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Enhet För Fri Musik

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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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Enhet för Fri Musik, “Inom Dig, Inom Mig” (Aguirre, 2017)

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Belgium’s Aguirre Records seems to have quite a talent for digging up some singularly obscure, weird, and surprising releases lately. The latest one to knock me sideways is this one, a free-folk project that seemingly involves most of the Swedish underground. Ostensibly formed to reignite and continue the tradition of communal psych genius of heavyweights like Pärson Sound, Enhet för Fri Musik made a rather intriguing detour along the way and wound up deep in idiosyncratic and otherworldly “outsider folk” territory instead. 

Even that is a bit of an oversimplification though, as Sofie Herner’s alternately fragile, distracted, ritualistic, and trance-like vocals are unpredictably accompanied with everything from saxophones to field recordings of birds and streams. Admittedly, tight songcraft was clearly not a big priority during these sessions, but Inom Dig casts an absorbing spell of timeless unreality that transcends mere melodies and hooks.

As befits a deeply strange folk album featuring folks like Sewer Election’s Dan Johansson and Release The Bats founder Matthias Andersson, Inom Dig, Inom Mig (roughly “Within You, Within Me”) has some rather kaleidoscopic and unusual sequencing. For example, the first side is composed of four sketchlike pieces of varying lengths, while the second side is consumed entirely by the epic 18-minute “Det Ordnar Sig Ska Du Se” (“That’s What You’ll See”). Only a few pieces feel like actual songs, which both adds to the feeling of spontaneity and generally makes me feel like I am listening to a mysterious jumble of field recordings of an arcane forest ritual (at least sometimes, anyway). 

That said, the whole experience opens in comparatively contemporary and straightforward fashion with a brief introduction of trebly strummed electric guitar chords until the following “Se Dig Om” (“See You On”) quickly leaves conventional music far behind. I suppose it still technically counts as a “song” though, as Herner is clearly singing actual words and sticks to a melody, even if she sounds like she is deep in a trance and emanating from a scratchy, hissing old recording. 

Despite all that, Herner’s vocals are still the closest thing to normalcy in the piece, as the underlying music is a brooding miasma of crackling field recordings, tape hiss, detuned and murky drones, and reverberating string noises—essentially the least likely possible place for a quietly melodic saxophone solo to erupt. That is exactly what happens though, as the second half of the piece is devoted to a soulful, jazz-inflected, and reasonably competent duet with some sparse nature sounds.

The following “Droppar På Din Hud” (“Drops on Your Skin”) takes a similarly aberrant and surprising path, as its central motif is an insistent chord played on an out-of-tune-sounding string instrument over a bed of strange scrapes. If I had to guess, I would say that it sounds like the source material is culled entirely from the rusting innards of a long-forgotten piano. Unexpectedly, however, that theme segues into a simple acoustic guitar ballad. 

To their credit, Enhet för Fri Musik even manage to make a simple acoustic guitar melody seem fresh and strange, as it sounds very trebly and close-mic’d and the occasional flubbed notes and string buzz feel like a textural component every bit as important as the melody. “Stilla Vatten” takes yet another hard detour, resembling a snippet of a mildly distressed old recording of an improv-prone church organist.

As strange and enjoyable as it is, however, the first side of the album is merely a series of appetizers leading up to the main course of “Det Ordnar Sig Ska Du Se.” Structurally, it could not possibly be simpler, as it is essentially just Herner singing a bittersweet melody over an insistently repeating and somewhat broken/out-of-tune sounding arpeggio. That arpeggio weaves quite an evocative hypnotic spell though, as do the underlying field recordings of what sounds like a windswept field. 

Eventually, the arpeggio abruptly stops and the player seems to fumble with a few dissonant chords as the wind swirls around him or her. Once it starts up again, the field recordings (featuring some birds and mysterious footsteps now) have crept a bit further into the foreground, as has the occasional disruptive wash of static. While the music itself is weirdly beautiful, the real magic lies in its unreal sense of time and place, as it feels like the band managed to channel the spirit of an ancient Druidic priestess through a secret pagan ceremony in a moonlit grotto.

If I were of a less amenable mindset, it would be easy to dismiss this ensemble as disingenuously childlike in their musicianship or lament the band’s seemingly indifferent approach to songcraft, but that would be completely missing the point. Though the line is admittedly a blurry one, Enhet för Fri Musik are not self-consciously dabbling in faux-naïveté so much as trying to use natural, organic sounds in compelling new ways. In that realm, they succeed admirably and they are smart enough to realize that they need Sofie Harner’s half-pretty/half-ghostly vocals as a coherent thread to ground their more outré impulses. Escaping conventional tunings and chords while remaining listenable is an impressive feat (especially on an acoustic guitar or piano). 

That said, the band’s other cunning move was the decision to rely heavily on trance-like repetition, making a virtue of simplicity and wrong-sounding notes. This album inhabits quite a unique space, as it is deeply psychedelic without any effects and much more tuneful, spontaneous, and direct than most psych-folk (and considerably less self-indulgent or plagued by whimsy). It also differs significantly from otherwise like-minded artists such as Christina Carter in its raw, found-sound aesthetic. It is a fine niche to stake out. 

Curiously, Inom Dig is the band’s debut album (it is a reissue of 2015 cassette) and they have been entirely silent since a flurry of follow-up releases that same year on various small European labels. I sincerely hope that they are still active, as their otherworldly vision is quite a wonderfully timeless and immersive one. If not, this remains both a beguilingly strange album and a welcome gateway into quite a rich underground scene that I may have otherwise missed completely.

Listen here.