Here is the latest single from pop experimental Fortune Cookies Blues, “Where Is My Plough”. This suggestive, dreamy song was created around the sound of falling water drops from a leaking tap and all the chords and harmonies have their origin in the band playing along to this sample, a sample which is still in the song.

The band name is a little different and I asked them how they came up with it:

Originally Fortune Cookies Blues is the name of a little piece of art music, and this name simply stuck in the back of the head about ten years ago. When this project was starting to take shape, the name surfaced again. It soon became the working name, even before the songs were named. Initially it was the sound and the feeling of the name that felt instinctively right, and the more we worked with the music the more fitting the significance of the name felt.
FCB’s songs and lyrics is grasping after the feeling of not being comfortable with the place in the fate lottery you have reached, a longing for something abstract “else” or “elsewhere”. Like a sorrow and a longing in one, a blues over the text line from the fortune cookie.
(translated from Swedish)

This is the band’s second single and you can listen to the songs together with several remixes on Spotify and there’s also music on their Facebook page where you can follow the band.
Below you’ll find a remix by Swedish duo Liquidizer and you can listen to the original song in the video. The videon is created by the Estonian artist Ulla Saar.

Where Is My Plough (Liquidizer remix)

Tenonsaw is a Swedish-Irish duo with the members Salt Eriksson and Thomas Luke. In the Autumn they first released the debut album “Beginnings”, and later, in November, the EP “Pact”. It’s not that easy to describe their music and I can’t really find any close comparisons among other artists.

The foundation, and what they also started with, is folk music; melancholic and with Tom’s acoustic guitar accompanying Salt’s sad song melodies. Soon, electronica, guitar figures and other sounds add new layers in a minimalistic way. Scales clashes with other scales and new layers add other types of emotions, which sometimes create slightly chaotic situations where there are no rules. They describe the ambition themselves:

…create emotional songbased music, based on the principle on finding the balance between clarity and confusion and between ugliness and beauty.

There is a large span between the songs, where they sometimes lie very close to folk music tunes and sometimes have left it completely behind. You can listen to the title track from the EP here below, and the rest of the songs are available on their Bandcamp page. You can find the duo on their site and on Facebook.

The name Tenonsaw they found in a dictionary while looking for a suitable band name. They liked the association with sharpness and details, and that it’s a small saw, not a big dangerous one.

Pact

A Dutch musician that has moved to Sweden may ring some bells. A. S. Swanski, though, produces music in quite different genres than the late Cornelis did. Here it’s about electronica, of the experimental kind, on the border to ambient, often with industrial vibes and sometimes with a feeling of mystique.

The song here below, “The Assassination”, was largely inspired by the parliament elections in both Holland and Sweden last year, and is a part of an EP with the same title. Presently he’s working on a full length album, to be released later this year. You can follow A.S. Swanski and listen more on his site.

The Assassination

Pokerface, aka Staffan Heidevik, released his new album “Transeo” a little while ago. It’s an exciting album full of experimentation and if I attempt to describe it I’d say it’s about a dense and dramatic mix of  jazz-electronica and progressive rock , largely instrumental. Sometimes I hear something that reminds me of David Bowie and his experimental music from the nineties.

Interestingly half of the songs are recordings from concerts, which I really like as it brings out the depth and the grandness in the music and a sensation of a massive live experience.

The album is a collaboration between Staffan, guitarist Mattis Karlsson, drummer Olle Prim and multi-instrumentalist Per Ericsson plus a number of guest musicians, among them Mike Lloyd and jazz virtuoso Bryan Baker.

Listen more on Spotify and visit Pokerface on Facebook.

Krtek Ve Snu
Beginnings and Endings

Already the title of Chicagojazzen’s new album “Misantropi för nybörjare” (“Misanthropy for beginners”) challenges and plants questions. And the music lives up to this challenge. It’s instrumental, experimental, lo-fi, but basically beautiful creations with contagious melody hooks and rhythms.

It feels like someone has taken a perfectly carved statue with perfect lines, and in an artistic pathos used axe, hammer and saw on it, to make it more real. Or maybe just to challenge, or expose something. Listen here below in a couple of tracks and in a live recording by SVT.
Visit Chicagojazzen on Myspace.

Dagens Outfit
VI

Mi Mes Favorito Es Junio (live from Berwaldhallen):