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A preview of ‘Häxan’ (‘The Witch’) the latest from Swedish psych-prog rockers Dungen
11.02.2016
11:29 am
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Last year my #1 top favorite album was Allas Sak by proggy Swedish psychrockers Dungen. As I prattled on at some length about it then, I’ll direct you now to that earlier post from 2015 if you are interested, but let me add that I still play this album all the time. As in all the time all the time. It’s just that good. Whenever you hear someone lamenting that they “don’t make ‘em like that anymore” sit ‘em down, stick a joint in their mouth, slap some headphones on ‘em and then play them Allas Sak and watch them convert. They do still make ‘em like that.

Before that album was even released apparently there was already another full-length Dungen project in the can, their all-instrumental original score to German director Lotte Reiniger’s early animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed, based on an Arabian Nights fable by way of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, took three years to make, and was animated with a unique silhouette “shadow show” animation technique Reiniger herself had invented using cardboard cutouts and thin sheets of lead placed under a camera. Reiniger’s original musical collaborator was German composer Wolfgang Zeller who wrote his score to match the onscreen action and “photograms” were created for orchestras to follow along with. Although all known German nitrate masters of the film had basically disintegrated, it was painstakingly restored by German and British technicians in the late 1990s using the Desmetcolor process and has become well known to modern day cinema buffs.
 

 
Dungen’s re-imagined score for The Adventures of Prince Achmed—released by Mexican Summer later this month (Novermber 25th, this year’s “Black Friday” Record Store Day, to be exact) as Häxan (“The Witch”) is a bubbling caldron of everything great about the Dungen sound, but even more dramatic, mystical and moody. Freer. More extreme. The sound of the album varies a lot, but the flute and Mellotron brings to mind Moody Blues or Focus in the prettier moments, and in the harder-rocking sections Pink Floyd’s “Nile Song” and even riff-heavy Sabbath-influenced stoner rock. As I type this, I’ve only listened to it once all the way through, but I fully expect I’ll be playing Dungen’s mighty Häxan longplayer as much as I played its glorious predecessor.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.02.2016
11:29 am
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Swedish jam/psych/progrockers Dungen have released the best fucking album of 2015
10.13.2015
07:14 pm
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I’ve been thinking of how to get across my extreme enthusiasm for the new Dungen album Allas Sak all day and I can’t quite figure out how to express it the way I feel it. Perhaps the “ALL CAPS” emphatic approach? Might work because I FUCKING LOVE THIS ALBUM. Or I could tell you how I’ve probably played Allas Sak from start to finish at least 200 times since I got the promo CD back in September. It might even be more than that. Perhaps a lot more! No seriously, I have played the shit out of this album.
 

 
There’s the fact that, if push came to shove, I’d definitely put this one on my Desert Island Discs list. After less than two months, Allas Sak has become one of my top ten albums of all time, effortlessly (and permanently) joining such classics as Abbey Road, L’histoire de Melody Nelson, Uncle Meat, Bitches Brew, Court and Spark, Led Zeppelin III, Sticky Fingers, Alice Coltrane’s World Galaxy and The Basement Tapes. I’m dead serious. This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. This year or ANY year. And it’s even sung in Swedish. I have no idea what they’re singing about, but that matters not in the least. The music of Dungen is like having gold poured into your ears.
 

 
There is no doubt in my mind that Allas Sak is a musical masterpiece. In a perfect world, Dungen would be selling like Adele or Beyoncé. That might be slightly farfetched to expect for a Swedish psychedelic progrock jam band, but then again the music is simply that good. That instantly classic. I can imagine people who don’t even like music that much, or own that many albums, falling in love with Allas Sak. It’s just that fucking amazing.

I kinda feel like a teenager raving about his favorite group, but having read me ranting and raving this far, don’t you just want to hear the music? Good plan!

First off, to hear Allas Sak in its glorious entirety, you can listen to this YouTube playlist. Pay careful attention to “Franks Kaktus,” track 4.

And here’s a brand new exclusive live performance for Dangerous Minds readers, courtesy of Mexican Summer Records. Dungen performing “Sova” live at Trädgården. Directed by Valerie Toumayan
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.13.2015
07:14 pm
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The amazing, massive, oceanic psych of the amazing Amazing. A DM premiere
01.27.2015
10:46 am
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I love it when a record takes me unawares and blows me away. It depends so much on context, sometimes a great album will just not impress you at all because you’re hearing it in the wrong situation, but when the stars align for a record and its listener, daaaaaamn.

So here’s one—I took a pretty long car trip in December, alone, and in advance of my leaving, I burned about a dozen CDRs of downloaded music I’d been meaning to listen to but hadn’t gotten around to. One of those discs was the advance promo of Picture You, a forthcoming LP by a Swedish band endowed with the delightful name the Amazing, about whom I knew nothing except that they sported the guitarist from the psych-prog band Dungen, whom I like quite a lot.
 

 

 
I threw that disc in when I was a few hours into the trip, driving through the hills of southwestern PA, a stunningly beautiful place in autumn when the leaves are changing, and a stunningly desolate place in winter when the leaves have fallen off. The Amazing were absolutely perfect there, and I fell straightaway in love with the album. This may not be the most precisely apt description, but it’s the one that hit me immediately, and I’m really stuck on it. There’s a lot of the dreamy, soaring psych of Dungen to them (no surprise), but airy, free, untethered, and in parts, it has a lot of the ren-faire folkiness of Midlake or Fleet Foxes to it, tendencies that come through strongest in “Circles” and “The Headless Boy.” The Amazing’s music has a massive, oceanic spaciousness to it, and amid Pennsylvania mountains full of unsullied snow and dormant trees, its lengthy, mind-bending, powerfully moving explorations just flat out dazzled me, and I’ve given Picture You plenty of spinnage since that roadtrip. The rest of the world will be able to procure a copy and see exactly what I’m splooshing about in mid-February, but some of it can be heard now. Three weeks ago, the band published “The Headless Boy” to Soundcloud.
 

 
The official video for the album’s title track, “Picture You,” was released a week and a half ago.
 

 
And lastly, today it is DM’s privilege to premiere the song “Safe Island,” an expansive and wistful piece that turns on a dime from gorgeous dream pop into a brain-melting noise trip.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.27.2015
10:46 am
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