Melodic, experimental post-folk three-piece consisting of one songsmith (F), one sound-painter (O) and one conceptual artist (A). All three of them mostly live and work in Malmö, Sweden and create music in a secluded 19th-century garden shack with the help of “darkness, voices, quiet instruments, curiosity, nightmares, melodies and terrible weather”, reportedly striving towards “impulsive beauty” and trying to avoid “rationalization, self-consciousness and irony”. Some people call their music surreal. A lot of people call the music soothing. Almost everyone says it makes them think of trees.
Fredrik return this spring with their third full length album, Flora. Recorded in their ramshackle garden studio last summer, Flora marks a departure from the wintry moods of the band’s first two outings as according to Fredrik, flower season is anything but limonades and hammocks. The music paints a vision of summer as the darkness beneath, a busy, feverish, sprawling organic chaos. The three members build songs from dense, wavering textures of voice, strings, brass and twinkly home-made folk instruments, all couched on top of a smattering of haywire orchestral drums and swirly electronics. In keeping with all their previous work, there’s the attention to detail, the unfailing knack for melody-making and the misadventures in hyper-soprano singing, not to mention Fredrik Hultin’s restful, abstract storytelling.