Underground vibrations
Stockholm 1967
What was the musical climate like in Stockholm in 1967? A lively expansion occurred simultaneously in several areas during the decade, at first in separate boxes but gradually in singular encounters and combinations.
Earlier during the decade the experimental jazz scene had found a place of refuge mainly at Gyllene Cirkeln (The Golden Circle) but other stages were open as well. Free form jazz wasn't only performed in obscure basement clubs but also in, for example, art galleries. Moderna Museet (The Museum of Modern Art) was a natural node not only for pioneering art and film but also for the avant-garde of experimental music.
At times there were happenings on a larger scale or "musical theatre" - absurd performances in a chamber setting, balancing on the borders of taste and sensibility. Several performances presented electronic music or concrete music, music produced directly onto recording tape, either completely electronically or from recorded treated sounds, performed through speakers.
Within theatre a similar change occurred. Forms were stretched, rules reconsidered. The stages were often open for musical performances but above all, music were integrated into the theatrical form. Pistolteatern (The Pistol Theatre) were one of the most reliable groundbreakers. The first wave of pop was extremely vital.
Every school had their own beat groups, playing at school dances and in youth...
Underground vibrations
Stockholm 1967
What was the musical climate like in Stockholm in 1967? A lively expansion occurred simultaneously in several areas during the decade, at first in separate boxes but gradually in singular encounters and combinations.
Earlier during the decade the experimental jazz scene had found a place of refuge mainly at Gyllene Cirkeln (The Golden Circle) but other stages were open as well. Free form jazz wasn't only performed in obscure basement clubs but also in, for example, art galleries. Moderna Museet (The Museum of Modern Art) was a natural node not only for pioneering art and film but also for the avant-garde of experimental music.
At times there were happenings on a larger scale or "musical theatre" - absurd performances in a chamber setting, balancing on the borders of taste and sensibility. Several performances presented electronic music or concrete music, music produced directly onto recording tape, either completely electronically or from recorded treated sounds, performed through speakers.
Within theatre a similar change occurred. Forms were stretched, rules reconsidered. The stages were often open for musical performances but above all, music were integrated into the theatrical form. Pistolteatern (The Pistol Theatre) were one of the most reliable groundbreakers. The first wave of pop was extremely vital.
Every school had their own beat groups, playing at school dances and in youth clubs. 1967 was a time of upheaval and change - the first wave had started to ebb out, and pop music had become rather shallow and strutty. New sounds began to appear – a heavier, "psychedelic" music, the flower power culture emerged.
In the early days, there weren’t many representatives for this new form of musical activity. The Hansson & Karlsson duo had a short but intense career with drum & organ orgies. Baby Grandmothers and Mecki Mark Men developed the "pop" format. The club Filips was home for this new culture, with stroboscopes, incense and flowers in the hair.
Above all, perhaps, the late Sixties were a time of cross-fertilization. Mixed forms appeared, with loans from other genres and cautious contacts over the borders; experimental jazz, contemporary art music and the new pop music approached each other. The interest in non-European folk- and art music grew, the Swedish folk music followed as a kind of bonus. USA and England were glanced upon for inspiration to a lessening extent.
And so came a time of great ambitions: More and more, people came to realize that the new world order had to come. There were several opinions on what it would look like, from militant Marxist to more blackredgreen anarchist, decentralized, pastoral. Incredible, often heated, discussions took place, at general meetings and spontaneously in the streets. And how could one find music with potential to transform the senses, a music that could make way for the new world order?
PÄRSON SOUND was born out of these crossings and tensions.
- Torbjörn Abelli
Pärson sound
Magnus Haglund works as a freelance journalist. At the age of 13 he attended his first ever rock concert with the Hot Boys in Borås in the mid-south of Sweden.
Sweden 1967: a society in transition, a strictly ordered way of behaving and perceiving things is opening up to new perspectives, new unpredictability’s, new passions. The rational visions and mathematical scales of the welfare state meet and collide with the world outside, with the political fights, the psychedelic dreaming, the cultural deconstruction’s.
You could see it and hear it in two Swedish films done that year: Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan which won the Golden Palm in the Cannes festival of 1967 and Vilgot Sjöman’s I’m Curious Yellow, an exploration of the free zones between sexuality and politics, that made a world-wide impact. A strange utopian light flows through these films, time is both delayed and instantaneous, people’s presence’s are caught in a state of waiting and suspense. Like in the conversation between Sjöman and Olof Palme on the steps of the coming prime minister’s house: everything is informal, nothing is strained. This floating time is also noticeable in the music of Pärson Sound: the hypnotic now-feeling, the extended moments that seem to grow out of an extremely vivid listening to all sounds. There’s something that effortlessly comes and goes in this music, an expression that is both intentional and non-intentional, hedonistic and romantic, eccentric and concrete, hidden and open. There’s a naiveté to it all. Like if all doors were open and the encounters between people were part of a never-ending conversation. What is manifested is the poetic under-standing of the post-war-term Open Society. Instead of completing the sentences and the explanations, the patterns are heightened to a state of psychedelic particularism.
How did it come about? Certain factors can’t be denied, like BoAnders Persson’s former compositional studies and experiments with electronic music (documented in the minimal piece Proteinimperialism, released in 1968 on the German contemporary music label Wergo), or Terry Riley’s visit to Stock-holm in the spring of 1967 with several of the members of Pärson sound participating in performances of In C and Olson III. But suddenly this provincial and in a lot ways extremely Swedish fringe-phenomenon catches up and even passes what is happening in the English and American experimental musical cultures during the same time. The marriage between repetitive structures and tribal rock’n roll-sounds in the music of Pärson Sound is absolutely comparable to the most intense moments of Velvet Under-ground, Grateful Dead, the early Pink Floyd or Cornelius Cardew’s experimental group AMM. It evolves, expands, starts to have a resonance with the inner systems. There’s a light in this music that is corrosive and completely hypnotic; it’s softer than Sister Ray, slower than Interstellar Overdrive, more utopian than Dark Star. Heavenly reverberations, shimmering fragments, circular rhythms: something is photographed in these concerts and field recordings, an alternative future maybe, or a more vivid now. It’s still to be touched, heard, revered.
BOANDERS Persson
BoAnders Persson (b 1937) became an important figure within the Swedish underground rock scene and one of the strongest and most original musical voices within the movement. BoAnders was also a member of International Harvester, Träd, Gräs och Stenar and Hot Boys.
“Once, during the early Sixties. I had some kind of vision of a conceivable music. The place was the dance pavilion by Hjortnäs steamboat jetty at the Eastern Shore of Siljan, Dalarna in mid-Sweden.
It was a hot, still summer night, and in the west the sun was slowly descending under the horizon. The shore was drenched in a red glow of almost unearthly grandeur. The Wednesday dance was in full swing. The young women present were they as well of an unearthly beauty. And they were almost impossible to make contact with. In addition to my difficulties they had no urge at all to talk about the dance music, its merits and maybe most of all its shortcomings.
I was filled with a longing for some kind of universal music that contained a more modern experience with a sound that was large and generous enough to acco-modate the whole width of this Wednesday ritual. With a dance rhythm, sensuality and transcendence.
Strangely enough, a few years later I would be taking part in playing that kind
of music, or at least something in that direction. By then we had been working with some kind of a free-form improvisational group, with mixed electro acoustical instruments, for a couple of years. In the group were Torbjörn Abelli, Arne Ericsson, Urban Yman and myself, the setting varied but double bass, cello, amplified piano and transverse flute was common. And different kinds of tape loops.
In the beginning of 1967 we made some pretty haphazard attempts at playing rock. Shortly thereafter Thomas Tidholm joined the band. The music changed, some “avant gardistic awkwardness” disappeared and was replaced by more conventional song structures. But above all, we could do long droning minimalist improvisations. During the autumn of ‘67 we did a few chaotic gigs in Stockholm and surroundings and suddenly we had an audience, and a drummer. Thomas Gartz was well established on the Stockholm rock circuit, he played with Mecki Mark Men. I was surprised when it turned out he wanted to join us.
It was bewildering to suddenly have band mates, and in addition to that an audience. Firstly I was a couple of years older than my band mates, I had wasted three years at the Royal Institute of Technology. In the end I got a belly ache.
I realized that if I was going to ruin my life anyway, I could as well do the Highest, that in some obvious way was Music. Even if I didn’t stand a chance as a musician. Despite an incredible luck with teachers I had failed to learn classical piano in my early teens. Yet I managed to qualify as piano player for the Dixieland school band, but my playing was cramped and limited. I had no high thoughts of my musical ability.
Anyway, now it was 1962 or so and the Cold War was reality. The Fifties with its sweat smelling physical education halls, Korean War, Victorian attitude towards sexuality and a mechanic belief in progress was still in the air. All this met up with my belated adolescent angst. Maybe I have to remind you that this was the year of the terror balance, when American B 52s’ flew in shuttle with their nuclear weapons to balance the threat from the larger Russian missiles. There was no room for the more immediate destructive mechanisms of the Western way of living in public consciousness. Such things were perhaps a debate topic for gits. Music turned out to be an opening for me. I started to study harmony, had Jan Bark as teacher in counterpoint. I believe I tried to use study time to catch up on some of my lack of knowledge in contemporary aesthetics. Through Jan I made contact with Americans like Ken Dewey – and Terry Riley. I was accepted as a trial student in composition at the Royal College of music in 1966. It would turn out the experiment wasn’t very success-ful. A lot of things started happening around town during 1967. And I got a lot of musician friends.
When we started playing there was a vision of something simple, folksy and relieving. And there was also an existing subconscious anxiety. This can be heard in the recordings from these years. Perhaps it’s this tension between anxiety and hope that makes listeners of today hear qualities in this music from the late Sixties.
In a time when anxiety has deepened and the development of the materialistic culture is so blatantly over the top. We had a unique chance to find an expression of a spirit of the time that really contained opposites, had a scope. And maybe we utilized some of the possibilities at hand. That is for others to decide.”
- Bo-Anders Persson
Thomas Mera Gartz
Thomas (b 1944), plays drums in the bands Träd, Gräs och Stenar and Kalousch. He has also made two solo records, made film scores and music for plays, he´s experimented with tape compositions and home made, so-called, "tekkhnå". Thomas Gartz has also worked as a recording supervisor and sound technician, done video cutting, and is currently a computer-nerd.
Thomas started playing with Pärson Sound in 1967 while being one of two drummers in Mecki Mark Men. Through the years he’s been a member of Arbete och Fritid (Work and Leisure), Bitter Funeral Beer Band and Archimedes Badkar:
“We chose to try to be present in the moment, like jazz and to play the music so that the border between the musicians and the listeners vanished. So that everybody could participate in the seance in their own way. We were also art, we weren’t just jamming away out in to eternity in small boxed rooms. We had visions about the music as a social magical art, about gigs and situations as collective creations, where the borders between the musicians and the spectators vanished and weren’t controlled by anyone from the outside… It is here in this place, with these people, now, that the free situations can create it’s own liberating moments and possibilities. Not necessarily for profitableness, social duty or good manners. Just playfulness and growth for it’s own sake. For just these people and at every place a free situation. That is for us, and for every me. I try to give the best I would like to. Not for something else beyond life or death. Something that hasn’t got anything to do with this and sits somewhere else as an absent God and who, when things go to far and out of hand, suddenly sends the police but never it self. We had painted pictures on our amplifiers: Freedom to the people and all animals, heaven and earth. Zonk Out!”
“We were opposed to the European and American cultural imperialism that wanted to take all people and their cultures, all ways of living and thinking and all gods in to their shopping sphere and confiscate their natural resources. To put price tags on them and their lives, to display their picturesque dresses for rich tourists. We saw ourselves on the side of the Vietnamese, the revolutionaries of Paris, the youths of Prague, the hippies, the Black Panthers, the Indians, the Swedish Samer. But we also saw ourselves on our own side, the workers, the children’s.”
“Stockholm was on the move. The inner city center was mostly full of people who got together to mingle and hang out at cafe’s, squares, terraces and parks. Sergels Square, which wasn’t yet finished, was the place to meet and talk. The place is now called Plattan (the Plate). By the enclosure to the construction site for The House of Culture there was a plank for graffiti and a wooden staircase with a platform. There was always a lot of people there, discussing and writing treaties on the plank. Any madman could spill his hearts content from the platform.
A lot of things happened at that place and spontaneous dances arose to the sound of ours and other peoples drums. I found this to be the funniest place in town because there was always some-thing unexpected and unpredictable happening. People actually talked to each other; for hours, and nobody had to pay to get the permission to do so.”
- Edited parts from Thomas Mera Gartz A Report From A Bucket Of Music.
The complete text can be downloaded at http://www.t.m.gartz.sida.nu
Torbjörn Abelli
While studying music Torbjörn (b 1945) met BoAnders in 1966. His original intention was to play the Hammond organ but when he lent BoAnders Hofner-bass he was soon struck by the unique nature of this specific instrument; how music so effectively can be built around it. Torbjörn has been the steady and immovable bassist in the band ever since and in all it’s different continuations but also as a member of Blomkraft (Flower Power) and together with Tomas Mera Gartz in Arbete och Fritid.
“At one occasion I was in the basement to record, while Björn J:son Lindh played the flute and BoAnders worked the tape machines above in the concert hall. It was magic – this weave, conjured from the flute. It was like a musical kaleidoscope, that with tiny alternations produced new images – and everything was built around solitary flute tones. Endless possibilities.”
“We agreed that we spent to much time analyzing music that others had created, in other eras and in other places. At the same time we witnessed how contemporary folk music developed around us, with low estimation in high brow cultural surroundings, but socially deeply rooted and in direct contact with life. If one is going to devote oneself to music, it should surely be pop.”
“And then Terry Riley visited Stockholm at a few occasions – the master of fragments, the hypnotist of repetition, the guru of subtle shifts and slow alterations.”
“There was continuous discussion and analysis of world events and local going-ons, of cultural expressions in history and of the period. The conception of the world was fundamentally shaken. Everything had changed. The old truths could not be trusted anymore; almost everything had to be reevaluated. The well known contained unforeseen secrets.”
“Pärson Sound/International Harvester was a continuous seminar – a trial of ideas, which formed a fairly common political base for the group. It was out of the question that we should concur to any particular fraction – partly because unity and not disintegration was strongest amongst the left wing, partly because there was a built in ideological barrier. One could say that the Anarchists was the grouping most close at hand, but establishing an official group ideology was far off for us.”
“Swedish folk music came to be of big importance -the cultural heritage were reawakened and reinterpreted: the same ear, the same calibration of listening that was used for The Rolling Stones could be used for Swedish folk music.”
“A rather instinctive intention with the music is that it shall describe contexts, interplay and organic growth, shape a conception of the world - an opposite of fragmentation, individual achievements and intellectual construction. The world is to be perceived as one body, a whole of inviolable parts. The minimalist repetition with slight changes gives associations of a slow growth, a cyclic process, of breathing, pulse, life, movement, machines. John Cage has said something about music being as audible time.
- Edited parts of Torbjörn Abelli’s A glorious mess.
The complete text can be downloaded at http:// hem.fyristorg.com/abelli /pscd.htm
Arne Ericsson
Arne (b 1942) came from the north of Sweden and was, like BoAnders, a student at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. In his own words “the huge and big heart of the times” made it easy to play unbounded and free. Being a very nice and humble man and sharing mutual musical interests with BoAnders he was soon involved with the early experiments in Pärson Sound. He traveled along side the band with his electric-cello but changed to a rebuilt electric-clavinet in late 1969. In the summer of 1972 though, he walked of, and left the rock-scene for good.
Thomas Tidholm
In the summer of 1969 Thomas Tidholm (b 1943) and Pärson Sound/ Harvester went separate ways. A bond between the band members still existed and they seemed doomed to return to each other over and over in different constellations. They meet again as the Hot Boys and in 1976 Tidholm team up with Thomas Mera Gartz and Torbjörn Abelli in the band Arbete och Fritid, after a short incarnation as T-Gås and then finally recording Tidholms LP Obevakade ögonblick (Unguarded Moments) in 1984.
Tidholm traveled around the North American continent in 1966 hunting for poetry and music. In San Francisco he attended concerts at The Avalon Ball-room. He saw The Fugs several times at The Player’s Theater in New York. He bumped in to Bob Dylan and interviewed Terry Riley for Sweden’s National Radio. Parts of this interview were broadcasted in conjunction with Riley’s visit to Sweden were he performed the piece Olson 3 together with pupils from a music school just outside of Stockholm.
The Persson affair began in the spring of 1967 when Tidholm, while working on an article for the magazine Nutida Musik (Modern Music), met BoAnders Persson and joined Pärson Sound. The imprint that Tidholm made on the band is not only visible in the lyrics, this is especially notable on the LP Sov gott Rose-Marie (Good night Rose-marie) by International Harvester. Thomas, “the motor”, elu-cidates a good deal about the group’s concept through his anarchistic personage. Creating wider boundaries - and then breaking them. The young poet Tidholm began as an Ornette Coleman on a plastic saxophone. He traveled with BoAnders & Co and then settled down as a countryman, beekeeper, shepherd, but always as the artist, with his incredible sense for the very small, but still very big, words. As a drama author, photographer, agitator, creator of children’s TV programs, philosopher and writer. Above all he has made countless fantastic books for children together with his wife Anna-Clara. Last year he debuted as a novel writer and the future is, as we all know, unwritten.
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