Tussilago Fánfara
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the Berlin School relocated to Sweden, well… Wonder no longer. That’s possibly an unfair, and certainly reductive, reading of Tussilago Fánfara, the only album by the late seventies electronics duo of Ingemar Ljungström and Mikael Bojen, aka Anna Själv Tredje. While there are similarities between these four tracks and the more stripped-back Berlin schoolkids, and several wags have already compared Tussilago Fánfara to Klaus Schulze, Anna Själv Tredje’s only album has a becalmed radiance that’s fairly unique; these compositions meander, for the most part, only really getting worked up halfway through album centrepiece “Den Barbariska Söndagen,” where the organ player suddenly wakes up for long enough to get the arpeggios chugging, while slippery synth blat and cresting cymbals act as drama, suspense, punctuation, all at once. The great pleasure of Tussilago Fánfara is the ease with which Bojen and Ljungström let this music spill out of their kit, and its laissez-faire brilliance makes it all the weirder that they’ve apparently all but disowned the project.