Menu

Hugo Randulv

a2120188012_16

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

, ,

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.

a1765909013_16

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

, ,

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.