Skövde is off Dungen's much anticipated new album En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog. Photo: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn
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Dungen just released “Skövde,” the third single from their forthcoming album En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, due October 7th from Mexican Summer. Named after the small Swedish town where singer/songwriter Gustav Estjes grew up, the album’s opening track expands a bright, strummy melody into a bittersweet and nostalgic atmosphere that makes it feel like a latter-day Wilco tune. “It’s about my elder brother and a bunch of friends,” explains Ejstes. En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog is available for pre-order right here.
“Skövde” follows previous singles “Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” and “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus,” which earned much praise from writers at various North American media outlets, despite having no idea what Gustav Estjes is singing about.
Translated to One is Too Much and a Thousand is Never Enough, Dungen’s first proper studio album since 2015’s Allas Sak finds the core band of Ejstes, Reine Fiske, Mattias Gustavsson, and Johan Holmegard now decades-deep in collaborative focus and elevating their trailblazing psychedelia to new heights. The nine-track album was recorded in pieces beginning in 2017 in Gothenburg, Sweden, with producer Mattias Glavå, who last worked with Ejstes on Allas Sak. Glavå’s creative input was crucial to the record, and helped Ejstes to challenge his preconceptions of how his own music might sound. “We’d be in his studio, where he has all this amazing gear, and he’d be encouraging me to go with every weird idea and not to feel any pressure,” Ejstes says. “He would say, ‘Let’s use this rhythm box or this sample or this loop,’ and I’d be like, ‘can we do that on a Dungen record?’” Likewise, Ejstes’ bandmates—guitarist Fiske and bassist Gustavsson, in addition to drummer Holmegard—encouraged him to push his ideas further. “It really took a lot of courage to go to the guys and play this stuff for them,” he says.
Since breaking out with Ta det lugnt, Gustav Ejstes has used Dungen as a way to chase down and take apart the music that he finds interesting, whether it’s Scandinavian folk, freak-fried acid rock, jazz, or jungle. That sense of constant movement, of itching to see where else he can go, has meant regularly pushing himself through new incarnations of himself. “Some artists, you feel like, ‘stick to your guns, the first three albums were so much better.’ But I can’t stay in one box,” he says. On En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog, Ejstes finds that the wildest trips lead within.
Listen to Dungen's tunes "Skövde," “Om Det Finns Något Som Du Vill Fråga Mig” and “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus,” below.
Cate Le Bon latest album Pompeii is out today via Mexican Summer. Check out "Remembering Me" and a Transmissions interview.
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Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe — global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava—or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch.
Tim Presley's paintings provided inspiration for Pompeii
Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged.
Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever.
To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence.
The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.
Get a copy of Cate Le Bon's new Pompeii album via Bandcamp right here. Watch the videos for "Remembering Me" and "Running Away" followed by her chat for the Aquarium Drunkard – Transmissions podcast.
Listen to Cate Le Bon's talk with Jason P. Woodbury right here.
A limited run of Dungen's witchy Häxan album on white wax is out Nov 25. Hear the title track below.
Here's the press release for Dungen's Häxan album from Mexican Summer...
In between the release of Dungen’s most recent two albums (2010’s Skit I Allt and 2015’s Allas Sak), the beloved Stockholm quartet was asked to create an original score to Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 touchstone The Adventures of Prince Achmed, understood to be the oldest surviving full-length animated feature film. Inspired by the nature of the work and the characters portrayed within, the members of Dungen collaborated on themes to represent their take on the film’s narrative, and immersed themselves in the groundbreaking visual language of this landmark film.
Häxan (translation: “The Witch”) is the result of those works, Dungen’s first all-instrumental album, and a continuation of all the things we love about their music. Moody, evocative, stormy, and brimming with life, Häxan provides both a tacit summation of the Dungen journey up to today, and gives the beloved group a chance to stretch out like never before. Here, the psychedelic rock is more bombastic, the softer passages more exquisite, the tension in their musical interplay more dramatic, their intentions remarkably robust. Häxan allows Dungen to move deftly between styles in a more circuitous fashion than their previous works, allowing them to build a story of their own around the action and characters in the film – Prince Achmed, Peri Banu, Aladdin, the Sorcerer, and most of all, the Witch – that reaches beyond the source material, returning to the hooks and melodies that come earlier in the album.
More pronounced collaboration with Häxan’s producer, Mattias Glavå, set the tenor of the sessions, fostered the interstitial moments between tracks, providing a more seamless listening experience. Recorded, mixed, and edited by hand to tape entirely in the analog domain, Häxan was sequenced away from the linear narrative of the film. This process helped to create a path of its own, fully capturing the rawness and spontaneity present in the sessions, as well as a loose, abstract, and fragmented collage feel, evident in the dense and dissonant free-form rock-outs, haunting ambient passages, and gorgeously cinematic soundscapes present in the work. As a result, Häxan works as new, original music by Dungen, both with and without the presence of the film itself.
With Häxan, the indulgences taken by Dungen find new corners in their creative space. “Trollkarlen och fågeldräkten” approaches the excitement of early ‘60s post-bop in a way that the band has yet to reveal until now, with Gustav Ejstes’ attentive piano melody connecting to Mattias Gustavsson’s bass, as Reine Fiske stretches out atmospheric strains of feedback-laced guitar overtop, while drummer Johan Holmegard establishes a busy, polyrhythmic background with a light touch, almost exclusively focused on cowbell and cymbals. The breezy, groovy theme to Aladdin’s appearances is cut across a handful of Häxan’s runtime, extended to both compact, flute-led bursts of melody, and a more luxuriant synth-based variant. Ejstes applies church organ sternness and harmonic majesty to “Kalifen,” which melts from a stately, Procol Harum-esque introduction into ‘70s soul stabs across a coolly understated rhythmic backing. Elsewhere, “Andarnas Krig,” “Wak-Wak’s portar,” and the title track represent some of the heaviest music Dungen has made to date, recalling the similarly burnt-edged Middle Eastern themes that Agitation Free cut for Vertigo decades ago. “Achmed flyger” ties it all together, with Ejstes and Fiske performing dual piano and synth leads, as the drums and bass surge underneath, creating a driving and focused backing, just as the film’s action begins to take flight.
Most recently, Dungen performed Häxan alongside the film at Mexican Summer’s 2016 Marfa Myths festival, marking its American debut performance. Asked about the experience overall, Gustav says, “In this setting, the movie becomes a solo instrument of its own, and we are simply backing up what we see on the screen. In many ways, it was a liberation to share the focal point with an audience when you’re performing with this kind of accompaniment. It’s a refreshing change to be playing live, and not be the center of attention; it’s the movie instead.”
Watch Dungen perform the title track from Häxan...
In this 18-minute mini-doc, San Francisco's Fresh & Onlys pull the curtains back on the less-than-glamourous process of recording their Long Slow Dance album with Phil Manley at Lucky Cat Studios. Spoiler alert: No fistfights break out over guitar levels.
