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Tan-Tan Therapy is a distillate of the last two years, when Tenniscoats and Tape have socialised, toured together and exchanged musical ideas and experiences. The album gives a slightly new picture of Tenniscoats. Found here is a fuller dynamic spectra and richer use of diverse sound elements than usually found in their live shows. Yet the album has a concise pop feeling to it, in a calm and multi-faceted way. The level of details and the different sound world is to a large extent due to the musicians of Tape, as they have been involved both in the production and the writing of arrangements on the record. To Tenniscoats’ original setting, various horn instruments, double bass, zither, organ, glockenspiel and electronic instruments have been added. The recordings were made in an intuitive way during a couple of days in Stockholm and Cologne with Tape (Andreas Berthling, Johan Berthling, Tomas Hallonsten), Andreas Söderström (Ass), Leo Svensson and Lars Skoglund and fellow musicians.
Saya and Ueno are also members of the Japanese music collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz. They live outside of Tokyo.
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“When we moved to tent and the light was golden and we were young, and the magazine was all there was to bring, and you woke in the night when the birds were singing just for you and the smell of soil and the warm breath over through you, ohh it moved you. All there was to it, was the morning of my life.”
The overall idea behind the first two A Taste of Ra records was for me to work with my voice, instruments and recording techniques on a more personal level.
On this final record in the trilogy, I’ve taken a different approach. It started off with one song that I developed and visualized together with Jari Haapalainen into six movements. Together they create a sense of a film-like dramatic pattern. Then we tactfully decided on the right locations and casting for the recordings, while Johan Berthling made some beautiful arrangements for three of the movements. After recording and mixing, I realized that we had created a musical monster that will challenge and hopefully inspire listeners for a long time to come.
- Nicolai Dunger
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Eric Malmberg’s music is a small miracle.
I don’t want to call him a genius, because I don’t want to jinx him. But I will say that he’s a complete original, in addition to being a vastly talented musician. I will also say that his recordings and the two performances that I saw by Sagor & Swing merit a place on a short list of most enjoyed musical experiences of the last half decade. I could bleat about the quality of the work, but “most enjoyed” to me carries the stronger charge.
Verklighet & Beat, meaning “Reality & Beat” (as opposed to “Sagor & Swing”: “Fairytales and Swing”), is a second high point in Eric Malmberg’s career. The first came with 2001’s Orgelfärger, the first album by Sagor & Swing. S & S were the duo of Eric on his beloved Hammond organ and Ulf Möller on sympathetic, timeless drums. The obvious comparison was to Hansson & Karlsson, the Swedish organ and drums duo from the 1970s. Indeed, Eric is the author of a number of comic books detailing the adventures of Hansson & Karlsson. (He’s also the author of the comic Happy Hammond in Slumberland.) Bo Hansson returned the favor by giving him an organ—as well as by appearing on synthesizer on Verklighet & Beat.
Orgelfärger came out of a clear blue sky. A brisk, chilly blue sky over a kind of stubbornly verdant rural landscape that I can easily picture but have never actually seen. It charmed by seemingly having zero connection to its era. A Hammond-whirlpool of minor-key melodicism. A snare, a brush, a mellower Mitch Mitchell. A sense with each new composition of starting back from the same place, of getting exquisitely lost in the woods each time, differently. Eleven songs, eleven paths. Listening to this album again, I can’t imagine how it could be improved. (Do I have to spell it out? Time on this planet is brief. If you haven’t heard Orgelfärger or the follow-up Melodier och fåglar, you need to be taking better care of yourself.)
Sagor & Swing reminded you that the Hammond organ was once a medieval instrument.
All of which brings us to Verklighet & Beat. Sagor & Swing disbanded after four albums, and this is Eric’s second solo release. The first, Den gåtfulla människan, finds Eric alone at the Hammond, with the occasional desolate rhythm-box accompaniment. Verklighet & Beat is an entirely different animal, a beautifully arranged and fully realized vision of how to present Eric’s music.
Verklighet & Beat has two obvious hits. “Till minne av Lilly Lindström” is the album’s effortless high-water mark in providing instrumental coloration for what had previously been implied by Eric’s bare-bones melodies. Are those guitar strings fifty years old? Sleigh bells haven’t sounded so good since the first Stooges album. Then the descending disco strings carve up the dance floor. A tip of the hat to producer/musician Jari Haapalainen. The other surefire smash in the Top 40 of my mind or dreams is “Söndagskonsert,” which holds its own when compared to the most moving of Peer Raben’s scores for films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Verklighet & Beat suggests that an impeccably programmed movie theater has opened in Eric’s neck of the woods.
The album’s opening track, “Finalen” is a signature gesture of Eric’s, wherein stirring, nearly martial melodies are rendered with maximum Hammond mellowness. A number of these pieces are essentially marches, and yet they could hardly be less bellicose. “Finalen” is another in a series of Malmberg earworms: melodies that after a few listens seem as if you’ve known them since childhood.
“Min kompis Anton” is another bittersweet, inward-turned march. It incorporates the musicality of distantly heard recordings of kids’ laughter – an intuitive gesture that seems so right as to preclude further comment. Synth is using sparingly, to merely indicate the stratosphere. “Slutet på en epok” is hard-rocking and frantic, much more like the S & S live sets, and a style only occasioned hinted at by previous studio recordings. Ascending modulations are handled in the style of a surf instrumental. The brushes are out on “Leksand, tidigt nittiotal,” a series of reexaminations of a single melodic line.
A key fiddle can sound as lonesome as any harmonica.
Verklighet & Beat is paradigmatic of Häpna in that its execution is improbably beautiful. It’s better in practice than in theory. And Eric Malmberg’s vision now radiates color.
- David Grubbs, New York, March 2007
This is Eric Malmberg’s second solo record on Häpna. He did four records with his previous group Sagor & Swing. This record is his first with a larger personnel. Featuring musicians like Goran Kajfes, Lars Skoglund, Johan Berthling, Cecilia Österholm and legendary organist Bo Hansson. Produced by Jari Haapalainen.
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"Me, a cuckoo. Of all the great things in Africa my eyes have met, one I can never forget. On the savannah a rhinoceros stood proudly, gazing into the distant. Its belly ripped open in battle with the one that always wants more."
Hot on the heels of his last record Naima, released in November 2006, Hans Appelqvist has a new album ready. It's called "Sifantin och mörkret" and is his third release on Häpna. The music shows Hans from a new side, the album being more open and spontaneous than previously. It oscillates between the sweet and grotesque, nice and ugly, harmony and terror, sifanti and darkness…
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Marcus Schmickler is internationally well known in heterogeneous contexts of contemporary music. He is closely associated with the a-Musik label and over the last years he has worked in different fields of electronic, instrumental, improvised, experimental and new music. His latest releases feature choir and chamber music pieces, a new computer music composition as well as a new release under the banner of Pluramon with Julee Cruise. His continuous collaborations feature settings with analogue synth wiz Thomas Lehn and British pianist John Tilbury. He is also member of various ensembles such as MIMEO and Pluramon. He has received numerous prestigious prizes and his work has been represented all over the globe. He lives in Cologne.
Hayden Chisholm is a saxophonist and a composer internationally well known for his work with the artist Rebecca Horn and as a performer in jazz and contemporary music. Originating from New Zealand where he won the Young Achievers Award, he studied music and philosophy in Germany, India and Japan and has since performed at major festivals all over the world. He currently performs with Burnt Friedman, Root 70 and Pluramon as well as creating music for several of Rebecca Horn's installations. Although only 31 he has spent 8 years of his life on concert tours. He currently lives in Barcelona and Cologne.
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”After two years of work since my last album ’Bremort’, a new album is finished. This time, the record is about Naima, an entity who in different ways is present to the persons on the album. Sometimes she interferes with their lives and speaks directly to them, sometimes her presence is only communicated through her musical theme, Naimamelodin (Naima’s melody).
Somewhat pretentiously expressed, the album is an answer to a longing for more fixed references. In less joyous times, I often wish for someone or something that could tell me how to be and behave, and through this advice free me from responsibility and thoughts about whether my acts are right or wrong. Someone who says: ’You ought to do like this, it is just the way it is’. Imagine how wonderful it would be if there was an entity with a pelican’s head who one had endless confidence in and who one could ask for advice every time one did not know what to do.”
In 2004 Hans Appelqvist released the album “Bremort” which got a lot of attention and among other things won the Swedish Radio’s Pop Record of the Year award. The record was staged in a fictitious small city in Sweden, where one as a listener could follow daily life during three days for some of the people living there. Hans Appelqvist has previously released ”Att möta verkligheten” on Häpna.
