Cosmic Overdose

Twice a Man Announce Compilation

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

The legendary Swedish artists, Twice a Man, have announced a new compilation of their work. A three-CD set, Songs of Future Memories (1972-2922), with accompanying book, is now available for pre-purchase with an expected release date in January 2023. The label writes:

“Songs of Future Memories (1982-2022)” is the long overdue second anthology dedicated to the Swedish pioneers of electronic music, TWICE A MAN. On three CDs, the finest tracks from the 14 song albums have been collected and diligently remastered. The 7 instrumental works of the band’s catalogue have been deliberately left out of this project, which is intended to serve as a comprehensive musical guide through the band’s outstanding career spanning over 4 decades of groundbreaking works. In addition to the known material, the band has also added two new tracks.”

The included tracks are:

1. Move
2. Russian Tractors
3. Decay 04:06
4. Goat II
5. Balloons
6. Talking to the Wall
7. Observations From a Borderland
8. Fear
9. Across the Ocean
10. Distant Calls
11. Still in the Air
12. Divided Light
13. Tribal Ways
14. Back on Venus
15. Girl
16. Driftwood
17. Yellow Flowers
18. Crane Dance
19. Speed
20. Reality Built For Two
21. Shivanayama
22. Somebody Sang Your Name
23. Skylark
24. Shoe
25. Tranquil Moonlit Lake
26. Where Are You Now
27. Black
28. Presence
29. High in the Clouds
30. Cocoon 7 (Version)
31. Fireflies
32. Modern World
33. Lotus
34. Dahlia

FacebookTwitterWhatsappTelegramEmail

A Trip Back in Time: Cosmic Overdose

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

maxresdefaultIf you’re going to call your band Cosmic Overdose, you’re going to have to deal with some preconceptions. The first is that you are a bunch of hippies, sitting in fairy rings and tripping on mushrooms. The second is that your material consists of overblown guitar solos. If your music is actually varied and complex, inspired by dada, punk and experimental electronics, and you are meant to be warming up for New Order, then it might be time to rethink the name.

That’s not the whole story of Twice a Man, but it is how it usually opens. Before the Swedish godfathers of alternative music adopted their current guise – prompted by the promoters of the New Order show they were scheduled to join – they swam in many of the streams that were converging or competing in the second half of the 1970s. Punk was a rebellion against the high-art extremes of prog rock, but Cosmic Overdose found something to appreciate in both. Experimental and industrial music provided an antidote to pop, and the band absorbed the textures and freedom of the former while maintaining the accessibility of the latter.

PROCD070_Box.inddIf there is a surprise in the recently issued Cosmic Overdose box set from Progress Productions, it is just how much groove there is in their material. Over the course of two studio albums, the band belied their name with sets of jaunty, angular material that did as much to shake hips as expand minds. There are passages of smooth, prog-influenced pop, but they are respite between slabs of pure energy generated with a provocative spirit.

If English comparators were sought, then Blurt, Brian Eno and Cabaret Voltaire would figure, but the points of intersection would be limited. Cosmic Overdose defied definition as craftily as those artists, even if they sometimes drew inspiration and confidence from similar sources. The three albums packaged in Koko Total don’t fit a template, nor do they bear direct comparison to others. Cosmic Overdose were true originals.

r-63591-1199198361-jpegThe first album they shared with the world was Dada Koko. From the opening number, “Investera i Framtida,” with its synthetic waves, it was clear that something new was being born. “Modern Dadaister” isn’t a million miles from XTC’s jerkier sound, when it starts, before growing into something trippier. There is a moment of calm in the arc of the album before “Tanten” explodes with a burst of dark energy. The Arp synth returns on the album closer, “Råttan,” a track tailored for the alternative dancefloor.

r-294022-1199199027-jpegThe second album, 4668, showed that the Swedes had absorbed something from Joy Division. As the Manchester doom-meisters had done, Cosmic Overdose were starting to push through the punk chrysalis to emerge as something more electronic. Their transformation into Twice a Man would put them at the forefront of the Swedish synth scene and keep them in its top tier for a generation. In the meantime, fans had the brooding “Android,” the well-crafted “Nina Fontanell” and the charming “Liten Storsint” to contemplate.

cosmov3The third CD in this package collects live recordings, singles and strays from the archives. “Observation Galen” from 1979 is here with its B-side, “Isolatorer.” Then there are live versions of “Suicide Case,” “Ruta Nr 1” and “Läckan” from a show the same year in Kalmar. They reveal a band confident in its presentation with spellbinding material. Further live sessions follow from shows in Oslo, Lund and Stockholm (with an appearance by Lars Falk on “Väx och Njut”) before the album closes with the single, “To Night.”

The quality of the recordings is excellent, and they open a window into the short time when art and punk overlapped with the electronics of the Futurists and the psychedelia of the proggists. Wire unpacked that confluence methodically over four decades, but Cosmic Overdose concentrated it into two albums and two singles and changed their name. What came next is a story for another day.

FacebookTwitterWhatsappTelegramEmail

Dan Söderqvist’s Solo Album Speaks Volumes Without Words

by coldwarnightlife
written by coldwarnightlife

0004083404_10Dan Söderqvist is well-known as one-half of the electronic group Twice a Man, but he began his musical career in 1969 as a guitarist with Älgarnas trädgård, a progressive rock band. The experimental tradition that he grew up with, artistically, is evident in his first solo album, A Defence of Poetry: there are no spoken words, but the title references an essay by Shelley, in which the importance of sound to poets is emphasised.

Gathered in this album are six tracks, of which five are original compositions dated between 1989 and 2013. Despite their diverse inspirations and backgrounds, there is a definite unity between the instrumental songs. They are held together by the human voice, which is emulated in its collective, choral form to make sounds but not words, and naturalistic references that give each track a feeling of place or time.

“The Cherry Orchard” is a piano-based piece that sits neatly between the processed sound of Harold Budd and the naturalistic work of Virginia Astley, but it has dimensions of its own. Söderqvist explains in the notes that:

The last play by Chekhov has always inspired my mind. Among all Russian literature that I fancied in my youth it stood out as the essence of nostalgic sentiments. I have not yet had the honour to work with the play in whole. As an example i wanted to make a fragmented version. Reading it through i found the character of Ljubov, the mistress of the house so intriguing, that I decided to make a piece with some of her lines from the play. The atmosphere of lost childhood, the beauty of her garden, now in jeopardy of the axe, evokes memories of her life, of lost dreams… It`s melancholic, a feeling I love and know perhaps too well.

“November, You Humming Mist” begins with an Asian percussion style, before synthetic strings waft in, coming in layers like cool air blowing through bamboo. Harsher organ sounds emerge from the fog, rising and falling, before giving way to wind chimes and a fragile tranquility.

Tension returns with “Nacht,” which is built around the spine of a looped string hit and gradually becomes more rhythmically complex before dissolving into choral sounds. Night is followed by “Morgen,” which makes use of processed found sound and draws the choral material more prominently into the mix. These tracks are companion works, composed following the death of Söderqvist’s mother, but they work organically as a preparatory stage for the samples and synthetic strings of “After Life You Will Hear Voices of Your Childhood”, which was commissioned for a dance performance in Gothenburg. As a reference point, “After Life…” has some echoes of Pierre Perret’s legendary cassette, Gaia, la Terre, but it is distinctively in Söderqvist’s style.

The album closes with “Heilige Dankgesang,” in which all earlier traces of brooding and anxiety are expurgated. Like movements of a symphony, each track has its place on the arc of the album, and Beethoven’s song of thanksgiving is imbued with pastoral calm. The album doesn’t just end; it comes to rest in a place that T.S. Eliot famously described as “the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering.”

FacebookTwitterWhatsappTelegramEmail

Copyrighted image. Enjoy it on our site!