Enhet För Fri Musik

Did this really first come out ten years ago? The years since, like all years tend to be, have been both kind and unkind, though something that has remained consistent is the creative output of the enclave of artists centred around Enhet För Fri Musik and an attendant experimental underground of similarly-intentioned noisemakers who have increasingly reshaped understandings of avant-leaning DIY culture. Låt Oss Vada Genom All Ängslan Tillsammans serves as a Rosetta Stone of sorts. Initially serving as the maiden release for Förlag För Fri Musik, a progenitor for what Discreet would subsequently ossify into a collective sensibility, Enhet För Fri Musik's debut outing would prove revelatory not just for its expressing of a certain set of aesthetic principles - improvised lo-fi free-folk with a defiantly autodidactic underpinning - but also for the ideas it suggested about community, shared language and de-institutionalised self-determination. Though later releases would see a growth in personnel, here they were the four piece of Dan Johansson, Hugo Randulv, Sofie Herner and Gustaf Dicksson, all of many other related groups, before, since and contemporaneously. Aspects of many of their associated activities are discernible here, though it's perhaps Dicksson's Blod output that bears the closest resemblance to what's being attempted here, fragile folk half-songs floating in the purgatorial amber of no wave dissonance and new age ambiance. There's the sense that these songs might fall apart in the turn of a sudden breeze, like the pages of an ancient book excavated from some lost tomb. The four were not so much inventing a new language as rechanneling the low-lit communiques of acts like Garbage and the Flowers, Charalambides and Tower Recordings into a Faust-ian (pun intended) pact of their own. An extending of a lineage, if you will, and one that has growth numerous branches of its own, across Gothenburg and much further beyond. This is the kind of pure expression music-making that seemingly seeks no audience or approval, and but finds a little of it in that negation. If the world has in anyway turned to to face Gothenburg in recent times, this is one of the first reasons why.