Instrumental
International relevance: ***
This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to see excavated from the dust-covered shelves of history's archives, by a band that needs more releases out! True there's the great box set of Swedish Radio tapes released in the early 00's, there simply can't be too much prime Fläsket Brinner in this world. At the same time, it's a Bo Hansson release, as this show taped at the legendary Pistolteatern in Stockholm in 1972 documents his short stint with the band.
It's a rare recording, and the copy that has circulated among collectors was really bad sounding, so the discovery of the first generation tape is a Holy Grail find. It remains an audicence recording with plenty of room ambience, but the sound has been cleaned up and the nuances brought out as much possible.
But the most important thing is of course the music. The performance is explosive. Fläsket Brinner provides the perfect backdrop to a particularly inspired Bo Hansson who travels the organways with equal parts of precision and curiousity. He sounds as if he discovers new melodies all the time, explore them, moves on, returns to them again, constantly pushed on by a band firing on all cylinders. I must especially point out Erik Dahlbäck here. Captain Dahlbäck is just about a flawless drummer in any given situation, but here he really shines like a supernova. His playing is incredibly intense, precise down to a molecular level, following every minimal shift in the music, creating new possibilities. What a powerhouse he is!
So I have no objections to the music pressed on this disc (500 copies in black vinyl, 500 in 'water blue' which more looks like glow-in-the-dark green if you ask me), but I do have a few towards the presentation. There's one ugly midtrack edit that breaks the flow brutally. Other tracks fade out early, others again fade in. It's like going to the loo amidst a concert and hear the music grow in volume as you return closer to the stage. It's actually pretty annoying. It's been decades since I heard the inferior tape dub of this show, so I can't remember whether the music was chopped up, and I can't vouch for what the source tape used for this release is like, but there was definitely more music recorded at Pistolteatern than what's on this disc. Why not make it a double album with the entire show, or at least how much of it was recorded? And why only make it a prefab raririty in limited edition vinyl? Skip the coloured vinyl kollektor skum nonsense and focus on a proper unlimited release instead. And if the songs are cut on the original tape, please let us know in the liners so we don't have to wonder where the rest of the show has gone.
One more Pistolteatern track can be
found on the FINALLY reissued first Fläsket Brinner album. True to
Silence Records' lazy treatment of their own massive back
catalogue, there hasn't been a proper reissue of that monolithic
album until now, 2024. Apart from being nicely remastered, the
original album has almost doubled its length with three long tracks
added as bonuses. ”Gulan” is from Pistolteatern and is to be
honest a messier recording than anything on the Melltronen disc. ”Mr.
Beautiful” has better in terms of focus and sound quality, but is
only a so-so latin-inflected track. The real tour de force among the new stuff is ”Collage från Konserthuset” which is a complete
ten minute monster, ending with variations on a theme by Bo Hansson.
Those ten minutes would blow The Mothers Of Invention off the stage
any given night from the same period. I
promise that you've rarely heard Fläsket that dangerous, not even on
the Pistolteatern album!
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