away at Here’s Laughter” and “Concept Is the Brick” bring the album’s method into focus. Dewlow does not destroy song form; he chips at it until its hidden supports become visible. Repetition, silence, crude texture and imperfect timing function like building materials, each modest by itself but capable of producing an inhabitable structure. “Uncredentialed” makes that philosophy explicit. People Skills needs no diploma, virtuoso performance or institutional permission. Its awkwardness is not an apology but a chosen freedom, allowing Dewlow to follow emotional logic instead of professional standards. The music can sound fragile while remaining remarkably difficult to erase.
The longer “Fleeting Apparition” nearly dissolves into its own atmosphere, but the album closes with its most concrete figure. “Cheval the Mailman” appears to invoke Ferdinand Cheval, the French postal carrier who spent thirty-three years constructing the Palais Idéal from stones collected along his route. Cheval had no architectural credentials, yet daily labor, private vision and accumulated small objects became a monumental work. He is an ideal guardian for People Skills. Dewlow also builds with overlooked materials, adding one rough sound to another until an impossible personal structure begins standing. The connection turns the preceding “Concept Is the Brick” and “Uncredentialed” into parts of the same quiet manifesto: imagination does not need authorization, but it does require continued work.
The album was issued by Hobart’s Altered States Tapes after a chain of connections carried this Philadelphia-area project through Sweden and onward to Australia. That crooked route suits music devoted to indirect communication. Only sixty-nine physical copies were made, but the tape does not treat obscurity as proof of superiority. Its intimacy comes from the sensation that one person constructed it carefully enough to reach another person, even across oceans and years. I Will Not Die is modest, murky and occasionally difficult to grasp, yet its title keeps glowing through the haze. Survival here is not invulnerability. It is the stubborn act of continuing to build with whatever the day has placed in your hands.

The Janitors - 2012 - Head Honcho

 

Your Ears Have Been Bad And Need To Be Punished Records – MyEars002  

The Janitors met while actually working as janitors, but nothing on Head Honcho suggests an enthusiasm for spotless surfaces. Jonas Eriksson and Henric Herlenius prefer music with dirt embedded in it: feedback, overloaded guitar, buried vocals, repetition and sounds left rough enough to retain their physical edges. After an early incarnation inspired by the Jesus and Mary Chain, a long hiatus and a troubled first album, the pair created their own label and studio so they could work without an outside engineer trying to brighten the singing or scrub the distortion away. Head Honcho captures the moment that independence became a fully developed sound. The riffs are direct and occasionally catchy, but every recognizable shape is surrounded by enough drone and fuzz to make it appear dangerous.
The brief “Head Honcho Pt.1” opens the door before “Strap Me Down” establishes the record’s central method: a heavy groove repeated until it stops feeling like a riff and becomes the room itself. The Janitors call their music stökpsych, roughly suggesting messy or unruly psychedelia, and the term is more accurate than polished labels such as shoegaze or neo-psych. Their effects do not create a beautiful cloud that conceals the band. They make the instruments seem larger, dirtier and less stable. Herlenius has explained that the group treats vocals as another instrument, deliberately covering them in delay so they glue themselves to the background rather than standing crisply above it. The words may blur, but the voice’s exhaustion, menace and strange invitation remain perfectly clear.
The twelve-and-a-half-minute “A-Bow” is the EP’s great black hole. It began with a recording Jonas made of an actual archery bow tuned to A, an unlikely little vibration from which the guitar riff appeared almost immediately. The band then circles that figure with bass pressure, drums, wah-wah and accumulating noise, trusting monotony to deepen rather than flatten the experience. It has the forward persistence of Loop or Spacemen 3, but the rhythm carries a crooked boogie that keeps the music connected to the body. This is where The Janitors separate themselves from groups that use fuzz mainly as period clothing. The sound is not an imitation of a lost psychedelic year. It is a tool for changing the scale of the present moment, making one riff feel wide enough to contain an entire hostile landscape.
“MSSG” condenses that atmosphere into less than four minutes. Its vocal has sometimes been compared to Ian Curtis, but the surrounding guitar is too swollen and unstable for ordinary post-punk severity. The song reveals the pop instinct hiding underneath the punishment. Eriksson and Herlenius love noise and monotony, but they also understand that a memorable phrase gives distortion something to deform. Their best music never asks the listener to choose between hook and drone. The hook draws you inward; the drone closes the exit. “Head Honcho Pt.2” then completes the frame without providing a clean return to ordinary daylight. The title may imply leadership, but the record has no obvious boss. Voice, riff, rhythm and feedback continually exchange control until the whole piece behaves like one badly wired organism.
The EP was created in only three months and began with no prepared blueprint. “Strap Me Down” and “MSSG” emerged through jamming, while “A-Bow” grew from its namesake recording. That history explains why Head Honcho feels discovered rather than manufactured, but the final result is not shapeless. The Janitors had learned how to recognize which accidents deserved repetition and when a jam had found its actual center. Their home-recording process allowed them to keep experimenting until the equipment behaved according to their own hearing. It also marked a return to the exploratory duo at the band’s core, with other musicians contributing as needed rather than determining a permanent conventional lineup.
Head Honcho and the preceding Worker Drone Queen EP were later joined on the double album Drone Head, which carried The Janitors beyond their Swedish circle and helped establish their reputation as “peddlers of heavy drones and fuzzed nightmares.” Heard alone, Head Honcho remains especially concentrated: twenty-eight minutes in which a tiny bow vibration becomes a massive psychedelic structure, vocals disappear into their own echoes and boogie is dragged through enough darkness to emerge almost shamanic. The Janitors do not clean the room. They switch off the lights, increase the volume and reveal that the dirt has been moving all along.

Harald Svensson - 2020 - Sketches & Fancies

 

Footprint Records – FR106

An undecet is an ensemble of eleven, but Harald Svensson has not assembled a miniature orchestra merely to make his piano compositions sound larger. The unusual lineup places a string quartet beside trumpet, trombone, clarinet, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, double bass, drums, percussion and piano, creating a group that can behave like chamber music, free jazz or an organism inventing its own anatomy. The title explains the method beautifully. These are sketches rather than sealed blueprints, and the musicians are invited to supply the fancies: responses, detours and spontaneous details that allow the written material to keep changing while it is being performed. Svensson provides direction without building walls around the players.
The six titles create the outline of an entire day. “Dawn” and “Nightfall” form the outer frame, while “Promenade,” “Siesta” and the journey implied by “Latcho Drom” occupy the hours between them. The two longest pieces, “Dawn” and “Latcho Drom,” give the ensemble time to gather gradually rather than announce its full strength at once. Strings can appear as mist, friction or sustained color; horns and reeds can move between melody and rougher collective speech; piano, bass and drums can suggest a jazz rhythm section before letting that identity dissolve. The shorter “Promenade” feels proportionally like movement through open air, while “Siesta” creates a place where activity can loosen without disappearing. The sequence is less a literal program than a change in musical light.
Svensson has been one of Sweden’s important improvising pianists since the 1970s, with a history reaching through EGBA, the Eje Thelin Group, Entra and numerous encounters with jazz, contemporary composition and choral music. That breadth is audible in the undecet’s refusal to choose between refinement and freedom. The string writing can be delicate without becoming decorative, and the improvisation can become unruly without reducing the ensemble to eleven simultaneous soloists. Nina de Heney’s bass and Henrik Wartel’s drums give the music weight and elasticity, while Staffan Svensson, Signe Lykkebo Dahlgreen, Isak Hedtjärn and Niclas Rydh provide a wind and brass choir capable of becoming either one mass or several independent characters. Violinists Karin Wiberg and Eva Lindal, violist Sara Nilsson and cellist Emma Augustsson bring another four-way conversation, so almost every moment contains several possible alliances.
“Latcho Drom,” a Romani phrase commonly translated as “safe journey,” sits near the album’s center and offers a useful image for the whole recording. Svensson gives his musicians a road, but safety does not require everybody to walk in formation. The pleasure comes from hearing individuals leave the path, discover another route and return with information for the ensemble. Even “Weed,” the smallest and most mischievously titled piece, suggests growth that ignores the gardener’s intended design. Improvisation behaves similarly: an accidental phrase takes root, spreads through neighboring instruments and may become more interesting than the original plan. By “Nightfall,” the record has not reached a conventional resolution so much as a shared resting point after a day spent testing what these particular eleven people could become together.
The entire album was captured during one January 2019 session, which helps preserve the sense of immediate group discovery. It does not sound like a composer displaying an impressive arrangement in front of obedient performers. It sounds like Svensson has chosen musicians whose individual judgment he trusts, then created enough structure for those judgments to interact. Sketches & Fancies is generous, alert ensemble music: composed enough to carry memory, free enough to remain surprising and spacious enough for eleven distinct personalities to appear without crowding one another from view. Its real subject is not the piano or even the compositions. It is the delicate social art of giving people direction while leaving them room to find their own way.

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.