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Hugo Randulv, “Drunkna I Ljus” (Discreet, 2025)

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Billed as a “minimal masterpiece of immense beauty,” this second album from Enhet För Fri Musik’s Hugo Randulv is composed of two longform pieces for electric cello and controlled feedback. Notably, I was a huge fan of Randulv’s debut (Radio Arktis), so it was quite nice to discover that its follow up was similarly beautiful and visionary yet otherwise quite different in some very interesting ways.

The opening “Drunkna I Ljus” (Drown In Light) is the more traditional of the two pieces, though it deceptively opens with an extended stretch of sensuously groaning and slightly out-of-phase string drones before opening up into a lovely unaccompanied cello melody. Gradually, however, additional layers of cello creep in to form warm and beautiful harmonies. Compositionally, it is quite a simple piece, as it is essentially just a single wistful motif languorously repeated with subtly shifting harmonies and some fitfully intense undercurrents of a deeper drone, but the illusion that Randulv weaves is quite an achingly beautiful one: the piece has the rustic, not-quite-fully-in-tune feel of a rural village’s traditional music ensemble performing an arrangement of a bittersweet folk melody as a heartfelt outdoor elegy for a beloved bandleader. 

The following “Med Darrande Händer” (With Trembling Hands), on the other hand, feels like a tenderly beautiful cello performance in an empty stone church conjured from an array of distressed tape loops. It mostly shares the rustic, homespun vibe of the opener, but there is one extremely cool and significant difference, as a chirping feedback tone appears to flicker and flutter around the piece like a small flock of hallucinatory bats in the rafters. 

At times, that feedback can get surprisingly harsh, slicing through the dreamlike spell like an extra-dimensional scythe, but then the bottom suddenly drops out entirely and it feels like I just woke up next to a remote pond in the middle of the night after consuming a Herculean amount of hallucinogens: all of the usual nocturnal pond sounds feel grotesquely amplified into a viscerally shrill and sizzling insectoid whine. Thankfully, that unsettling passage doesn’t last long, but it beautifully sets the stage for the unexpected return of the opening theme that feels quietly rapturous and soul-stirring after my lysergic journey through the realm of feedback phantoms.     

Both pieces are pretty damn amazing and complement each other nicely, as the more straightforward opener and the more experimental closer feel like they achieve some kind of perfect Zen balance of light and shadow or yin and yang or whatever. I can definitely understand why there was a four year wait between Randulv’s solo albums, as he clearly spent that time further distilling his vision into something quite unique and sublime. 

Then again, maybe he just felt like making a solo electric cello album one day when he wasn’t busy with other projects like Amateur Hour. Who knows. Either way, Drunkna I Ljus is the second great Hugo Randulv album in a row, which means that he is currently sitting on an absolutely flawless solo discography. Anyone looking for a good entry point into the endlessly fascinating “contemporary homemade music from Sweden” underground would be well-served by starting that journey with either this album or Radio Arktis, as Randulv is most definitely one of the more accessibly melodic & reliably inspired proponents of that endearingly weird and insular scene. 

Listen here.

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Hugo Randulv, “Radio Arktis (samlade ljud från den norra polcirkeln)” (Discreet, 2021)

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Bandcamp recently published a feature on one of my favorite subjects (the Gothenburg Underground) and it turned me onto this solo release from an artist they dubbed “the closest you’ll get to a traditional musician in the Enhet För Fri Musik circle.” That is no doubt accurate, as Randulv has been the guitarist in a couple of popular Swedish indie rock bands (Westkust and Makthaverskan) that bear zero resemblance to the outsider folk of Enhet För Fri Musik, but I am sure literally everyone in that collective has extracurricular interests that would surprise me (they are quite an interesting bunch, after all). 

In any case, the more ambient Radio Arktis is another outlier of sorts, though it is one still creatively indebted to the Gothenberg free music milieu. Randulv notes that the album was inspired by “a dream that one of us had, that we were going to make an imaginary soundtrack to every place on Earth.” While the album’s title (“Collected Sounds From The Arctic Circle”) offers an explicit clue about the first place he chose to soundtrack, Randulv consciously opted for a more “beautiful and bright” aesthetic than I would normally associate with arctic-inspired ambiance. At its best, Radio Arktis carves out a beautiful and distinctive ambient/drone niche that gives Randulv’s field recordings and more experimental tendencies fertile soil in which to subtly blossom.

The album’s three numbered pieces kick off in impressively strong fashion, as “1” is the piece that feels most like the heart of Radio Arktis. Fittingly, it is twice as long as the other two pieces and Randulv uses that extended duration to pass through several different stages. Initially, “1” is built upon little more than a slow-motion bass buzz, crashing waves, and plenty of tape hiss. That eventually blossoms into a reverie of blurred and shimmering synth-like melodies, but the terrain gets increasingly imaginative and inspired from that point onward, as it soon sounds like a Swedish lumberjack, a fireworks display, a extremely vocal flock of geese, and a melancholy young poet have turned up (as well as a probable cow). 

Those “non-musical” touches elevate the piece into something quite beautiful, as Randulv has a knack for artfully fading into the background to make something like a cacophony of squawking birds feel like the emotional core and focus. That “bird interlude” is the highlight of the album for me, as it feels like I am on a remote Nordic beach where the sun has just unexpectedly broken through a bank of clouds (exciting plenty of birds in the process). 

The second piece (“2”) is a bit more melodic, as an oscillating shimmer slowly blooms into a dreamy, soft-focus loop of carousel/music box-like melody. It is wonderfully warm and sublime enough to be the album’s other major highlight, yet it too undergoes an interesting transformation. It evokes the feeling of being inside an enchanted snowglobe, then having the spell broken to reveal just battered old piano and a fitful wind-up music box in a sad, empty room. 

No such magic trick occurs in the final piece, lamentably, but “3” makes for a pleasantly radiant coda nonetheless. Sort of, at least: it feels like a New Age album was dubbed over a noise tape, but the latter remains simmering below the surface, threatening to break through. The noise never breaks though enough to make “3” as memorable as its predecessors, but such a cool climax likely would have ruined the spell of the album, so I must concede that Randulv’s artistic judgment is sound. In any case, I like this album a lot and excitedly look forward to Randulv’s imaginary soundtracks for the rest of the globe.

Samples can be found here.

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Enhet För Fri Musik, “Ömhet & Skilsmässa” (Discreet Music, 2021)

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This latest release from my favorite Swedish free music collective is apparently “a concept album on relationships, family values and broken promises.” I will have to take their word on that, as I do not understand Swedish, but Ömhet & Skilsmässa (“Tenderness & Divorce”) does have a very different (and possibly more wholesome) feel than some previous releases. How truly wholesome an album can be when it features Sewer Elections’ Dan Johansson is up for debate, but I do not doubt the collective’s commitment to carrying on the grand tradition of freeform Swedish psychedelia a la Pärson Sound, Träd, Gräs Och Stenar and others. 

That said, Enhet För Fri Musik have their own wonderful thing going and I would be hard pressed to think of any other artists this devoted to guileless simplicity and organic spontaneousness. Admittedly, I was secretly hoping the quintet would revisit the sound collage territory of “Fragment Av En Midsommarnattsdröm” this time around, but my consolation prize is that the Jandek-ian discordant acoustic guitars are kept to a minimum. 

Instead, this album feels like the impressionistic audio diary of a teenage girl who is growing up in a pleasant rural commune, as it uncannily evokes the wonder and openness of someone totally indifferent to popular trends and not yet hardened by the endless disappointment and inhumanity of the outside world.

It took me a bit longer than usual to fall in love with this album, as I was initially exasperated by the extreme brevity of several of the best songs and the fragmented, kaleidoscopic nature of the album. I am probably a fool for coming to an Enhet För Fri Musik album expecting a hot single, but I do like it when a band’s best ideas are expanded into complete, fully formed statements. That sort of thing was not on the agenda with this album, but it eventually dawned on me that something considerably more interesting and unique was happening instead. 

Obviously, “Swedish noise artists reclaim their childlike naivete to transform into an oft-brilliant free-folk ensemble” is an impressive feat in its own right, but I was already expecting that part. Consequently, I was more struck by how this album feels like a VHS tape of enigmatic found footage fragments that capture flickering tender, beautiful, intimate, and uneasy moments spanning many years and many miles. 

There are, however,  a few pieces that delve into deeper darkness, such as “Opus 6 – Sommarljus” (crunching footsteps in a desolate moonlit shipyard, then a ramshackle, Wicker Man-esque folk procession) and “Kärlekens Nöjen” (woman humming a sad melody by the seaside as storm clouds gather). If the album was entirely in that vein, it would feel like a series of clues to an unsolved murder, but the amiable musicality of Sofie Herner’s voice makes the album feel like I am being led through a bittersweet phantasmagoria by a trusted and charming friend. 

It also helps that there are some genuinely lovely song vignettes strewn throughout the album. My favorite pieces are the ones in which Herner haltingly and casually chatters over a simple pretty melody, such as “Idag Är Det Bra  (featuring an endearingly wobbly-sounding synth melody) and the hesitant, finger-picked folk of “En Bra Dag.” 

The closing piano ballad “Skilsmässa” is another delight in that simple melodic vein, but there is also one excellent sound collage-style piece on the album as well (“Flytten”). In fact, “Flytton” is probably the album’s most surreal and absorbing piece, as it sounds somewhere between an accordion-driven sea shanty and a murky, hallucinatory cabaret. Or maybe like a melancholy noir film about the French Resistance, except the club’s femme fatale chanteuse has lost interest in singing and is just conversationally chattering in Swedish as a grinding, supernatural roar slowly envelops everything. 

I would be thrilled if there were a few more songs like that on Ömhet & Skilsmässa, but I genuinely love the spell that the collective casts on this album. Enhet För Fri Musik are channeling something truly radical: a simpler pre-internet era before regional character, emotional directness, and intimacy were nearly wiped off the map by advances in production technology and all-consuming international trends. And they seem to be confidently climbing farther and farther out on that limb with each new release.

Samples can be found here.

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Jon Collin, “Music From Cassettes, Etc., 2008-2017” (Fördämning Arkiv, 2021)

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I initially slept on this album, as the prosaic title made it sound like a collection of old and orphaned songs rather than a minor sound collage masterpiece. The former would be just fine by me (in a non-urgent way), but the fact that this album is actually the latter completely blindsided me. As the label puts it, Collin pulled “shining diamonds from his discography” and put them “in a new context with more recently recorded segments.” In more practical terms, this means that the album beautifully bleeds together ephemeral highlights from Collin’s discography into a soulfully mesmerizing, endlessly evolving impressionist fantasia. In its most striking moments, Music From Cassettes, Etc. makes me feel like I am a Dickensian ghost experiencing all the warmest moments from Collin’s life through a flickering projector.

The first side rolls in as a fog of tape hiss and crackle that sounds like a ravaged dictaphone recording of a bus tour somewhere in some exotic tropical place. Soon, however, a simple twanging acoustic guitar piece starts to fade in. It is quite a warm and deeply emotive performance, so I was sad to see it go as it gradually became consumed by a slowly oscillating hum that later dissipates into enigmatic dictaphone hiss once more. That theme of slowly dissolving vignettes is the heart of the album, but the variety, beauty, and cumulative power of them is what makes this album transcendent and bittersweet. 

On the A side, the dream parade makes further noteworthy stops at deconstructed blues and something akin to a tribute band that accidentally double-booked themselves as both Pink Floyd and The Dead C, but valiantly blurred them together to give everyone the concert of their lives. The playing near the end is absolutely amazing, as Collin whips up a rapturous Orcutt-level firestorm of wild hammer-ons and swooping slides for the volcanic finale. The second side offers a similarly mesmerizing but completely different phantasmagoria of fragmented delights. Sometimes I find myself at a languorous campfire jam in which lupine howls harmonize with a sliding melody, while at other times I am catching the fiery performance of a noise rock band from a reverberant alley. Elsewhere, Collin’s collage sounds like a ravaged tape loop of an organ mass backing a demonic squall of white-hot electric guitar catharsis. 

Throughout it all, Collin maintains a perfect balance of soulful melody, lo-fi ruin, and sharp-edged feral intensity, the latter of which definitely surprised me (he sounds absolutely possessed during some of his solos). The whole album is great from beginning to end, as Collin hits one perfect moment of tender melody or viscerally howling noise guitar incandescence after another with nary a lull between them. This is an instant classic.

Samples can be found here.