Swedish vocals, spoken word
International relevance: *
The final and most peculiar album on the collectable Gump label. Actually, it's one the most puzzling progg
related releases ever. It features abbreviated versions of tracks
from previous Gump albums by Sten Bergman and Joakim Skogsberg, an
extract from ”Mr. Smith in Rhodesia” by sound poet and author Åke
Hodell, pieces by avantgardists Sten Hanson, Leo Nilson, and J.O.
Mallander (of legendary Finnish experimental band The Sperm) plus
several previously unreleased recordings including a not very good
outtake from Pugh Rogefeldt's not very good 1973 ”On the Rocks”
album. (Metronome artist Rogefeldt was a sort of A&R man for
Metronome subsidiary Gump.)
The entire second side of the album is
dedicated to Hans Anton Knall's ”Merde”, comprising excerpts from
all the tracks on side one, electronically treated by Knall into one
dizzying electronic composition. The album was credited to and
edited/produced by Carsten Regild at Sweden's leading studio for
electro-acoustic music, Fylkingen. Regild had previously released the
massively rare ”Be My Baby” 7” on Gump in 1970, and
provided graphics to several albums in 70's and 80's (among them ”Alla
vi barn” by enfant terrible Tom Zacharias).
As a showcase for Gump it's pretty
useless as it only includes a couple of edited tracks from previous
Gump LP's. It doesn't work as a general representation of the Swedish
experimental audio scene either as the selections are so wildly
inconsistent stylistically. It's much more of an aural installation
piece. Far from a regular spin but undeniably intriguing on its own
terms.
I was really excited to find this post - pretty hard album to find! - but sadly all of the tracks have been removed from youtube. Do you know if they can be found anywhere else?
ReplyDeleteThat's strange. All tracks are available here - can it be some geoblocking? I found it on Deezer too, does this work better where you are?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.deezer.com/sv/album/3536851
Must be geoblocking, if you can still access those videos. I wonder why? It appears to be available on iTunes in your part of the world, but not mine (as is usually the case - the block Australians from accessing all sorts of music but won't let us legally buy them either!). The youtube playlist displays, but if I click on one of the videos I get the 'not available' message.
ReplyDeleteThe deezer playlist displays; I'll try to access it when I'm on another computer later and will let you know how it goes.
Even using a website to get around the youtube geoblocking I could not play the videos. I set up a free deezer account to try that way, but it is extremely confusing for a non-Swedish speaker (the site won't let me grab any text to past into a translater). I loaded up that deezer playlist after setting up my account but it would only play 'Sorti' by Sten Bergman over and over - I could not access any of the other songs, even after searching for them individually. It makes no sense that all the songs are listed there but if I click on one of the artists it tells me they have no songs on deezer. I eventually figured out how to select a song and add to my own playlist but I still could not get it to play! This is driving me crazy :-(
ReplyDeleteFound it on yandex, so joined that and logged in, and it fails to play any of the songs!
ReplyDeleteIf you have time to upload this album to somewhere it can be easily downloaded (such as mega.co.nz, that is always free of malware pop-ups and malicious links), that would make my day (or even make my year!). Thanks for your reply earlier.
Weirdly if I click on your link it loads up the youtube playlist )even though I can't play a single one of them) but if I go to youtube separately and search for any of those tracks, none of them come up in the search results.
ReplyDeleteI have still had absolutely no luck with this and itunes is no help in Australia. I have been trying to find your contact so I can e-mail you privately and also have had no luck.
Sorry for my late reply, I've had a break from the blog for a while and didn't check it.
ReplyDeleteThis is bad news. I thought all playlists on Youtube would be accessible to everyone, but like you say, it seems there's geoblocking at work. It's very frustrating, the whole concept of geoblocking is absurd - especially for an album like this!
I understand your frustration fully - really! - but I have a strict rule never to share anything by uploads/downloads, sorry.