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  • Sifantin Och Mörkret

    H35D

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Häpna

  • Naima

    H31D

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Häpna

  • Sifantin och mörkret

    H35

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Häpna

    "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…

  • The Xiao Fang EP

    ASCUDRE02

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Komplott

    The Xiao Fang EP was originally released on Mjäll a few months before Appelqvist's debut album Tonefilm in 2001. On this EP Appelqvist works with field-recordings from China done during his stay there the summer of 2000. This beautiful 10" vinyl EP was pressed in a limited edition of 500 copies and the few copies we had available at our mailorder sold out rapidly. The Mjäll label's initiator Bo-Stefan Lundkvist decided to finish his business short after the record was released and we thought that this record sold out. But apparently a few copies was actually returned to Mjäll and they have collected dust in the attic since then.

    We are now glad to announce that we have a few more copies available so there's a new chance to pick up this rare and stunning release by Appelqvist.

  • Naima

    H31

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Häpna

    ”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.

  • Bremort

    ESCUDRE03

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Komplott

    On his new album Bremort, Hans Appelqvist seeks an alternative technique of musical story telling, a search which seems to be founded in a sort of restlessness or maybe a mise en cause of those simple and solidly established parameters which have been established in instrumental and conventional popular music. Appelqvist mainly derives his particular form of musical story telling from feature film, where the music is paralleling the story so as to amplify it or comment it. It is in this form, where sound and image converge, that Appelqvist is conducting his search for unexpected emotional expressions.

    Bremort is the name of a fictitious city where the listener takes part in scenes in the lives of the people of this average Swedish town. The album has no comprehensive theme but is rather built up around several small episodes, which have nothing in common other than the fact that they all take place in this same fictitious city during a limited period of time. The depictions are accompanied by different musical themes in which the beige existence of some of the inhabitants of Bremort are portrayed and linked together in recurrent intermezzos. As such Bremort is in a way a place of refuge, a sanctuary for the commonplace.

    Appelqvist?s music infuses the debate on the musical qualities of music. The newness of his acoustic image, where the choice of sounds are not always evident or natural in there context, makes the listener react, certain musical nuances might generate...

  • Att möta verkligheten

    H11

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Häpna

    'Att möta verkligheten' consists of three tracks based on stories from ordinary people. The record has a strange atmosphere: the interplay between text and music makes a listening that is both sad and joyous, playful and serious, personal and general.

    The voices and the songs are in Swedish, English, Chinese and German. The persons speak openly and sing well-known or less well-known poems and songs. Together with the instruments - foremost piano, mandolin and flute - these encounters become much more than interviews and plain everyday stories.

    'Att möta verkligheten' is to be considered in its own, not as a part of another project. This record differs in some ways from his debut 'Tonefilm' and points out a new direction in his music.

  • Tonefilm

    ESCUDRE01

    Artist: Hans Appelqvist

    Label: Komplott

    Making use of various devices such as outmoded film equipment and an old-fashioned portable gramophone, Appelquist's inventive stage performances has been the subject of much attention. Here fragmented video clips and film sequences carefully synchronized with the music turns into an unconventional musical and cinematic experience combined. Finding any musical references to the work of this young Swede is tricky indeed. The Tonefilm project and its creator truly defies all comparison. Interweaving acoustic instruments - such as the recurrent resonance of a melancholic guitar or a slightly agitated piano - with electronic beats and sound samples from movies, Appelqvist creates his own distinctive sonic landscape where the ambience swiftly shifts from evocative and mellow to a state of subtle agitation. "Tonefilm" is a thrilling hybrid between moving pictures and music. Each composition has its own story to tell at the same time as the distant humming of a film projector suggest the interrelated cinematic theme of this meditative and melodious compilation.