The primary raw material for Dungen’s music is time. By now, you’ve almost certainly heard about the shaggy Swede’s “retro” psychedelic washes, his love for Jimi Hendrix, and his penchant for heady jams that recall the folk, rock, and psychedelia of the late ’60s and early ’70s.
You’ve probably heard about long hours in the studio, where Gustav Estjes – the brain, body, and heart of Dungen – plays nearly all instruments (but for some random exotica and the guitar solos played by primary collaborator Reine Fiske). Maybe you’ve even read stories about epic song lengths (his first album, Dungen, weighs in at nearly 45 minutes with a mere three tracks).
What none of this illustrates, however, is the way time stretches, slows, and grinds to a standstill in the space of a Dungen song, or the way his albums evoke past, present, and future occurring simultaneously.
On Dungen’s upcoming album, Tio Bitar, this feat of aural metaphysics is accomplished in smaller, more digestible bites. With the exception of “Mon Amour” – weighing in at just shy of nine minutes – Tio Bitar is a marvelous distillation of Dungen’s psych-rock seizures; with song lengths that suggest pop or punk rather than the acid-flavored bands that are Dungen’s obvious forbearers, the aura of spontaneous epiphany is (paradoxically?) more profound than it was on the seemingly endless jams of the first album, as though the previous songs held ballast that kept the music from truly taking flight.
The shift from hypotaxis to parataxis cost Dungen nothing in scope. This brevity is not, however, reflective of the process that created it.
“I’ve been working on it [for] maybe six or seven months,” says Estjes over the phone. “We recorded in a house in the South of Sweden. We finished in a studio in Stockholm.”
“It’s all different now when we all have MP3s. In the future, people are just going to download the chorus.” – Gustav Estjes
Estjes disarms even when tossing out statements that would sound like boasts coming from any other lips.
“I do all of the producing myself. Of course, I had some help from an engineer in Stockholm,” he says when I ask about the production, and I can almost hear him shrug as he says it.
He possesses childlike transparency, refreshing candor, and maddening humility. It becomes clearer as we speak that the retro tag is inappropriate, not because his music doesn’t hearken back to the earlier eras so easily associated with his sounds, but because the music – and the way he speaks about it – betrays an emotional connection to the art that’s more organic than the museum-grade homage paid by many a classic rock enthusiast.
Indeed, the content of the songs closely reflects Gustav’s inner world. His lyrics are in Swedish, so I’m forced to ask him to help me out on their meaning.
“The lyrics could mean more than one thing.”
Are they abstract, then?
“Not that abstract. It’s honest – in the sense that some Swedes think is too honest.”
He laughs sheepishly.
“Thoughts and ideas about life . . . The second song [on Tio Bitar], ‘Familj,’ could be about your relationship to family or friends.”
Interviewing an intuitive artist is a unique challenge. Pretentious rock journalists (guilty) are always trying to get at the theories and game plans that make music happen; an instinctual artist is resistant to our attempts to saddle them with concepts. Who has time for concepts when music is erupting volcanically from the subconscious?
“I really try not to think of what people may think. I don’t want that to affect me at all. I try to just get to music.”
I wonder aloud if he could at least describe what makes this album different from previous output.
“Hmmm . . . Less ‘sound collage’ thinking. I don’t know why; it just came out that way. There are shorter songs.”
Was this the result of a different approach to songwriting?
“No, I think it was more an accident. Often I start with chords on some instrument, piano, or guitar. Sometimes I start with beats and rhythms, and a groove will come with that.”
Estjes first began recording out of love for hip hop. Searching for samples led him to old folk, rock, jazz, and psychedelic recordings, which in turn led him to learn to play the instruments he was sampling…which isn’t to say that he didn’t bring some musical knowledge to table at the beginning.
“My first instrument was…piano, guitar, fiddle…I don’t remember which was first. We were sent to music school when we were kids, but there was always music in the family. I have two brothers – one older, one younger. My older brother is into electronic music; my younger brother plays violin, and is into folk music. Not professionally, either of them, but they are very musical.”
This natural curiosity about instruments is primed to lead him down new and interesting paths.
“Right now, my favorite instrument is the turntable. I’ve been practicing a lot. I’ve really been into hip hop for the last year or so. I’ve been really liking ’80s hip hop. Stones Throw is always making good music. Madlib and Madvillain – I like them a lot. If I do something like that, it might need to be something other than a Dungen project, because Dungen is connected to this other sound.”
Like many a hip hop artist, Dungen blurs the line between producer and performer, using some of rock’s quaintest tools with the aid of forward thinking technology.
For all the scratchy, analog-sounding ambience, “The [Dungen] recordings are made on a computer. We used old instruments and old microphones – I like dirty sounds – but I record on a computer.”
His output isn’t even so album-oriented as it may sound.
“It’s all different now when we all have MP3s. In the future, people are just going to download the chorus. I listen to songs; I don’t play whole albums when I’m walking. Sometimes, at home, I’ll listen to a whole record.”
I’m fascinated by this line of reasoning, and am tempted to drag something more specific out of him. But the man known to listeners as Dungen has done it again: taken the simple ingredients of a hack writer’s interview and used them to stretch time.
We surpassed our allotted time, and yet still had spoken for less time than it seemed due to how willingly I had gotten lost in the conversation. Fortunately for me, I have Tio Bitar, wherein I can get lost in Gustav Estjes’s mind to greater effect than some mere journalist could ever extract through mere conversation.
– Story by Lyam White, photos respectively by Karl Max and Filip Meichsner