E321 is a trio from Västerås, whose music I’d like to place in the post rock domains, with some influences from progressive rock and fusion. Here it’s not about verse-chorus-songs but longer pieces of musical exploration of various moods around a certain theme. It’s mostly instrumental, but they add some thoughts with spoken word-like vocals. It’s music that grows with each listen as I get into the songs more and more. Listen for yourself here in “They Call Us Human” from their EP “Among the Trees”.

E321 on Facebook – on Spotify – on Bandcamp

Here’s a song by Jon Mårtensson, who creates music which he calls melancholic field recording-hop. This means that he records sounds out in the field, turns them into rhythms and tones, and then combines them with electronica into compositions and songs. Listen here in the new track “Katolsk magnetism” (“Catholic Magnetism”).

Jon Mårtensson on Soundcloud

The unpredictable, but still fascinating Scraps of Tape, hailing from Malmö, released the new EP “Orka allt” in May. There you’ll find five songs that jumps between beautiful melancholic reflections, post rock, instrumental noise rock and more. Here’s the title track.

Scraps of Tapes’ site – on Facebook – on Spotify – on Wimp – on Rara

The experiment-happy Cyan Marble, which I wrote about in the Autumn, is back with a new EP, “Maya”. And also this time they bring their sense for the theatrical and their unchecked progressive rock. Try the starting track here below.

Cyan Marble on Facebook – on Bandcamp

Monogatari is a band created by Sebastian Ungh. With an open mind for what could be contained in music, he started writing and recording songs in 2007 with the help of instruments from all over the world; old and new, toys and real instruments joined together in the songs and was collected in the debut album “It May Have Seemed Like a Sign of Hope That the Birds Followed Them Out Into the Vastness of the Open Sea”.

A live line-up was formed, which after several changes ended up in a septet that performs using a lot of instruments like banjo, charango, accordion, guitars, drums, bouzouki, violin, ukulele, toy piano, chimes, stylophone, harmonica and percussion in various forms. A few weeks ago the new album “One Step Forward and Two Steps Back?” was released, which is the first one in an album trilogy, to be launched during this year. The records will each have it’s own direction, with this first one having an acoustic, peaceful vibe with a lot of guitars and vaious string instruments. It’s rather naked, with folk-influences from many places and sometimes with a fairytale-ambience to it. Listen to a taste from the album here below.

Monogatari’s site – on Facebook – on Spotify – on Soundcloud