Nathalie Stern - 2019 - Nerves And Skin

Cruel Nature Records – CN126

 Nerves and Skin names the two territories through which every experience must pass. Skin is the border where the world first touches us: pressure, heat, injury, affection, air. Nerves carry that contact inward, converting the external world into electrical information that the hidden body can understand. Nathalie Stern builds this album in the space between those functions. Voices touch one another, synthesizer tones travel like signals beneath the surface, breath becomes rhythm, and feelings that might ordinarily be explained through narrative are instead allowed to enter through sensation.

Paul Hess’ cover makes that hidden process visible. A human torso has been opened to expose ribs, intestines, organs, and flowing internal structures, while an eye appears in the center of the chest as though the body has developed another method of seeing. Beyond it are branching cellular shapes resembling neurons, roots, veins, or organisms encountered through a microscope. The image refuses the comforting division between interior and exterior. Skin is no longer a complete boundary, nerves resemble landscape, and the body appears simultaneously vulnerable, intelligent, and unknowable.

The album behaves in much the same way. It is intimate without sounding small, exposed without becoming confessional in the ordinary singer-songwriter sense, and bodily without depending upon conventional acoustic naturalism. Stern’s principal materials are voice, a MicroKorg, loops, drones, and a limited number of carefully chosen collaborators. From those apparently modest resources she creates rooms that seem much larger than the person standing at their center.

Nerves and Skin arrived almost a decade after her first solo album, Firetales. That interval was not merely a long production schedule. Stern has described reaching a point where she had begun losing interest in her own music and deliberately setting her tools down while another direction formed. The decision matters because artists are often encouraged to continue supplying work even after the method producing it has stopped feeling alive. Stern did the harder thing. She waited until the language changed.

Her earlier history had included guitar-based groups such as the Swedish band Candysuck and the Newcastle group Lake Me, followed by years of solo performance in which traditional Swedish folk memory, vocal looping, and experimental electronics gradually moved toward the center. After roughly twenty years of playing guitar, she found that it no longer allowed her to write the music she needed. The MicroKorg replaced it, but the more important discovery was that her voice had been the true instrument all along.

That recognition gives the record unusual authority. Stern does not use electronic equipment to disguise limitations or imitate a full conventional band. The synthesizer supplies pulse, duration, darkness, and a surface against which the voice can reveal its physical character. Her vocals can be melodic, choral, whispered, percussive, disembodied, or multiplied into a group whose individual members all happen to originate in the same throat.

The live versions of these songs were constructed through real-time looping and sequencing. In the studio, Stern and MP Wood took many of them apart, isolating the components rather than simply recording the established stage performance. That change of method allows the album to expose its internal anatomy. A breath can be positioned independently from the phrase that once surrounded it. A harmony can acquire another voice. A bass trombone can enter beneath a loop and reveal weight that the original live arrangement had only implied.

This is not studio polish applied to spontaneous music. It is a second form of composition. Stern’s live process creates a present-tense architecture in which every layer must be performed, captured, and trusted before the next one can exist. The studio permits time to be opened and examined. Individual moments can be separated, collaborators can enter the structure, and a song can discover relationships that were impossible when one person had to operate the entire mechanism onstage.

“Here to Stay and Here to Belong” begins with breath. Before nationality, politics, residence, or belonging can be discussed, a body must establish that it is alive. A deep synthesizer pulse then appears beneath overlapping voices, creating a landscape both protective and unsettled. At more than seven minutes, it is the album’s longest piece and the foundation upon which everything that follows is built.

Stern wrote the song before the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, intending it as a love song to the country where she had established her adult life. After the result, its words became painfully literal. As a Swedish person long settled in Newcastle, the apparently simple desire to stay and belong had suddenly been placed inside administrative, political, and emotional uncertainty.

The song is strongest because it does not become a topical slogan attached to a date in 2016. Its deeper subject is the instability of belonging itself. A person can spend years making a home, building friendships, participating in a community, and loving a place, only to discover that official language may still classify that presence as provisional. Home exists socially and emotionally, but governments possess documents capable of casting a shadow across it.

Stern’s layered voices answer that uncertainty by creating their own community. No single vocal line has to prove its right to remain because the others are already surrounding it. Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch join Stern, widening the song from one person’s declaration into a small chorus. The music does not pretend that singing can settle an immigration status. It creates another kind of belonging, the temporary nation formed whenever several people agree to breathe and listen together.

This is one of the album’s central ideas: a loop can be a form of shelter. Repetition is sometimes described as imprisonment, the mind or machine trapped inside the same action. Stern uses it differently. Returning to a phrase can establish a reliable ground when the larger world has become unstable. The line comes back. The pulse comes back. The voice is still present. Each recurrence says that disappearance has not yet occurred.

“Because Science” takes the record from political uncertainty into cosmic uncertainty. The title sounds like a sarcastic shorthand used during online arguments, a phrase meant to close discussion by claiming rational authority. Stern instead repeats the opening thought from H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, in which scientific restraint is used to warn humanity away from knowledge hidden in Antarctica. Rational inquiry has opened a door that reason itself now wants closed.

The repeated text becomes increasingly detached from ordinary speech. Stern, Duncanson, and Gabrysch chant it until the sentence stops functioning merely as information and begins behaving like an incantation. This is an important reversal. Lovecraft’s narrator attempts to use language scientifically, documenting evidence and issuing a warning, but Stern’s repetition exposes the ancient fear already living beneath that formal voice. Explanation becomes ritual.

Hannabiell Sanders’ bass trombone enters this environment with astonishing naturalness. The instrument is named Tyler in the credits, a small affectionate detail that makes its enormous low voice feel almost like another character. Trombone can suggest ceremonial brass, industrial machinery, animal call, human lament, or something moving beneath a frozen surface. Here it seems to breathe below the choir, giving physical mass to the unseen presence the words are trying not to reveal.

The title’s humor protects the track from becoming costume horror. Stern’s relationship to occult films, strange fairy tales, and folk horror is genuine, but she understands that horror becomes less convincing when every object announces its darkness too solemnly. “Because Science” lets a phrase from contemporary argumentative culture collide with cosmic dread. The joke opens the door; the thing behind the door remains serious.

“Luchadora” returns attention to the body. The Spanish title names a female fighter or wrestler, someone whose survival depends upon knowing where force enters the body and how it can be redirected. The track moves through low, lurching percussion, electronic pressure, hissing breath, and vocal fragments whose repetitions feel less like a chorus than controlled exertion.

MP Wood’s percussion does not produce a conventional dance beat. It creates impact and recovery. Each sound seems to make the surrounding body adjust its stance. Stern’s breath becomes part of that rhythmic system, removing the usual distinction between the person performing the song and the machinery supporting her. The lungs are already percussion instruments; the microphone merely enlarges what is normally hidden.

The luchadora is an especially appropriate figure for this record because wrestling joins performance and genuine physical risk. The body becomes symbol, costume, spectacle, and vulnerable flesh at the same time. A staged identity may still receive an actual blow. Stern’s multiplied voice can likewise sound supernatural while remaining unmistakably rooted in muscle, air, saliva, fatigue, and nerves.

“Luchadora” never needs to announce a victory. Its power lies in continuation. The rhythm remains standing, the breath returns, and the track gradually makes endurance itself feel combative. Strength is not represented by making the voice invulnerable. It is represented by hearing vulnerability become organized motion.

“Ember Child” is the album’s first great contraction. After the extended opening environments and the physical struggle of “Luchadora,” two minutes and forty-six seconds of voice and piano create a smaller chamber. Nicky Rushton’s playing brings an acoustic warmth into the electronic landscape, but the song does not become a conventional respite. Its gentleness retains the knowledge of darkness surrounding it.

An ember is not simply a small flame. It is what remains after the visible fire has diminished, carrying enough heat for combustion to begin again. Joining ember to child creates an image of vulnerable persistence: a young life holding warmth inside an environment that may not appear warm at all. Stern’s lullaby-like delivery protects that spark without surrounding it in false innocence.

Rushton’s piano gives individual notes room to decay. Unlike a loop, which can return with apparent permanence, a struck piano tone begins vanishing immediately. “Ember Child” places Stern’s sustained vocal world beside that mortality. The voice can be layered and prolonged, but each piano note reminds the listener that sound is also disappearance measured through time.

The song’s small dimensions are important. Albums concerned with dread and ritual sometimes enlarge every emotion until intimacy is crushed beneath atmosphere. Stern understands that a whisper can carry as much consequence as a drone. “Ember Child” does not leave the album’s larger world. It reveals the tiny life being sheltered inside it.

“Then You Talk of War” begins from a different kind of threshold. The title places violence inside conversation. One person has been speaking, another introduces war, and the emotional climate of the room changes before any physical event occurs. War first arrives through language: threat, justification, memory, prophecy, fantasy, history. By the time weapons appear, words have often spent years preparing the ground.

A heartbeat-like pulse runs beneath the track, making the political subject bodily. War may be discussed through borders, governments, armies, and strategic abstractions, but its final location is always nerves and skin. It enters lungs, ears, sleep, families, and the learned reflexes through which bodies begin anticipating danger.

Sanders’ trombone adds weight without producing military grandeur. Brass instruments carry unavoidable associations with public ceremony, armies, funerals, and state power, but Tyler’s low voice here sounds closer to an organism enduring pressure than a fanfare commanding obedience. The choral layers rise around it, neither triumphant nor defeated.

Stern’s arrangement makes war feel like an infection of scale. A conversation becomes a room, the room becomes an institution, the institution becomes machinery, and the machinery eventually returns its consequences to individual bodies. The song remains compact because the title has already supplied the entire terrifying expansion. Someone talks of war, and suddenly every ordinary object nearby appears temporary.

“Deep Sleep” occupies the album’s most ambiguous refuge. Sleep should provide restoration, but the track’s wheezing drone and barely raised voice suggest a threshold from which returning is not guaranteed. Nicky Rushton’s piano, Sanders’ bass trombone, and the additional voices gather around Stern without dispelling the unease. The ensemble sounds like a group keeping watch while the central figure travels somewhere they cannot follow.

A lullaby normally establishes safety through repetition. The same melodic contour returns, assuring the listener that the caretaker remains nearby. Stern preserves this function while allowing the surrounding electronics to question it. The song may be soothing, but what is being soothed? A child, an adult nervous system, an illness, a fear of death, or the body’s resistance to surrendering consciousness?

Deep sleep is the point at which awareness of the skin temporarily diminishes. The world continues touching the body, but the conscious mind is no longer translating every contact. The album’s title therefore changes meaning here. Nerves remain active beneath sleep, maintaining breath, heartbeat, temperature, and the possibility of waking. The hidden system continues its work without requiring permission.

The track’s patience makes it one of the record’s deepest rooms. Nothing has to leap from the darkness to prove that darkness exists. A low mechanical breath, a distant harmony, and a melody hovering between nursery song and elegy are enough. Stern trusts the listener’s imagination to populate the empty areas, which is almost always more effective than explaining what lives there.

“Spectre” lasts only two minutes and twenty-three seconds, appearing less as a complete haunting than as evidence that haunting has occurred. A spectre is defined by incomplete presence. Something appears without returning fully to physical life. Stern’s method of recording voices is ideally suited to this condition because each overdub is the preserved trace of a body that is no longer standing at the microphone.

Recording has always contained an element of haunting. A person produces vibrations once; technology allows them to sound again after the originating moment has vanished. Vocal looping intensifies the uncanniness because the same preserved breath can continue beside the living performer who made it. Past and present versions of one person become briefly audible together.

“Spectre” makes that ordinary technical fact emotionally visible. Stern’s voice does not need theatrical ghost effects. The very act of hearing a human presence separated from its original time is already strange enough. The song passes quickly, refusing the ghost enough duration to become domesticated.

“Stig in Lucia” is the album’s most explicit meeting between Stern’s Swedish childhood and her adult experimental practice. Its opening section is based upon a traditional song she remembers singing at school. She has said that this first half remains close to the way it was performed then, apart from the drone now sounding beneath it.

Swedish Lucia observances are built around light entering the darkest portion of the year, with processions, candles, white clothing, and choral song. The ceremony is Christian, seasonal, familial, civic, and theatrical at once. For children participating in school, the tradition can enter memory before its historical meanings are fully understood. Melody and group singing arrive first; explanation follows later, if it arrives at all.

Stern retrieves that choral memory without preserving it beneath glass. The old song enters a drone, receives additional voices, meets MP Wood’s bass and guitar, and eventually crosses into increasingly forceful synthesizer sound. The track begins as recollection and ends as possession. Tradition does not remain safely in the past. It wakes up inside current technology and discovers that the new machinery can carry it somewhere the childhood performance could not.

This transformation avoids the politeness that sometimes weakens contemporary approaches to folk material. Stern does not merely sing an old melody clearly, add tasteful electronic ambience, and allow heritage to remain recognizable and well behaved. The second half reveals that inherited songs may contain energies their ceremonial use has disciplined rather than eliminated.

The title itself contributes to the slight dislocation. “Stig in Lucia” sounds almost familiar but not completely settled, as though a known seasonal ritual has been entered from an unexpected angle. That crookedness suits Stern’s memory. She is neither reproducing a definitive ethnographic version nor treating the tradition as exotic material discovered by an outsider. She is returning to something that once passed through her own body and asking what it has become after decades elsewhere.

Migration alters inherited music in ways that can be difficult to measure. A song sung within Sweden may feel communal and ordinary. Sung in Newcastle, it can suddenly carry geography, childhood, language, distance, and the knowledge that the singer has built another home. The melody has not changed, but its location inside the person has.

The track’s descent or ascent into synthesizer intensity also complicates Lucia’s symbolic light. Light is usually treated as safe, revealing, and morally opposed to darkness. Stern’s electronic illumination is more volatile. It exposes the body, overloads the nerves, and makes the old chorus appear less like reassurance than the opening of a channel.

“Interlude” follows as residue. The voices seem to wilt, fall away, or continue after their organizing ceremony has ended. Calling it an interlude suggests an interval between important events, but near the end of the record it becomes a necessary zone of decompression. The listener has passed through childhood ritual transformed into electronic force and cannot be moved directly into the closing statement without an altered silence between them.

The track demonstrates how little Stern needs in order to establish place. A human voice weakened, reversed in emphasis, or left without its expected harmonic support can make a room feel enormous. The absence of a conventional lyric does not reduce meaning. It redirects attention toward the voice’s material condition: air becoming vibration, vibration being preserved, and preservation slowly losing its human outline.

“A Life” closes the record with an indefinite article. Not “Life,” which might promise a universal statement, but one life among many. The title acknowledges both singularity and limitation. Every life is complete from inside itself and one small event from the perspective of history.

Duncanson and Gabrysch return, making the ending communal rather than solitary. This matters after an album that has repeatedly multiplied Stern’s own voice. The difference between overdubbed self and actual collaborators can become difficult to hear, which is part of the record’s quiet philosophy. Identity remains real, but no voice develops outside other voices. Family, school, bands, places, traditions, political events, friendships, and remembered songs are already present inside the supposedly individual singer.

“A Life” does not require a spectacular conclusion because the album’s central process has been continuation rather than conquest. Breath has moved through ten different structures. Voices have gathered, separated, returned as spectres, carried tradition, confronted war, entered sleep, and constructed a home. The final track leaves the listener with existence itself, neither diminished by mortality nor inflated into a promise of transcendence.

The collaborators form another body around Stern’s body. Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch appear on six tracks, contributing voices informed by Newcastle’s experimental Noize Choir culture. Their participation makes the harmonies feel social rather than merely multiplied through studio technique. Hannabiell Sanders’ bass trombone supplies breath converted into brass vibration, a second respiratory system beneath the singers. Nicky Rushton’s pianos introduce strings struck by felt-covered hammers. MP Wood brings impact, low-frequency foundation, guitar texture, and the engineering decisions that determine how close every body appears.

Each contribution is physical. Even the synthesizer is operated through pressure from fingers, converted into voltage, sound, and speaker movement. Nerves and Skin refuses the lingering idea that electronic music is disembodied. Its electronics are extensions of touch. Buttons, keys, pedals, cables, microphones, and loops form an external nervous system through which one body communicates with another.

The apparently simple synthesizer tones are therefore a strength. Stern does not bury them beneath excessive processing in order to make the technology seem mysterious. Their buzz, pulse, and raw surfaces remain audible. The machine is not pretending to be weather or orchestra. It is allowed to be an electrically powered object responding to human hands.

This directness makes the album more timeless than an elaborate display of fashionable production might have been. Folk music and basic electronics share an unexpected durability. Both can be carried through relatively modest means. A song requires memory and a voice. A minimal synth pattern requires a small machine and electricity. Neither needs the full industrial apparatus of commercial recording in order to begin.

Stern’s use of loops also belongs more closely to folk practice than first appearances suggest. Traditional songs survive through recurrence. A melody is repeated until a community remembers it, then changed slightly as new voices carry it forward. Looping performs this process within one performance. The first phrase becomes inherited material for the second phrase, even when only seconds separate their creation.

The crucial difference is that technology remembers exactly while people remember creatively. Stern works between those conditions. The loop returns with mechanical reliability, but every new vocal placed beside it changes its meaning. Exact repetition becomes the ground for human variation.

This is why her music feels rooted without becoming revivalist. The traditional element is not limited to the Swedish song quoted in “Stig in Lucia.” It is present in the understanding that voices gathered around a repeated form can produce a social and psychological space larger than any individual singer. Folk tradition becomes method rather than decoration.

Folk horror enters through a similar route. Stern has spoken of her lasting attraction to strange fairy tales, occult films, and stories in which familiar landscapes conceal older forces. Nerves and Skin contains darkness, but its horror is not imported as a bundle of visual symbols. There are no obligatory crows, antlers, village sacrifices, or samples from old public-information films. The unease grows from ordinary human systems: belonging, scientific inquiry, fighting, childcare, war, sleep, memory, seasonal ritual, and mortality.

Each of those systems is necessary, yet each can become frightening when examined long enough. Belonging creates the fear of exclusion. Science reveals knowledge the discoverer may not be prepared to carry. Sleep restores life by imitating its absence. Childhood songs preserve warmth while reminding the adult that childhood has vanished. Skin protects the body while proving how easily the body can be reached.

The record’s horror is therefore inseparable from tenderness. “Ember Child” could not feel vulnerable without care surrounding it. “Here to Stay and Here to Belong” hurts because the attachment to home is genuine. “Deep Sleep” becomes uncanny because lullabies are intended to protect. “Stig in Lucia” becomes powerful because Stern has not rejected the childhood tradition she transforms.

This mixture gives the album an unusual emotional integrity. Darkness is not treated as more intellectually serious than love, and beauty is not offered as proof that danger has disappeared. The two conditions continually occupy the same sound. Harmonies can be gorgeous while the drone beneath them remains threatening. A bass trombone can suggest a creature and a grieving human breath in the same note.

The geographical relationship between Sweden and Newcastle runs quietly through the whole album. Stern’s identity is not divided into a traditional Swedish half and an experimental British half. Newcastle’s musicians, studios, labels, and communities have become part of the work, just as Swedish choral memory and folk structures remain present within it. The album does not choose between origins and arrival. It creates a third territory from their overlap.

That territory is particularly audible in “Here to Stay and Here to Belong.” Political language often demands that migrants explain where they truly belong, as though attachment can be measured through one birthplace and one passport. Music is less obedient. A voice can carry childhood school songs, decades of guitar playing, North East friendships, European anxiety, horror films, electronic instruments, and the acoustics of a Gateshead studio without arranging them into competing national compartments.

Belonging becomes something constructed through repeated participation. One stays, sings, helps, listens, collaborates, attends other people’s performances, and becomes part of the local memory. The additional Newcastle voices on the album are therefore more than guests. They are audible evidence that home has already been built socially, regardless of the uncertainty imposed from above.

Cruel Nature Records was an appropriate home for the cassette because the label has consistently allowed experimental music from the North East and far beyond to coexist without forcing it into one marketable genre. The tape’s limited edition of seventy-five copies gives the album another skin: a white plastic shell enclosing magnetic material upon which electrical signals have been physically arranged.

The white vinyl and CD editions provide other bodies for the same nervous information. Vinyl converts sound into a groove that can be touched but is damaged by careless touch. Tape holds magnetized particles that slowly change through age and playback. The compact disc makes the information optically readable while remaining vulnerable to surface injury. Every medium has skin, memory, and a particular way of deteriorating.

That material vulnerability suits an album concerned with preservation. Stern waited almost ten years between solo records, but the music does not sound anxious to compensate for absence through excess. It behaves like something that needed to reach its final form before being given a body. Once pressed, duplicated, or transferred, it can travel independently of the person who made it, carrying her breath into rooms she will never enter.

Nerves and Skin is often described as ethereal, haunting, or gothic, all of which identify genuine qualities. Yet those words can make the album sound less physical than it is. This is not mist floating above the ground. It is lungs, fingers, vibrating reeds, struck strings, abdominal breath, electrical current, magnetic storage, and the minute muscular adjustments required to hold several voices in tune.

Its most supernatural effects emerge from ordinary anatomy. One throat becomes a choir. One breath returns after it should have vanished. A remembered school song passes through decades and appears again beside a synthesizer. A voice recorded in Gateshead reaches a listener years later while the body that produced that exact sound is somewhere else entirely.

Technology does not remove the human presence. It reveals how strange human presence already is.

The album’s restraint is equally important. Stern never fills every available frequency simply because the studio permits it. Silence remains active around the loops. Guest musicians enter where their particular physical color changes the structure, then leave before the arrangement becomes a demonstration of abundance. The record knows the difference between expansion and crowding.

That discipline allows the voice to remain central without becoming dominant. Stern does not use virtuosity to stand above the other sounds. Her greatest skill is making the voice function as environment. It can become wall, floor, weather, companion, warning, or the faint light by which another instrument is recognized.

By the end, the title no longer feels like a poetic abstraction. Nerves and skin are what the record has been playing all along. Nerves are its loops, signals, pulses, and invisible connections. Skin is its breath, contact, pressure, voice, and recording surface. One carries the message; the other determines how deeply the message is felt.

Anyone who witnessed Stern constructing these pieces live, participated in Newcastle’s Noize Choir community, remembers the traditional Lucia song from childhood, or knows more about the sessions at the Soundroom may hear further bodies inside the record. Those memories would be especially valuable here, because the album understands that no voice exists alone. Every sound touches another surface, and every surface sends something inward.

Blod - 2021 - Missväxt LP

 

Grapefruit Records – GY11-5

Missväxt means a poor harvest or crop failure, but the word reaches beyond agriculture. It suggests growth that has gone wrong: seed planted in unsuitable ground, a season turning hostile, nourishment failing to arrive, or a living thing emerging in a form nobody expected. Gustaf Dicksson builds the album inside that wider meaning. Its melodies appear to have grown from Swedish folk, church music, medieval imagery, family memory and regional melancholy, yet they rarely develop according to the respectable rules attached to any of those traditions. They lean, wobble, repeat themselves imperfectly and occasionally bloom with such strange intensity that failure begins resembling another kind of fertility.

Blod means blood, an ideal name for music concerned with inheritance without treating inheritance as purity. Blood carries ancestry, illness, kinship, violence and life itself, but it never remains untouched by the present body containing it. Dicksson approaches Swedish cultural memory in much the same way. He does not preserve old forms behind museum glass or recreate an imaginary village where everybody knows the correct dance steps. He allows tradition to circulate through damaged recording methods, private humor, synthesizer, amateur enthusiasm, religious song, psychedelic rock and the loose social network surrounding Gothenburg’s experimental underground.

The result is neither an authentic medieval recording nor a modern rock album wearing medieval clothing. Missväxt sounds more like an invented tradition whose participants have forgotten which elements are inherited and which were made yesterday. Flutes may carry something recognizably archaic, but their surroundings remain unstable. Drums can suggest procession, communal dance or somebody striking available objects in a small room. Voices arrive with the directness of people singing because a song exists and ought to be sung, not because every note has first been approved by a conservatory.

This quality connects Blod to Enhet För Fri Musik, Oroskällan and the wider community around labels and groups including Förlag För Fri Musik, Discreet Music, Loopsel, Monokultur and Neutral. These projects do not share one dependable genre. What they share is permission: permission for folk song to become collage, for domestic recording to carry serious emotional weight, for technical roughness to remain expressive and for several people to contribute without sanding away their individual awkwardness. The community behaves less like a scene organized around a recognizable sound than a village whose residents keep borrowing one another’s instruments, rooms and memories.

Dicksson began Blod by returning to home recordings made years earlier, discovering that private musical experiments he had once considered unusable still contained a living impulse. That origin remains important on Missväxt. Even with guest musicians and Joakim Karlsson helping shape the production, the album never loses the sensation of music being assembled close to everyday life. It does not sound removed from the rooms, limitations and personal relationships that produced it. The studio has not been used to erase circumstance. Circumstance is one of the instruments.

“Brudmarsch Från Mölndal” opens with a wedding march from Mölndal, Dicksson’s part of the Gothenburg region. A brudmarsch traditionally accompanies the movement surrounding a marriage ceremony, guiding a wedding party toward or away from the church and helping transform several individuals into a temporary public body. Calling this particular composition a local wedding march immediately gives it the authority of custom, even though Dicksson is constructing his own crooked version of custom.

That is one of the album’s recurring jokes and one of its deeper truths. Tradition often presents itself as though it has always existed, when every traditional song was once somebody’s new tune. A musician composed or altered it, another person remembered it incorrectly, a village adopted it, and repetition gradually converted an individual invention into common property. “Brudmarsch Från Mölndal” compresses that process. Dicksson writes a piece that sounds as though it might have been carried through generations, then names it according to the same geographic system used for older folk melodies. A new root is inserted into old soil.

The marriage implied by the title also introduces an album filled with unions that do not become smooth. Acoustic instruments meet synthesizer. Sweden meets Denmark. Christianity meets pagan-looking forest imagery. Folk melody meets acid rock. Private recording becomes collective performance. The partners remain visibly different, and their incompatibility generates much of the record’s life. Missväxt is not seeking perfect fusion. It prefers the moment when two materials are still deciding whether they can inhabit the same household.

“Arbejdet Måste Flyde På” roughly suggests that the work must continue or keep flowing. Even its wording moves between neighboring Scandinavian languages, fitting an album whose later tracks increasingly open toward Danish song through Astrid Øster Mortensen. The title can sound like encouragement, resignation or an instruction issued by somebody who will not be doing the labor personally. Whatever the season brings, work continues because bodies require food, institutions require obedience and songs require somebody to repeat them.

The phrase also describes Dicksson’s prolific practice. Blod releases do not appear as monumental statements separated by years of silence. They form a continuing stream of cassettes, LPs, organ recordings, hymns, experiments and provisional identities. The work flows onward, but not according to industrial ideas of efficiency. It meanders, doubles back and allows apparently minor fascinations to occupy an entire release. Productivity becomes less about finishing products than maintaining contact with the impulse to make them.

“Gryningstid,” or dawn time, and “Den Morgonen,” that morning, bring the album through a small cycle of expectation. Dawn ordinarily promises renewal. Morning suggests that whatever remained hidden during darkness can now be seen and acted upon. Placed immediately before the title track, however, these pieces acquire uncertainty. Light reveals the field, but it may reveal that the crop has failed. A new day does not guarantee a new beginning. Sometimes it merely provides enough visibility to measure what has been lost.

Dicksson’s melodies are especially effective in this region between innocence and foreknowledge. They often sound simple enough to have been learned in childhood, yet their repetition gradually creates doubt. A phrase returns once and feels comforting. It returns again and begins sounding compulsive. One small tonal shift can turn warmth into sadness without changing the melody’s outward posture. The songs understand that childhood forms may continue carrying emotions acquired much later.

The title piece pushes the album toward acid rock, allowing amplified repetition and distortion to overtake the more delicate folk framework. “Missväxt” does not sound like a documentary representation of crop failure. It expresses the mental climate surrounding it: effort already spent, patterns interrupted, the natural world refusing the agreement people believed they had made with it. Rhythm keeps moving, but the promised result has not appeared.

Historically, failed harvests were not picturesque rural disappointments. They meant hunger, displacement, debt, illness and the collapse of confidence in both earthly and divine order. A community might have performed every required task, observed the calendar, prayed, planted and waited, only to discover that obedience offered no protection. The bad harvest therefore becomes a spiritual problem as much as an agricultural one. What does faith mean when the expected evidence of care does not grow?

Blod’s later work would move more explicitly into Swedish parish culture, hymns, free churches, religious authority, loneliness and belief. Missväxt already contains the seeds of that direction. Sacred and secular material are not separated into different rooms. A wedding march, a working song, a failed crop, an Easter hymn and a Danish liberation song form one emotional landscape. Religion appears not as settled doctrine but as part of ordinary cultural memory, tangled with seasons, family, fear and music learned before its words were fully understood.

The title can also describe a person who believes they have developed incorrectly. Modern life is filled with measurements of proper growth: education, work, relationships, income, health, taste, social usefulness. Anyone who fails to bloom according to schedule may begin imagining themselves as the bad harvest. Dicksson’s music offers another interpretation. A malformed plant may simply be responding honestly to strange soil. Its crookedness records the conditions under which it had to survive.

This is where the album’s humor becomes essential. Without humor, Swedish misery, failed crops and medieval atmosphere could harden into an expensive cloak of solemnity. Dicksson continually punctures that danger. The performances retain the pleasure of people discovering sounds together, and the intentionally ordinary presentation refuses to advertise every musical event as ancient wisdom. Missväxt can be bleak, but it is never impressed with its own bleakness.

“Förrädaren,” the traitor, makes flute the center of a short medieval-looking drama. A traitor is somebody whose closeness made betrayal possible. An enemy outside the walls may be feared, but the traitor already understands the language, customs and secret entrances. This makes betrayal one of the darkest themes available to communal music. Songs establish trust through shared rhythm and melody; the traitor knows the song and breaks the community from within.

Magnus Jäverling’s flute, recorder and percussion are particularly valuable here because they give the music historical suggestion without pretending to deliver historical accuracy. A wooden wind instrument immediately changes the apparent age of a recording, but breath remains completely contemporary. The air entering the flute belongs to a living person in the twenty-first century. What sounds ancient is being created now.

The distinction is important. Folk revival sometimes treats old instruments as time machines capable of returning listeners to a more authentic world. Missväxt knows that no return is possible. The past arrives through fragments, fantasies, recordings, inherited melodies and modern desires. Dicksson is not reconstructing ancient Sweden. He is examining the strange ancient Sweden that modern people carry in their imaginations.

That imaginary nation can be beautiful, comic and dangerous. Ideas of traditional culture are easily recruited into stories of national purity, especially when forests, villages and old songs are treated as evidence that one population naturally belongs to a landscape more than another. Missväxt quietly disrupts that sealed image by allowing Danish language and Danish musical memory to enter its second half. The record’s north is not divided into clean national compartments. Voices, hymns and histories move across the water.

“En Dejlig Tid På Året” means a lovely time of year. Coming after “The Traitor” and “Poor Harvest,” the title may be sincere, ironic or both. Seasonal beauty does not cancel the possibility of failure. Spring can be beautiful while carrying anxiety about whether anything planted will survive. Summer can produce abundance while exhausting the people responsible for gathering it. Winter can create communal closeness while placing the vulnerable in danger.

The phrase’s Danish language brings Astrid Øster Mortensen’s presence more clearly into the album. Born in Denmark and newly connected to Gothenburg’s Discreet Music community during this period, she entered the project when Dicksson was seeking a Danish voice. Her singing and flute do more than add another guest color. They gradually redirect the record’s cultural geography, making the final tracks feel like correspondence between neighboring countries rather than a self-contained Swedish folk fantasy.

Mortensen’s voice is particularly suited to the material because it carries intimacy without conventional polish. She does not arrive as a featured singer placed above Dicksson’s eccentric arrangements. Her presence feels embedded in the same handmade world, allowing tenderness to remain slightly unstable. The human imperfections do not interrupt the spell. They are what make the spell human.

“Dina Händer Är Fulla Av Blommor,” “Your Hands Are Full of Flowers,” carries a deeper history than its beautiful title initially reveals. It is a Swedish Easter hymn adapted during the 1970s from Marcello Giombini’s Italian song “Le tue mani.” The hymn uses a question-and-answer structure, traditionally allowing different singers or groups to address one another before joining together. Its flowers belong to the story of resurrection, recognition and the attempt to understand how death has been crossed.

The song therefore places successful growth immediately after the album’s failed harvest. Hands are full of flowers, but the flowers are connected to a body that has passed through death. Growth has not been restored to innocence. It now carries knowledge of loss. In the Christian imagination, resurrection does not pretend that suffering never occurred; the returned body still bears its wounds. Missväxt makes that idea musical. Beauty arrives, but it remains surrounded by rough recording surfaces and voices that sound vulnerable enough to be harmed.

The hymn’s call-and-response form also gathers several of the album’s concerns. A question requires another person. Faith requires a community capable of answering, even when the answer is partial or sung from uncertainty. Dicksson’s music repeatedly values this ramshackle togetherness over technical perfection. The participants do not sound like a professional choir representing institutional certainty. They sound like people trying to hold the song between them.

There is a lovely historical loop in the hymn’s journey. An Italian religious song enters Sweden, receives new words, becomes part of Swedish congregational life and later appears inside an experimental folk album where a Danish singer helps carry it again. What listeners may experience as a deeply Swedish piece is already the result of translation and migration. Tradition has never been as stationary as nationalist mythology wants it to be.

“Danmark Frit” closes the record by turning fully toward Denmark. The title recalls the Danish liberation song also known as “En lærke letted,” written around the end of the German occupation in 1945. Its celebrated image of spring and a free Denmark holds public joy beside grief for those who did not survive to witness liberation. Freedom arrives, but it arrives among absences.

This is an extraordinary destination for an album beginning with a local Swedish wedding march. The record moves from union to labor, dawn, morning, crop failure, betrayal, seasonal beauty, resurrection and national liberation. Yet the sequence never behaves like a formal historical pageant. These themes are carried by short, rough, intimate recordings whose apparent modesty keeps their symbolism from becoming pompous.

The Danish closing also changes the meaning of “Missväxt.” A failed harvest can describe not only crops but entire political systems that cultivate obedience, fear and exclusion. Liberation becomes the possibility that something else may grow after the destructive system has been removed. But the new growth is not guaranteed. Freedom must be planted, remembered and maintained by people who understand how easily another bad season can begin.

The record’s thirty-one-minute length helps preserve this density. None of the pieces is asked to become the definitive statement on its title. Each opens a little chamber, permits a melody, image or ritual to occur, then closes before explanation can exhaust it. The listener is left with connections rather than conclusions.

This brevity belongs to home recording as much as to folk tradition. A tune does not need ten minutes merely because tape is available. A private recording may preserve only the portion that mattered to the maker that afternoon. The rough edge at the beginning or end can remind us that music existed before the recorder was switched on and may have continued after it stopped.

The LP edition extended this world through an optional cassette of Svensk Orgelmusik, experimental Swedish organ music. That companion object now seems prophetic. The church organ would become increasingly important to Dicksson’s exploration of belief, community and spiritual unease. Here it functions almost like another building located beyond the main album’s field. The LP contains the songs sung outdoors; the cassette opens the church door.

Grapefruit Records was an especially fitting international home. Founded by Simon Joyner and Ben Goldberg, the label has consistently treated the experimental underground not as one genre but as a network of distinctive personal practices. Issuing this deeply Scandinavian record from Omaha creates another route across geography, allowing Dicksson’s intentionally local references to travel without being translated into generic international indie music.

The pressing of five hundred copies also occupies an interesting middle ground. Missväxt is not a secret tape passed among ten friends, but neither was it manufactured for unlimited availability. Its physical scarcity helped make the album feel like an object discovered from another system of circulation, even though the music was new. The Internet then allowed the songs to continue moving after the original copies disappeared, repeating the old folk process through digital means: one person receives the song, copies it and carries it elsewhere.

That process suits Dicksson’s approach because Missväxt is ultimately less concerned with ownership than transmission. Melodies borrow from tradition. An Italian hymn becomes Swedish. A Danish song enters a Swedish solo project. Friends contribute drums, flute, voice and synthesizer. A Gothenburg recording is pressed in connection with an American label and later shared through private archives. Every stage alters the object while helping it survive.

The album’s apparent antiquity is therefore inseparable from modern circulation. Nothing here was simply waiting in a forest for microphones to arrive. The ancient atmosphere is assembled through choices made by musicians with access to decades of folk revival, psychedelia, underground cassette culture and experimental recording. Missväxt is powerful because it does not conceal that construction. Its medieval clearing has cables running through it.

Fairport Convention is an understandable comparison because that group demonstrated how traditional song could inhabit electric rock without becoming a novelty hybrid. Yet Blod’s relationship to folk is less polished and less theatrical. Dicksson does not establish a clear modern rhythm section beneath a faithfully delivered traditional melody. The categories leak into one another. The old song may already sound damaged; the synthesizer may feel strangely pastoral; an awkward vocal entry may carry more historical atmosphere than an expertly played antique instrument.

The album also belongs near the stranger branches of Swedish progg, not progressive rock in the technical sense but the broad anti-commercial movement that allowed politics, folk, communal improvisation, amateurism and experimentation to coexist. Groups such as Träd, Gräs och Stenar understood that a repeated rock figure could become social rather than spectacular, and that technical modesty could create room for participation. Dicksson inherits that ethos while shrinking it into a more private and psychologically crooked form.

Missväxt does not ask whether Swedish tradition is alive or dead. It treats tradition as something living badly, beautifully and unpredictably. It may be underfed, mistranslated, politically manipulated or half forgotten. It may sprout in an apartment, record shop, church, basement or foreign country rather than the field assigned to it. Its survival may not look healthy according to official standards.

That is the album’s quiet argument for the malformed. Correct development is not the only evidence of life. A crooked voice can carry a hymn. A damaged recording can preserve closeness. A failed crop can force people to recognize the conditions governing their survival. An invented wedding march may one day become somebody else’s tradition.

The poor harvest is real, but it is not the end of growth. By the final track, Swedish and Danish voices, local memory, Easter flowers and liberation have become tangled together. Something has grown after all, only not where the authorities expected to find it.

Skiftande Enheter - 2021 - Lögn b/​​w Bättre Förr

 

Chunklet Industries – CHK7066

Placed beside one another, the two titles form a small philosophical machine. “Lögn” means “lie.” “Bättre Förr” means “better before,” carrying the familiar implication that things were better in the old days. Read straight across the record, they can become a sentence: the belief that everything was better before is a lie. Reverse their order and another possibility appears: perhaps the past really was better, and the present is the lie we have agreed to inhabit. Skiftande Enheter do not settle the argument. They place one possibility on each side of a seven-inch record and allow the listener to keep turning it over.

That ambiguity belongs naturally to a group whose name can be understood as “shifting units” or “changing components.” Skiftande Enheter began as a small, primitive punk band, drawing energy from the do-it-yourself bluntness of groups such as the Urinals and Desperate Bicycles. Their earliest songs treated limitation as propulsion: a few chords, short durations, Swedish words, and enough rhythmic insistence to make technical refinement irrelevant. By 2019’s Snubblar Genom Drömmar, however, they had already begun changing shape. Punk remained in the construction, but its surfaces had opened toward new wave, post-punk, psychedelic pop, Velvet Underground repetition, Beat Happening intimacy, and the fragile guitar architecture of Felt.

This single continues that transformation without treating evolution as an escape from the band’s beginnings. The playing is still economical, the arrangements still trust repetition, and nothing has been inflated into expensive studio grandeur. What has changed is the scale at which Skiftande Enheter understand intensity. The earlier band could create excitement by moving quickly and ending before the listener had completely caught up. “Lögn” discovers that the same nervous system can be activated by moving slowly enough that every small alteration becomes suspicious.

The song advances on a heavy-lidded strum, with bass carrying as much emotional information as the voice. Its motion is slow but not peaceful. The instruments seem to be watching one another, waiting for somebody to expose what has been concealed. Organ gradually clouds the room, adding a faintly psychedelic glow whose beauty never completely removes the tension. When the arrangement gathers force, it does not become a conventional chorus announcing the song’s meaning. It feels more like a private thought briefly becoming too large to remain private.

That slow bass-centered movement has invited comparison to Galaxie 500, particularly Naomi Yang’s ability to make a simple line function as melody, pulse, and emotional counterargument simultaneously. The resemblance is useful, but Skiftande Enheter do not sound like a Swedish tribute act attempting to reconstruct an American college-radio melancholy. What they share with Galaxie 500 is an understanding that slowness can enlarge vulnerability. A note held slightly longer than expected begins to reveal the uncertainty beneath it.

The Velvet Underground also hovers around “Lögn,” especially when organ and guitar begin pushing the repeated figure toward a scruffier, more communal kind of release. Again, the connection lies less in a copied chord sequence than in a method. Repetition is not background scenery beneath the song. It is the process through which the song discovers what it contains. The musicians keep returning to the same material until its emotional temperature changes.

Calling the track “Lögn” makes that method especially effective. A lie depends upon repetition. A false statement told once may be dismissed, but repeated often enough it can become memory, policy, identity, family history, or a person’s private explanation of themselves. The music behaves like a sentence being repeated until certainty begins to loosen around it. Nothing in the arrangement declares which element is false. The title merely places doubt inside everything we hear.

The Swedish word itself is compact and hard-edged. “Lögn” occupies one syllable, landing almost as a physical object rather than an elaborate accusation. English allows phrases such as deception, fabrication, falsehood, or untruth, each creating a little distance around the idea. “Lögn” arrives with no such padding. It is small enough to be whispered and heavy enough to end an argument.

Yet the song does not sound like an argument won. Its subdued pace suggests the more difficult moment after a lie has been recognized, when exposing it has not automatically repaired the damage. The truth may be known, but everybody must still continue living inside the structure the lie helped create. Bass, guitar, organ, drums, and voice remain together, repeating the environment rather than escaping it.

This is where Skiftande Enheter’s movement away from bare punk becomes meaningful. Punk often imagines that naming the falsehood is already an act of destruction: reveal the lie, shout it publicly, and watch the structure shake. “Lögn” is older and less certain. It recognizes that lies can be emotionally useful, socially reinforced, and woven deeply enough into ordinary life that removing them leaves an empty space. The song’s beauty may be part of that difficulty. Some falsehoods survive because they are attached to something we love.

“Bättre Förr” turns the record over and increases the motion without producing a simple answer. Its guitar-pop trance is lighter on its feet, closer to the homespun propulsion associated with the Clean and the early Flying Nun world, yet a shadow remains beneath the brightness. The parts lock into a repeated pattern whose rough edges keep it from becoming polished nostalgia. It feels remembered and immediate at once, as though an old favorite song has returned with one chord placed slightly wrong.

The phrase “bättre förr” is almost automatically nostalgic. It summons the person who believes music, cities, neighborhoods, politics, manners, television, childhood, romance, work, or humanity itself reached its proper form at some previous moment. The exact date usually remains conveniently undefined. “Before” is useful because it can be moved continually backward, keeping perfection beyond verification.

Every generation eventually encounters this temptation. The present is crowded with unfinished events, inconvenient people, new language, changed technology, and consequences whose meaning is still uncertain. The past has already been edited. Contradictions have faded, pain has been organized into stories, and surviving objects can be mistaken for representative evidence. A beautiful old record remains visible; thousands of forgotten bad records do not. Memory becomes an exceptionally selective record shop.

Skiftande Enheter are an ideal band to examine that temptation because their music openly loves earlier underground pop. Felt, the Go-Betweens, Beat Happening, Galaxie 500, the Clean, Television Personalities, C86 groups, the Velvet Underground, and primitive punk all provide recognizable coordinates. Yet the band’s relationship to those records is active rather than archaeological. They do not ask the past to return intact. They use old discoveries to make something that could only belong to their own place and time.

This separates affection from nostalgia. Affection says that a previous artist found something worth continuing. Nostalgia says the discovery was completed then and everything afterward is a weaker copy. Skiftande Enheter’s existence argues against the second position. Their songs demonstrate that a young or current group can inherit methods without surrendering its own personality. A guitar sound learned from Felt does not remain Felt’s property forever. Once it passes through Swedish language, Gothenburg rooms, different friendships, altered recording equipment, and another historical moment, it becomes new information.

The single’s two sides may therefore be heard as a critique of its own influences. “Lögn” introduces suspicion. “Bättre Förr” names the seductive story that older music was inherently more truthful, more human, or more alive. The band then disproves that story by making a wonderful contemporary record from the supposedly exhausted materials of guitar, bass, drums, organ, and voice.

There is no need to choose between Cherry Red and Flying Nun as the single’s true ancestral territory. Byron Coley heard more Cherry Red, while other listeners immediately recognized the South Island pulse of early New Zealand pop. Both comparisons identify something genuine. Cherry Red suggests cultivated eccentricity, introverted songwriters, unusual production choices, and pop allowed to remain slightly unworldly. Flying Nun suggests rhythmic repetition, rough recording surfaces, ringing guitars, and bands whose local circumstances became part of their sound.

Skiftande Enheter stand in the overlap. Their songs are introspective without becoming delicate objects protected from noise. The rhythm retains punk’s practical sturdiness, while organ and guitar introduce enough color to make the small arrangements feel strangely spacious. A trio can imply an entire lost scene because the music understands how scenes are built: not through unlimited resources, but through a few people repeatedly listening to one another.

The band’s shift from short punk songs toward this darker psychedelic pop was not a sudden personality replacement. Snubblar Genom Drömmar had already announced the transition. JJ Ulius described that record as noisy but no longer exactly punk, pointing toward pop, new wave, and post-punk while acknowledging Felt and the Velvet-worshipping side of Beat Happening. Lögn b/w Bättre Förr sounds like the next turn of the same screw. The shimmer remains, but the mood has deepened. The songs have learned that prettiness can conceal pressure.

This makes the single feel much larger than its six minutes and forty seconds. Many longer records present a style, repeat it, and conclude. These two songs contain a before and after. “Lögn” suspends the listener inside slow doubt; “Bättre Förr” converts that doubt into motion. The first side distrusts the story. The second side demonstrates why the story remains attractive.

Their durations are nearly equal, giving the object a satisfying physical balance. One side lasts 3:22, the other 3:18. Four seconds separate them. On a conventional album, that resemblance might be meaningless. On a hand-cut seven-inch containing only two pieces, it makes them feel like matched arguments, each granted approximately the same amount of space to state its case.

The physical edition intensifies this duality. Only fifty copies were made, each cut individually rather than mass-pressed. A lathe-cut record carries tiny differences created during manufacture, making every copy a slightly distinct mechanical event. The medium fits a band called Skiftande Enheter. The musical information remains nominally identical, but the physical units shift.

Lathe cuts also occupy a peculiar place between permanence and ephemerality. They turn sound into an object that can be held, numbered, mailed, scratched, misplaced, and eventually worn. Yet an edition of fifty is so small that most people interested in the music were excluded from physical ownership immediately. The record becomes nostalgic almost as soon as it appears. By the time somebody discovers it, the original object may already belong to “before.”

Chunklet Industries understands this tension well. Henry H. Owings’ operation developed from a fiercely opinionated music magazine into a mixture of publishing, graphic design, archival activity, humor, and small-run records. Releasing two Swedish songs through an Atlanta-based label might look geographically improbable, but underground music has always survived through exactly these crooked routes. Somebody hears a record, contacts somebody else, cuts fifty copies, mails them outward, and creates a temporary bridge between communities that may never occupy the same room.

The handmade quality does not mean the single is anti-modern. Its existence depends upon contemporary communication, digital files, international correspondence, and online listening. The physical record is not a rejection of the network. It is one small object produced by the network, a material knot tied in a much larger invisible system.

Marc Klockow’s cover photograph gives this little object an unexpectedly emotional face, although the face is turned away. The model is Bun E. Carlos, a fifteen-year-old Australian Labradoodle shown in profile, looking toward something outside the frame. The image has been washed in green, while the band name and song titles appear in loose white handwriting. Nothing resembles the formal confidence of a commercial pop sleeve. It feels more like a photograph retrieved from somebody’s home and written upon before the memory could disappear.

The dog’s age makes “Bättre Förr” impossible to read only as a joke about reactionary nostalgia. An old animal really did possess a younger body before. It moved differently, saw differently, perhaps heard more clearly, and required less help. “Better before” may be false when used to dismiss an entire present generation, but it can contain painful truth when spoken by or about a body undergoing time.

The photograph does not sentimentalize that truth. Bun E. Carlos is not posed facing the viewer with an expression engineered to produce affection. The dog is occupied elsewhere, remaining an independent creature rather than becoming a symbol on command. The listener sees the back, collar, textured coat, and only part of the head. Like the songs, the image withholds the information that would make interpretation easy.

There is also humor in giving a fifteen-year-old Labradoodle the name of Cheap Trick’s drummer and placing that credit beside mastering and design information. The joke prevents the record’s melancholy from sealing itself inside solemnity. Underground pop has always benefited from this ability to care deeply while refusing to behave as though caring requires ceremonial seriousness.

The handwritten sleeve reinforces the sense of provisional communication. The letters are not standardized branding intended for infinite replication. They look personal, slightly hurried, and vulnerable to misreading. “Lögn” and “Bättre Förr” resemble phrases somebody needed to write down before deciding exactly what they meant.

That tension between personal mark and reproducible object runs through the entire single. The songs are performed by identifiable people but circulated as files. The records were individually cut but carry repeatable audio. The music draws on recognizable historical traditions but refuses to remain historical. Swedish words travel to listeners who may not understand them literally yet can still feel their rhythm and emotional weight.

Singing in Swedish is essential to the record’s independence. An English-language version might make the titles immediately accessible to a larger international audience, but accessibility could flatten their cultural resonance. “Bättre förr” is not merely an abstract statement that the past was superior. It belongs to everyday conversation, generational complaint, political rhetoric, family storytelling, and jokes about aging. Swedish listeners bring histories to the phrase that a dictionary cannot entirely transfer.

International listeners receive another experience. The voice becomes partly instrumental, with meaning carried through tone, cadence, repetition, and the relationship between syllables and rhythm. This is not a lesser way of hearing. It simply leaves a different amount of mystery intact. Pop music has crossed language borders for decades because emotional recognition does not wait for complete translation.

The single also captures a particular pleasure of small bands: hearing musicians discover that they are allowed to change. A group can become trapped by the first thing it does convincingly. Listeners, labels, and even the musicians themselves may begin protecting that initial identity. Skiftande Enheter could have continued producing brief primitive punk records and remained good at it. Instead, they allowed organ, jangle, drone, slowness, sweetness, and uncertainty to enter.

The word “evolution” can sound grand when applied to a six-minute single, but the development is real. The band’s earlier directness has not vanished. It has become the skeleton supporting more ambiguous emotional tissue. “Lögn” is still built from the punk conviction that a small number of sounds can be sufficient. “Bättre Förr” still understands that repetition can create community. The difference is that neither song needs to shout in order to prove its urgency.

This may be the single’s quiet rebuttal to “better before.” The past was not better because punk had fewer chords, indie pop had cheaper studios, or obscure records were harder to find. Those limitations produced beautiful work, but beauty did not belong to the limitations themselves. What mattered was what people invented inside them. Contemporary musicians can inherit the inventions without reenacting every hardship that surrounded their birth.

At the same time, the record does not dismiss nostalgia as stupidity. Nostalgia is often love attempting to protect itself from time. We say something was better before because admitting that it is gone feels harder than turning its disappearance into criticism of the present. The phrase allows grief to wear the clothes of judgment.

“Bättre Förr” understands that seduction. Its homespun pop trance feels immediately familiar, even to someone hearing it for the first time. The song seems to remember itself. Guitar, bass, drums, organ, and voice arrange a small false past around the listener, a place that may never have existed but feels briefly habitable. The music does not lecture us for entering. It comes inside too.

Then the record ends, requiring another decision. Turn it over and return to “Lögn.” Start again with the lie. Move from doubt into nostalgia, then from nostalgia back into doubt. The format prevents either statement from becoming final.

That endless reversal is the single’s true composition. The two songs are excellent separately, but the seven-inch gives them a relationship digital sequencing can only imitate. A physical listener must stand, lift the record, touch its edge, invert it, lower the needle, and hear the opposite side. Thought becomes gesture. The argument is conducted through the hands.

Most copies will never be encountered in that form. Fifty hand-cut records disappeared almost immediately, leaving digital versions, photographs, descriptions, and private transfers to continue the music’s life. This does not make the later experience false. It creates another shifting unit. The song survives by changing its container.

Anyone who owns one of the original cuts may hear surface characteristics, tiny manufacturing differences, or sleeve details absent from the file. Anyone who saw Skiftande Enheter during this stage may remember how the slow tension of “Lögn” and the trance of “Bättre Förr” changed in a room. Swedish listeners may also hear shades in the titles and vocals that translation leaves behind. Those memories would help complete a record whose central subject is the unreliability, necessity, and strange beauty of remembering.

Things were not simply better before. They were unfinished in a different direction. Skiftande Enheter take pieces of that unfinished past, change their arrangement, and send them forward as evidence that nothing alive remains in its original unit.

Our Solar System - 2016 - In Time

Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records – none

 The title In Time contains a wonderfully unstable promise. To play “in time” ordinarily means to obey a shared pulse, to occupy the proper position inside a measurable sequence and arrive exactly when expected. Our Solar System assemble fifteen musicians and spend forty-four minutes demonstrating that collective time can be far stranger than obedience. Each player remains connected to the others, yet the music continually stretches, compresses, accelerates and dissolves the clock by which that connection might be measured. Everyone is in time, but time itself has become liquid.

The name Our Solar System provides an unusually precise model for the group’s organization. A solar system is not a row of objects following instructions from a conductor. It is a field of bodies whose movements are created through relationships. Some are enormous, some barely visible; some follow stable paths, while others arrive at eccentric angles or pass through only once. Gravity provides coherence without requiring uniformity. Our Solar System work in a similar fashion. Bass, drums, guitars, saxophone, clarinet, flute, violin, piano, organ, synthesizer, oud, percussion and voices do not line up politely to perform a predetermined hierarchy. They become masses exerting force upon one another.

The group has described itself as a floating crowd, open to musicians willing to create within its cosmic framework. That openness is not merely a romantic biography attached to otherwise conventional rock arrangements. It is audible in the music’s construction. No instrumental personality is permitted to govern the entire journey, and the listener is rarely handed one obvious protagonist to follow. The center keeps changing. A saxophone may seem to be guiding the ensemble until bass and drums reveal that they have quietly altered the direction of travel. Piano enters and redraws the horizon. Guitar gathers enough density to become weather. A human voice appears not to explain what has happened, but to join the material already in orbit.

In Time reduces this large population to two compositions, one occupying each side of the record. “In the Beginning of Time” lasts twenty minutes and twenty-six seconds; “At the Edge of Time” extends to twenty-three minutes and thirteen seconds. These are not songs expanded by solos until they fill an LP side. They are temporal environments. Entering halfway through would resemble arriving in the middle of a migration and mistaking the current formation for its point of origin. The meaning lies partly in remembering how the ensemble reached each condition.

“In the Beginning of Time” starts appropriately close to formlessness. Saxophone, synthesizer and surrounding electronic atmosphere appear before the music has established a firm surface. A bass line slowly becomes perceptible, less like an opening riff than the first reliable law of physics. It does not immediately command the other players. It provides enough gravity for their movements to begin acquiring relation.

The drums enter gradually, and the piece starts collecting definition. The important word is collecting. A conventional arrangement might announce its beat, establish a chord sequence and identify the main instrument within seconds. Our Solar System allow organization to emerge from the interactions themselves. Matter gathers. Repetition becomes orbit. What first sounded like unrelated particles begins forming a system without any single moment at which chaos officially becomes composition.

The album’s cosmic vocabulary could easily have produced decorative space rock, with synthesizer effects representing stars while a guitar band performs underneath. Our Solar System take the concept more seriously. Space is not simply a theme applied to the music. It is the condition allowing the music to occur. The arrangements require large areas of apparent emptiness so that the entrance of one instrument can change scale. A flute or piano figure matters because it appears inside a field already charged by everything absent from it.

This is especially clear during the first half of “In the Beginning of Time.” The saxophone does not immediately behave as a free-jazz soloist, even though its tone introduces that possibility. It searches, repeats and hovers around the emerging structure. Echo makes some phrases appear farther away than their physical source, creating several imagined distances within the same recording. A note may be produced in the room and answered by its own ghost somewhere beyond the speakers.

The connection to jazz therefore lies as much in listening as in vocabulary. Fifteen musicians cannot play freely together merely by refusing structure. They must recognize which gesture requires an answer, which should be allowed to remain alone and when adding another sound would reduce rather than increase the music’s possibilities. In Time repeatedly demonstrates this collective discipline. Its abundance never becomes fifteen people shouting their credentials at once.

As the first side continues, the rhythm begins tightening. Hand percussion, clapping and drums increase the sense of communal motion, while repeated keyboard and bass figures pull the ensemble toward the motorik zone associated with Can and other German experimental groups. Yet Our Solar System do not imitate the clean forward line of a machine. Their rhythm continually reveals human asymmetry. The pulse is stable enough to enter physically, but crowded with tiny pushes, delays and irregular accents that prevent it from becoming automatic.

This relationship between regularity and disorder gives the album its peculiar exhilaration. The music does not alternate neatly between composed sections and free passages. Order is continually being born inside apparent chaos, while chaos remains alive inside the order. The more coherent the groove becomes, the more opportunities individual musicians find to stretch against it. The stronger the orbit, the more dramatic each deviation appears.

Around the middle of “In the Beginning of Time,” the saxophone begins applying greater pressure, and the ensemble’s slow accumulation turns into genuine combustion. Piano, guitars and percussion are no longer objects appearing one at a time in empty space. They have become part of a rotating mass whose velocity is increasing. The piece starts to feel less like observing a solar system from a safe distance and more like being caught inside its formation.

The resulting intensity has affinities with psychedelic rock, free jazz and Swedish communal improvisation, but none of those descriptions completely explains its emotional effect. Psychedelia accounts for the altered sense of duration. Jazz accounts for the responsiveness among players. Krautrock accounts for the commitment to pulse. Progressive rock accounts for the scale and long-form development. Yet the music’s real identity lies in the refusal to keep those languages in separate departments.

A saxophone phrase may carry free-jazz heat while riding a bass pattern closer to dub or psychedelic rock. Piano can enter with the density of an improvised jazz cluster, then become part of a repeating rhythmic mechanism. Guitar distortion creates mass rather than heroic spectacle. Flute and violin introduce acoustic colors without transporting the music into a pastoral interlude. Each tradition becomes a temporary behavior available to the collective rather than a genre the whole band must suddenly adopt.

The use of multiple bass instruments is particularly important. In a group this large, low frequencies could easily become mud, but bass serves as the organizing gravity. Its repetition creates enough certainty for everything above it to behave unpredictably. The bass does not merely hold the music down. It makes expansion possible. Because one body keeps returning to the same route, fifteen others can temporarily forget where the ground is.

The drums perform a related function without becoming a metronome. Rather than simply increasing speed, they alter the density of time. A passage may feel as though it is accelerating even when the underlying pulse has barely changed because more events are being fitted into each cycle. This is one of In Time’s finest illusions: the clock can remain steady while subjective time begins racing.

By the final stretch of “In the Beginning of Time,” the ensemble has moved from invocation into something resembling collective possession. Saxophone, keyboards, guitars and percussion no longer seem arranged in front and background. The entire stereo field has become active. The pleasure comes from hearing fifteen separate intentions generate one event without becoming indistinguishable. The mass is enormous, but the record still permits flashes of individual human decision inside it.

The side eventually releases its accumulated force rather than ending with a hard declaration. The system disperses enough to make silence conceivable again. This descent matters because it transforms everything that preceded it. A climax without aftermath becomes a stunt. Our Solar System allow the listener to feel the energy leaving the structure, like heat radiating from matter after an immense collision.

“At the Edge of Time” begins from another state of uncertainty. Piano, keyboards and electronic effects are more immediately prominent, producing a softer but stranger environment than the first side’s saxophone-led awakening. The title shifts the scale of the question. The beginning of time concerns origin, the moment when matter and sequence become possible. The edge of time concerns whatever happens when sequence can no longer continue. It is not simply the end of an album. It is the boundary beyond which “before” and “after” may lose their usefulness.

Voices appear early in the piece, but they do not bring ordinary lyrics or narrative certainty. They operate as mantra, breath and recurring human signal. Their calm repetition contrasts with the increasingly active instrumental field, creating the sensation that a small group is maintaining a ritual while weather grows violent around it. The voices do not conquer the chaos. They remain present inside it.

That relationship makes “At the Edge of Time” more seductive than its companion side. “In the Beginning of Time” builds outward from elemental sound into ecstatic motion. “At the Edge of Time” begins with a more recognizable human presence and gradually makes that presence seem mysterious. The voice, supposedly our most direct instrument of identity, becomes one texture among reeds, strings, electricity and percussion.

This is an essential part of the collective’s philosophy. Their performances have involved matching garments marked with planetary symbols, minimizing individual visual hierarchy in favor of the shared concept. On the record, the same idea operates acoustically. The singer is not elevated automatically because human language is assumed to be more meaningful than instrumental sound. A repeated vocal phrase can orbit beside a synthesizer tone or saxophone line without claiming the center.

The result recalls ritual without pretending to reconstruct one particular historical ceremony. Nothing here announces itself as an authentic ancient practice. The ritual is being invented by the musicians as it occurs. Repetition produces familiarity; familiarity produces participation; participation gradually makes the music feel as though it existed before the performers entered the room. That is how newly created forms sometimes acquire the emotional weight of tradition.

As “At the Edge of Time” gathers momentum, the voices become part of a wider pattern involving bass, drums and keyboards. The rhythm is less immediately explosive than the first side’s central ascent, but more hypnotic. Rather than continually climbing, the ensemble circles. Each return deepens the groove until repetition stops feeling like recurrence and begins feeling like location.

This is where the title In Time performs another reversal. The musicians remain precisely connected, but the listener may lose any reliable sense of elapsed minutes. Twenty-three minutes do not feel like twenty-three identical units. Some passages appear to widen, while others pass almost without leaving a measurable interval. The album does not take the listener outside time through mystical assertion. It changes the listener’s perception of time through musical labor.

The jazz elements also change character on the second side. Saxophone eventually enters with considerable force, but it arrives inside a world already formed by voices and keyboards. It must negotiate with the existing atmosphere rather than simply claim the spotlight. The horn can cut through the ensemble, but its power partly comes from hearing resistance around it. Every instrument changes what freedom means for the others.

The piano repeatedly provides a fascinating bridge between jazz improvisation and kosmische repetition. It can scatter notes across the rhythm, then suddenly reinforce a figure with almost percussive insistence. Piano is both a harmonic instrument and a machine containing eighty-eight hammers; In Time remembers the machine. Its attack helps divide the flowing music into physical moments without reducing that flow to a grid.

Organ and synthesizer work differently. They stretch across the gaps, connecting moments that percussion and piano have separated. Sustained tones make the music feel continuous even as individual parts arrive and vanish. The record’s temporal illusion depends upon this combination. Some instruments count time; others blur the boundaries between the counts.

Guitars also avoid the standard psychedelic role of delivering one spectacular solo above the band. They operate as density, friction and changing light. A repeated guitar figure can become another rhythmic gear, while distortion enlarges the perceived environment. When the music approaches overload, guitar is difficult to separate from organ, saxophone or electronics. Their identities merge at the edges while remaining different at the source.

This collective blending has a clear Swedish ancestry. Groups emerging from Pärson Sound, International Harvester and Träd, Gräs och Stenar treated repetition as a social practice, not merely a compositional technique. A simple figure could be maintained long enough for musicians and listeners to inhabit it together. Technical mastery mattered less than the capacity to sustain communal attention. Our Solar System inherit that permission while adding a broader instrumental palette and the rapid responsiveness of contemporary improvised music.

The connection became almost architectural when In Time was recorded at Silence Studio in rural Värmland. Silence was created as more than a sealed commercial room; its large building, multiple acoustic spaces and live-recording design allow musicians to spread through a shared environment while remaining connected. For a fifteen-person collective, that is not a neutral technical detail. The building becomes another member, determining which sounds reach one another directly and which arrive through walls, halls and microphones.

Silence also carries a long relationship with Swedish independent and experimental music. Recording there places Our Solar System within a physical history rather than merely referencing older records stylistically. The same idea of collective exploration that animated portions of Swedish progg can continue inside the building without being reproduced exactly. History becomes acoustics.

This does not make In Time an exercise in national tradition. The music listens too widely for that. Alice Coltrane’s spiritual expansiveness, Can’s rhythmic concentration, early Pink Floyd’s willingness to treat sound as environment, free jazz, psychedelic rock, folk instrumentation and the cosmic scale associated with Sun Ra all hover nearby. The album does not combine them through scholarly quotation. Fifteen musicians have absorbed different histories, and those histories encounter one another through playing.

The comparison to Sun Ra is especially tempting because both projects use cosmic language and a large, fluid ensemble. Yet their uses of space differ. Sun Ra’s cosmology was inseparable from Black history, liberation, mythology and the invention of another possible social identity. Our Solar System’s cosmos is less narrative and more organizational. It offers a model in which individuality can remain active without requiring a permanent leader. The universe becomes an argument for collective authorship.

That argument is not utopian in a simple sense. Large-group improvisation can fail spectacularly. Too many people may produce caution, with everyone afraid to interfere, or noise without relationship, with every player attempting to demonstrate freedom simultaneously. In Time is exciting because failure remains possible. The ensemble repeatedly approaches overload, but listening keeps the structure alive.

One can hear this in the passages where intensity drops unexpectedly. A large band accelerating toward a climax possesses obvious momentum. The harder decision is to reduce sound together without one musician continuing the previous argument. These collective decelerations show trust. Players recognize that emptiness is not the absence of music but another shared action.

“At the Edge of Time” eventually passes through one such reduction and reconstitutes itself around a steadier rhythmic motion. The late section carries the deep, repetitive propulsion associated with Can, but its surface remains crowded with specifically human detail. The groove is not a railway track disappearing toward infinity. It is a procession whose participants keep changing position while continuing in the same direction.

The mantra-like voices become particularly moving here. Earlier they supplied calm against instrumental turbulence. Later they feel like a memory the music has carried through its transformations. Their return is not identical because the surrounding world has changed. Repetition demonstrates that the same phrase can mean something different after twenty minutes of experience.

This is also how the album treats its title. “In the beginning” and “at the edge” sound like opposites, but the vinyl format places them beside one another in a cycle. The needle reaches the edge of the first side, the listener turns the record, and another beginning occurs. At the edge of the second side, the record can be flipped again. Recorded time repeatedly dies and is restarted by a human hand.

The smokey black-and-white vinyl edition makes this cycle visible. Its colors swirl without forming an identical pattern in every copy, an appropriate body for music in which shared parameters generate unpredictable details. The groove carries fixed information, but each playback occurs in another room, through another system, at another point in the listener’s life. Mechanical repetition becomes experiential variation.

The cover performs a related trick. Figures appear as dark silhouettes beneath a violently illuminated cosmic projection, with the largest light source almost obliterating the top of the image. The people are visible because light strikes around them, but their individual features are withheld. One raised hand seems to point, conduct, greet or surrender. The photograph captures collective activity while refusing the usual hierarchy of the band portrait.

The blazing sphere behind them may be a sun, planet, projection or stage effect, but it is far larger than any person in the frame. The image places human makers inside the phenomenon they are creating. They are not presenting the cosmos from outside. They have been reduced to bodies moving within it.

This is one reason In Time avoids the grandiosity that often follows cosmic rock. The album is immense, but none of its musicians claims personal ownership of that immensity. Scale is generated through cooperation. A bass note becomes enormous because drums, piano, organ, reeds and guitar adjust their positions around it. A small repeated vocal phrase acquires ceremonial power because fifteen people make room for its return.

There is joy throughout the record, even during its most disorienting passages. The music is not traveling into space because Earth has become contemptible. It is enlarging the terms under which earthly people can play together. Every sound comes from ordinary bodies, wood, metal, electricity, stretched strings, animal breath and hands striking surfaces. The cosmic effect is assembled from intensely local physical actions.

That gives the title one final meaning. These musicians are not simply in musical time or cosmic time. They are in their particular historical time, able to inherit free jazz, Swedish progg, krautrock, psychedelia, folk instruments, home electronics and decades of recorded experimentation without treating any one tradition as a locked room. The past is available, but not compulsory. It supplies tools for producing a present that none of those earlier movements could have predicted exactly.

A revivalist group might reconstruct one favorite year with great accuracy. Our Solar System allow many eras to coexist until chronology becomes less useful. An oud can sound ancient beside a synthesizer; a motorik rhythm can support improvisation whose phrasing belongs to no fixed decade; a flute can enter electric density without symbolizing a return to nature. The instruments carry histories, but the ensemble decides how those histories behave now.

In Time is therefore not formless. Its form is gravitational. Themes, timbres and rhythms attract one another, remain together for a period and then separate when another center becomes stronger. The listener may not be able to draw a conventional song diagram, yet every transformation follows from pressures established earlier. Nothing needs to arrive through a verse or chorus in order to feel inevitable.

The record’s two enormous sides also restore a scale of attention that digital listening frequently fragments. They ask for commitment before providing certainty about what the commitment will yield. Twenty minutes is long enough for impatience to appear, be recognized and gradually converted into another mode of listening. The album’s trance is not instantaneous. It is constructed through remaining.

That remaining is where the music becomes generous. Our Solar System do not demand that listeners understand fifteen simultaneous contributions. They offer several possible routes. Follow the bass and experience the album as gravitational rhythm. Follow the saxophone and hear pressure seeking freedom. Follow the keyboards and encounter shifting architecture. Follow the voices and the record becomes a ceremony. Stop following any individual element, and the entire ensemble becomes weather.

Anyone who saw this configuration perform, visited Silence Studio, knows which musician generated a particular fleeting sound, or remembers how these pieces changed onstage may possess another route through the system. Those details would be valuable, especially for a collective whose official credits intentionally emphasize participants more than instrumental ownership. The mystery is not a failure of documentation. It keeps listening from becoming an exercise in assigning every light to a name.

In Time begins with matter learning to move together and ends at the boundary where movement threatens to lose sequence. Between those points, fifteen people construct a universe without appointing anybody its ruler. They enter the same time, alter it through attention and leave behind two grooves capable of restarting the event whenever another hand lowers the needle.

The system remains stable. Everything inside it is still moving.