3 on Slottet - Jean-Louis Huhta, Boots Brown & Santa Maria

Slottet (translates in English to “palace”, if I’m not mistaken) is an intriguing new label out of Sweden that, judging by its current and impending crop of releases, is going to be a fairly wide-ranging one as well.

Jean-Louis Huhta
Halfway Between the World and Death
SLM5

Huhta has a history in various Swedish bands going back through the mid 80s, ranging from punk and art-music to grindcore and funk, though he’s currently involved with artists like Carl Michael von Hausswolff and ex-Wire bassist Graham Lewis. This lengthy (76-minute) disc is essentially a solo venture (guitarist Johan Zetterquist appearing on only the title cut), largely emanating from Huhta’s laptop but with substantial acoustic guitar strumming and other small non-electronic details.

The pieces tend to maintain a steady pulse or throb, nudging them along at a pace that rarely rises above a lope, ingratiatingly non-insistent, allowing the listener to wallow a bit in the effluvia Huhta passes along the way. It’s an effective tack, almost a travelogue approach, something like you might have heard on a Made to Measure disc 15-20 years ago (Where is Benjamin Lew, anyway? This record would’ve been very much up his alley). The songs, sixteen in all, merge into one another like morphed slide images, the repeated guitar lines augmented by computer-generated bell-tones, washes of field recordings or delicate percussion. The “melodies” are simple and engaging (think non-ethnically oriented Penguin Café Orchestra, maybe with a bit more grit) serving to make the overall experience a very pleasant one with enough itchiness to hold one’s attention. Things almost never rise above a medium boil even on the more industrially rockish numbers and the stratagems don’t vary all that much from track to track, enabling a certain bland patina to encrust the proceedings but, all told, it’s a solid effort, recommended to those who enjoyed recent offerings from bands like Johan Berthling’s Tape.

Boots Brown
Boots Brown
SLM7

Speaking of John Berthling, he and his double bass appear as part of the quartet calling itself Boots Brown, along with Magnus Broo (trumpet), Mats Gustafsson (alto & tenor saxophones, slide saxophone, electronics) and David Stackenäs (acoustic guitar, low budget electronics), joined by Tomas Hallonsten (Hammond organ) for one selection. Broos’ work has something of the skittering, liquid quality of Kenny Wheeler (perhaps surprising in someone who’s worked with the Brotzmann Tentet) whereas Stackenäs’ playing reminds me a great deal of A. Spencer Barefield, an interesting combination of sounds. With Gustafsson largely reigning in his bent for overblowing and Berthling remaining resolutely (but imaginatively) out of the spotlight, the seven improvisations have an endearing, light-on-their-feet quality, a wateriness that harkens back to Jimmy Giuffre. On pieces like “Gaucho Volcano”, they venture into more abstract areas, the electronics providing a suitably “dirty” haze, but there’s never any effects-driven screaming, the musicians opting for the thoughtfully elegiac instead.

The Boots Brownians have a nice habit of centering in on musical points that almost sound preordained. I don’t think that’s the case, but I’m never quite sure as in the middle of “Black Industrial Greasy” where Broo suddenly emerges with a lovely, romantic quasi-melody. It’s more than a bit fascinating to observe all the hummingbird-like darting about coalesce, cloud-like, around something that comes close to sounding thematic. No real solos as such, just a fairly complex intertwining of tones and plucks, relaxed and self-composed. “Chamber jazz”? Perhaps, but one of the more enjoyable examples of such I’ve heard in quite a while. Highly recommended for aficionados of similar strains from, say, the hatOLOGY catalog.

[note: an actor by the name of Boots Brown appeared in ten or so movies in the 1940’s. No idea of the relevance of that info.]

Santa Maria
Santa Maria
SLM4

Well now, here’s Mr. Berthling once again, serving as producer in addition to performing on the solo debut of Santa Maria, the rather hubristic nom de musique of Maria Eriksson. I’m blissfully unaware of the current state of Swedish pop, but learned that Ms. Eriksson has been the lead singer of a fairly popular band called The Concretes for some time now. (I did check with a good friend who’s extremely up on all things Scandinavian and pop, but the band was a mystery to him as well.) This is a pop album through and through, and I thought it might be a decent one after the first cut, the beguiling and pared down “Dogs”. Though paced with a somewhat martial beat, there’s an appealing earnestness and offhandedness in Eriksson’s delivery. Her voice isn’t really exceptional but a grainy, natural quality goes a long way toward giving her the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the following track, “Everytime” (both of which are remixed uninterestingly on an accompanying single) plunges into an overblown, bubble-gummy, tootling pop atmosphere as frenetic as it is cloying. The lyrics, in English, are almost entirely unremarkable. The relative honesty of the first piece only surfaces a couple of other times, once on the delicate, heartfelt “Face Blank” (my favorite cut on the album) where Eriksson performs in duo with a musical saw wielded by Leo Svensson and on the closing “Lay Down” where the instrumentation is again limited, here to acoustic guitar, Hammond organ/synth and zither/glockenspiel. Atypical pop instruments are scattered throughout (oboe, recorder, vibes, etc.) but the general feel of the album is an affected alt rock with proggy overtones that’s nowhere near as unusual as it thinks it is, far too infused with easy answers and shopworn structures.

Future Slottet releases include collaborations by Tetuzi Akiyama & Gul 3 (Johan Arrias, Henrik Olsson and the abovementioned Svensson) as well as Gustafsson & Christian Marclay. Stay tuned.

slottet