Best of 2020
This week's second highly-limited, blink-and-you'll-miss-it dispatch from the Swedish underground, this time in the form of the especially elliptical second album from Oroskällan, who you might also know something about via their relationship with Blöd. The spirit of Popol Vuh hangs heavy here, in that sense that folk music need not be performed with traditional instruments. This is music conjured straight from the soil (or does it come from the cycle of the moon?) and rendered in minimal synth form, seemingly primitive (possibly crude!) in its construction but also possessed of some kind of higher power, like a witch or how nature operates beyond us on animal time. Don't try to understand it. I'm not sure you're meant to, which is probably why very little biography accompanies its release. Musically you can draw some comparisons with the Danish Tape Amateurs scene and Daphne Oram, but i'm only really saying that as a way to make you listen. You know how some comets have elliptical orbits around the sun so as to sometimes seem very close and at other times appear much further away? There's a similar thing going on here. Nowt as uncommon as this kind of folk. Limited to 240 copies, and our allocation is nearly all gone now.
