ARRIVING END OF MARCH
Arv & Miljö call time on their decade-long exploration of noise-poetics with a final LP of field recordings that effectively serves as a love-letter of sorts to the underground culture and associated skirmishes they've both propagated and enjoyed. You can't really make sense of what's been happening in Gothenburg the past ten years without thinking about Arv & Miljö's place in it all, their work often a romantic re-framing of ambient, drone and found sound that provides its own map of sorts for contemporary experimental Swedish music. Typical, then, that these two long-form pieces are perhaps their most non-musical to date, at least in any conventional sense, anyway (fans, don't worry too much - still present are passages of their signature countryside concreté, just with a little more port town night life in the mix). A collage of various snippets of diegetic sound recorded over the course of their entire existence (the presence of TR/ST's 'Sulk' contributes brilliantly to the time-dilated feel) that detail what they charmingly describe as "endless summer nights out, great people desperately wanting more from life, hazy underground culture encounters and just random, confusing everyday nonsense", it ends up feeling like a form of hallucinogenic storytelling, a abstract means of expressing its own place in the world that's as emotional, really, as any straight-up folk singer attempting to communicate their truth. We frequently use the term 'self-determination' when discussing music in the Discreet orbit. Arv & Miljö might just represent the apotheosis of that sentiment, as if to say: they'll never take our (non-)music from us, hold on to what that means. I don't suppose a group like this thinks too much about legacy. But that might be theirs.
The LP comes with a 12-page booklet telling the story of Arv & Miljö through 27 releases and 18 shows. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug. Edition of 300 copies.
