Carl Abrahamsson: Understen is coming to get you!

Understen's Imaginär Koherens album from 2010 swept by underneath the radar of everyone, including Understen themselves. That's why it's a necessary privilege to be able to re-release this little gem of improv lo-fi psychedelia via the Highbrow Lowlife imperium-emporium.

Way back when, in 1987 to be exact, two frustrated Stockholm youngsters got together to make some music. I was one of them. Jan Ekman was the other one. We called the band White Stains. That initial phase got me actively interested in making music and that is something that hasn't really changed, ever. To make noise or rock'n'roll or both together with Jan was a lot of fun and I guess the peak of our first phase of collaboration was when we played at the Hultsfred festival in 1989, with Thomas Tibert at the mixing desk. This concert can be heard in its entirety on the The Somewhat Lost Horizon album, which will, incidentally, also be re-released this autumn.

Carl A & Jan E, Stockholm 1987. Photo © Max Fredrikson.

Jan drifted away as new folks entered the White Stains music machine but luckily we stayed in touch and remained friends. I guess it was inevitable that we would some day make music again. In 2009 we started talking about it and one thing led to another. This another would eventually be called Understen.

The result of these very loose sessions became the album Imaginär Koherens ("Imaginary Coherence"). It was released in a nice little box with a CD, one photo by me, one drawing by Jan, and some other stuff. Only 100 made and still not sold out... Ha! Always the same old story! Anyway, a nice box and, most importantly, a very nice album.

Acoustic guitars, improvised percussive bits, ranting, letting the MicroKorg run amok, voices, noises... Hard to describe, isn't it? We talked about David Crosby and Hawaiian hippies a lot, but those goals are hard to reach. Impossible perhaps. Or maybe we actually succeeded too well and transcended our own expectations? I think it's probably more of a David Crosby "zone" or a Hawaiian hippie "flow", to contemporize the lingo a bit.

A joyous disclaimer: The album was made entirely without music software, sequencers, data bloaters, left brain halves, causal rhythms, optitech inflation, terrabytean delusions of grandeur, quantized thought processes, syncopations filled with opinions, Aristotelean assumptions, Euclidian prejudices, etc. It's just wild human stuff plugged into your ears basically. That's how we think Understen should be – and sound.

As the album is now unleashed into an unexpecting digisphere, it might be nice to clean up some of the original videos too. The first one out is Returbiljetten - ej giltig!, which features our dear friend Sylvie Walder on beautiful ethereal piano. This one can be seen on the Highbrow Lowlife YouTube Channel, or, if you're too lazy to click the link, just watch it right here!

Understen's Imaginär Koherens is released by Highbrow Lowlife on September 26th, 2013. Stream where you stream, buy where you buy. But why not buy at the Highbrow Lowlife webstore?