ERIK ASCHAN – Mothugg! (E. Aschan, 1981) / Vi ska alla den vägen vandra! (E. Aschan, 1982)

Swedish vocals, English vocals, spoken word

International relevance: **

It's been a five long years since I wrote about Erik Aschan's third album, ”Så länge ni vägrar lyssna”. It's an ambivalent review, and my ambivalence towards Aschan hasn't lessened since. I'm still not sure how to deal with his music, a kind of music that's intriguingly beguiling and completely lost at the same time. He was (probably still is) able to get some good tunes together, but he wasn't necessarily good at performing them. His sense of timing was at times, well... not necessarily one he shared with others.

One thing's for sure – a double album such as ”Mothugg!” is usually way too much to consume in one sit. And if you do get through it from the beginning to the end, it's a dizzying experience, a whirpool of weird phrasing, off-key vocals, drum beats behaving like they belong to a different album, peculiar sound effects, lyrics that someone with a better self-perception would never have made public... The list of examples of how not to make a record is endless but Erik Aschan, or Erik Aschan Zürcher, or Erik-Gabriel Willand Zürcher, or Eric Asch an Surcher, or whatever his name was at a certain moment in time, breaks every rule, probably because he doesn't know there were any rules at all. Maybe there aren't. Probably not. Who knows. After listening to any of his albums, I'm not too sure about anything.

The first disc of ”Mothugg!” is electric, the second acoustic, and while Aschan sounds more like an artist in the traditional sense once he leaves the drums and electric guitars behind, it doesn't do enough to pull the listener back into the world and mind where most of us live, whether we like or not.

”Vi ska alla den vägen vandra!” (subtitled ”Offrad på politikens altare”) followed in 1982, self-released just like every Aschan album, and one his most coherent albums. It still sounds like someone not quite part of the regular reality, but this time it's usually only Aschan's vocals that are off. He shrieks in desperate falsetto, as if the he twists his voice like he twists his ankle, and the lyrics aren't really Nobel Prize material, but at least the bass realizes what the drums are there for and the guitars screaming and buzzing with fuzz behave rather well. This is possibly the Erik Aschan album that 'normal' listeners may enjoy the most.

But I still can't decide whether Aschan's albums are good or terrible. Perhaps neither. Perhaps they're just Aschan, capturing that particular quality that only applies to him. Erik Aschan is the epitomic outsider making everybody else feel as if they're on the wrong side without knowing which side is which. Or maybe not. After listening to three of his discs in a row, and I really don't know anymore. Do I like them? I've no idea.

”Mothugg!” is subtitled ”Mina sånger kommer alltid att leva!!!” – ”my songs will live forever!!!”. (Note his absurd overuse of exclamation marks and parenthetical titles.) It could very well be. When they've dropped the final bomb, two things will remain: the cockroaches, and the ambiguously unsettling voice of Erik Aschan.

Selections from ”Vi ska alla den vägen vandra!” can be heard at Erik Aschan's website.