Sweden
Mark Kidel
Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).There are no comedies here – late mid-life brought out the full darkness of the Swedish director’s palette – although Fanny and Alexander both delights and shocks as it combines a characteristic lightness of touch, including a much-loved farting uncle and a child’s eye view of adult rituals, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Some of what’s nourishing the debut album by Sweden’s Dina Ögon is evident. A Bossa Nova jazz-pop essence evokes Brazil’s Quarteto em Cy. There’s a trip-hop undertow. Vocal lines bring to mind Free Design. Less easy to pinpoint is a melodic sensibility which seems to be derived from local traditions; echoing the sort of fusion pioneered by Jan Johansson’s Jazz på svenska and Merit Hemmingson when she reframed folk music on the Svensk folkmusik på beat albums.It’s likely Dina Ögon – the name translates as “your eyes” – are mindful of all or some of this, but what they’ve come up with doesn’t Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood. Leaving her parental home to work with eight other girls in a lavish but mouldering hotel, Rafa grapples with what it means to be a woman in a world literally and culturally saturated with gender-based violence.Gothic and mythic in atmosphere, Strega is a novel that fights back, through occult and secular rituals, through a collective of young women who refuse to become dolls, and through its witchy love of things – an enchanted concatenation of lipsticks, liquorice, hairclips and jewellery. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ruben Östlund builds theatres of cruelty for the elite, petri dishes for pretension and hypocrisy. After Force Majeure’s family implosion at a ski resort and The Square’s art crowd Armageddon, Triangle of Sadness casts off with a superyacht which becomes a vomitorium when it hits choppy waters, in his second consecutive Palme d’Or-winner.The titular triangle is the facial furrow dug by feelings, disfiguring for models such as Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are in a relationship of algorithmic convenience. Their most searing scene is drawn directly from Östlund’s life, as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to the male-dominated art world.Not that she sought fame: she stipulated that her abstract work (she also painted portraits and landscapes to make money) should not be shown for 20 years after her death. She was more or less ignored until she was celebrated in a ground-breaking show at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018 (and there’ll be an exhibition Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now six years since Goat last released an album of new songs and, despite a live disc and one of B-sides and other odds and sods that have appeared in the meantime, its Requiem title suggested that it might have been their last call to arms. However, do not fear, our favourite pagan psychedelicists are back in the ring and on top form with a lively soundtrack that is more than enough to drag even the most dancefloor phobic up on their feet to shake a leg.Yet again, these mysterious mask-wearing Scandinavians defy any easy classification though, taking in 70s funk grooves, Afrobeat Read more ...
Mark_Kidel
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.Most of them are as dark as they come. The Scandi Noir that has flooded our screens in the last few years is black in its own way, and despair is seldom absent from it, but "Bergman noir" is something else. Relentlessly – and the eight films in this set, from The Virgin Spring (1960) to The Silence (1963), from Through a Glass Darkly (1961) to Persona (1966), are equally relentless Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The third album from Stockholm rowdies Viagra Boys doesn’t muck about with what they do, but it’s more persistently punkin’ than their last. There’s more than a snifter of Iggy and the Stooges in both the vocal style and the raucous over-amped riffage, but Viagra Boys spice their sound with electronics and, where early-Seventies Ig was always about untrammelled “Raw Power”, this lot are as happy to offer wry lyrical critiques among the all-out stompers.Thus, goofin’ rock’n’roll trashiness such as “Troglodyte”, which comes on like The Cramps discovering Krautrock, sits easily alongside songs Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh Cherry output, the esoteric jazzual spirit that’s imbued her last couple of albums. The Versions is a crafted, mellow, late night affair containing material different enough from the originals to be interesting, even if it cannot top their cheeky hip hop-pop potency.Take the version of 1989 cut “Heart” by Los Angeles violinist-singer Sudan Archives, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of form, proportions, colours, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections,” he wrote. He lived on the island for 40 years and made several films there, including Through a Glass Darkly, Persona and the TV series that inspired millions of divorces, Scenes from A Marriage.In Bergman Island, the Swedish director is an inspirational presence, Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Contrary to the title’s implication, there initially seems to be little movement in Arch of Motion. A note is held on an organ. Then another note comes in and is also held. Chords build up gradually. Maybe one or two ascending or descending notes come and go. And that seems to be it.But when Track Five arrives, the mood brightens and the sonic pallete becomes more broad. The drone on “Mending (Light Pressure)” might be an analogue synth. Next, “Conversation” adds a breathy wordless voice – celestial, wraith-like. After this, the crepuscular “Inhale” features what seem to be actual words. In Read more ...