Arbete Och Fritid "Se Upp För Livet "1976 Swedish
The long-running Swedish ensemble was founded in 1968 by saxophone player Roland Keijser and trumpeter Torsten Eckerman. During the early years, the leaders searched the perfect modus operandi between their emotional attachment to Nordic melodiousness and their talent for folk-jazz thematic developments. The departures of key personnel after the first two records pushed the band even further into straddling these strongly divergent musical pathways. The results were, most of time, satisfactory, especially in live format. During concerts, the band often indulged in longer forms, ingeniously stringing familiar themes together and interspersing them with tentative improvisational departures. At the same time, the utilization of traditional folk motifs expanded into other cultures – the Balkans, the Baltics and Asia Minor.
The radical transformation came after the founders’ departure in 1975. A+F were then joined by two veterans anointed with Sweden’s most celebrated “psychedelic” pedigree – Torbjörn Abelli and Thomas Mera Gartz. Both had previously been involved in a continuously evolving jamming vehicle known under a variety of monikers: Pärson Sound, International Harvester, Harvester and, last but not least, Träd Gräs och Stenar. Their arrival critically affected Arbete och Fritid’s sound and pushed the band towards a bolder form of rock jam.
Although the two records created by this line-up are among Sweden’s most accomplished experimental rock statements from the era, they do show signs of stylistic strain. The psych-jam format proved largely incompatible with the lingering affection for Scandinavian folk.
Roland Keijser’s and Kjell Westling’s subsequent ‘return’ resulted in the recording of a deeply sentimental, charming acoustic document that remained in stark contrast to the wild A+F of the late 1970s.
Multi-instrumentalist Ove Karlsson was the only member of A+F who played with the band throughout its entire existence. Only his direct testimony could reveal the compromises behind the band’s double life. .
Födelsemusik
From deep silence, Ove Karlsson’s furtive cello adsorbs airy, sustained notes on the C-string. Thomas Gartz’s indifferent mallets stumble on the large tom-tom. One by one, spacey guitars lurk from their dens, howling like a pack of orphaned wolves. True to this pictorial metaphor, Tord Bengtsson’s and Ove Karlsson’s strings recede in tremolos, but advance in glissandos. Meanwhile, the mallets progression remains frail and ineffectual, affecting the overall atmosphere of this lazy jam. Whenever the energy does swell up, it dies down almost instantly, taking the joule content to negligible levels. Finally, the multiple guitar barking becomes more intrusive, densifying the texture with echo, fuzz and wah-wah. Although the drummer maintains the simplistic meter, the tempo picks up, and the shadow of Träd Gräs och Stenar’s is upon us. Supported by bass and guitar tremolos, Bengtsson construes an irradiant, magnetic ascension. The pace stays languorously laid-back, à la Grateful Dead, and dangerously epigonic by 1976. The utopistic pathos of guitar-led anthem is, however, dense enough to escape the pretentiousness of the 1970s’ rock. When the volume increases a flute saves the band from too conventional a climax (Who is this? The mysterious Jan Zetterquist credited on the cover? We know that neither Keijser nor Westling appear in this session). Transparent flute runs subjugate mallet-drum rolls and a guitar drone. The ensemble slowly climbs down the dynamic slope, leaving the cumulonimbus of feedback behind them. The final fade-out is as slow as the fade-in was. It is down to Ove Karlsson on the cello again…
