** 2025 Stock. Original 1983 Copies that may show some signs of long storage wear. ** Swedish Contemporary Music is a concise yet telling snapshot of how composition in Sweden evolved once the shocks of the postwar avant‑garde had been fully absorbed and metabolised. Rather than a broad survey, the LP narrows its focus to four distinct voices - Mats MP Persson, Jan Sandström, Lars Sandberg and Tommy Zwedberg - whose pieces collectively sketch a terrain where timbre, space and structural clarity matter as much as pitch. Released as FYLP 1030 on Fylkingen Records, the album belongs to the same ecosystem as the Stockholm new‑music society’s legendary text‑sound and electroacoustic documents, but here the emphasis is firmly on instrumental and mixed chamber work, the kind that tests performers’ precision as much as listeners’ concentration.
The compilation is conceived in dialogue with the International Society for Contemporary Music’s Swedish section, which has historically used Fylkingen as a platform to present new works by both emerging and established composers. The focus is not on a single aesthetic but on a shared set of questions: how to write for tape and instruments as equals; how to integrate live electronics and extended techniques without turning them into mere effects; how to let text, voice and noise function as musical parameters in their own right. Across the LP, listeners can expect a spectrum that runs from finely chiselled chamber writing - where timbral detail and silence are as important as pitch - to dense electroacoustic constructions that exploit the full spatial and dynamic range available in the studio, often embracing montage techniques first cultivated at Fylkingen in the 1960s.
What gives Swedish Contemporary Music its coherence is the specific institutional and historical context from which it emerges. Fylkingen has been a crucible for electronic and experimental work since it presented Sweden’s first electroacoustic concert in 1952 and some of the earliest European computer‑music events in 1963. Over the decades it has hosted figures such as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Åke Hodell, Lars‑Gunnar Bodin and Sten Hanson, and the pieces on Swedish Contemporary Music carry that lineage forward, informed by text‑sound composition, intermedia practice and improvisation without being reducible to any one of them. The LP thus operates as both document and relay: a snapshot of a particular moment in Swedish contemporary music, and a reminder that Fylkingen’s role has always been to keep the field open - a space where composers and sound artists can continue to test what “new music” might mean.
