Småland’s debut album, Ljudspårsmusik Vol. 1, is the imagined soundtrack to the book Girlfriend in a Coma by Canadian author Douglas Copeland. The novel tells the story of a group of friends growing up in Vancouver in the late 1970s. On a snowy night in 1979, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, her circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory. And real life grows more and more surreal as the friends await Karen’s reawakening . . . and the subsequent end of the world.
Ljudspårsmusik Vol. 1 was recorded over two weekends in Gothenburg and Stockholm during winter 2017/2018. With its instrumentation of mainly various analogue synths and a proper, old-fashioned pump organ, the music itself bridges the gulf of past and present. Though at times both cinematic and lush, the music is firmly rooted in the native soil of Sweden, marrying the squeaks and the mechanical sounds of the pump organ with the warmth and the richness of vintage synthesizers.
Småland consists of Dag Rosenqvist, Thobias Eidevald and Christian Berg. Dag Rosenqvist has been releasing albums in different constellations since 2005, the main one nowadays being the duo From the Mouth of the Sun with American musician Aaron Martin. Thobias Eidevald makes one half of kraut/synth duo Domus who released their self-titled debut EP on Swedish label Malmö Inre in 2018. Christian Berg is a veteran on the Swedish synth music scene, perhaps recently most notably as part of Kite who over the last ten years has released six EPs and toured extensively throughout the world. The album Ljudspårsmusik Vol. 1 also features the otherworldy voice of Swedish singer Nicole Sabouné.
