This part doesn’t even show up on the track listing, so it’s probably a last-minute addition to start the CD with a typical, hypnotic, soaring figure and get you in the mood!

This piece is interesting, of course, because it is the oldest recording from Trees, Grass and Stones – in their initial shape of Paerson Sound – available on recorded media. Another interesting note to make is that Folke Rabe produced the recording, when he was in his early thirties. His initiative had brought Terry Riley to Stockholm in the spring of the same year, 1967 – and Riley’s activities that spring had influenced Bo Anders Persson, Thomas Mera Gartz and Torbjörn Abelli.

Last week, 23rd February 2007, before the Kafé 44 concert, I was talking with Björn Abelli about Terry Riley’s In C, since he told me that Trees, Grass and Stones would play joint gigs with the Japanese group Acid Mothers Temple on the imminent TGS Japanese tour. I had recently received Acid Mothers Temple’s new recording of In C.

Everything comes together in obvious and strange ways, like were we flushing through wormholes of time and space.
The names Folke Rabe and Terry Riley keep appearing time and again in this context, like coded messages on the window of opportunity! There is good medicine in those names; a benevolent radiance; the good karmic essence of right livelihoods, of just causes and positive, healing energy, benefiting anyone within psychic reach!

Ten Minutes is a slowly and steadily swelling motion of relentless sound, pounding and screeching along across the terrain, forcefully persuading anyone up ahead of some kind of sustained imminence!
Already in this roaring mudflow of haunted drums and wailing, dark guitar sounds in the midst of an unidentifiable haze of sunlight and buzzing electricity, we hear characteristics of Trees, Grass and Stones, in an Impressionist catharsis.
The vocals that come on in a repetitious nursery rhyme-type canon make me think of Rolling Stones and some of their earlier endeavors, like Satisfaction, Time Is On My Side or Going Home, but the shamanistic glow of overtones and glittering sparks of spirit and electricity veer off into another kind of distance, off the planet, into immaterial realms that you can travel on the fuel of inspiration and honesty.

This is a tight, heavily corrugated event in the style of John Cale’s and Terry Riley’s Church of Anthrax (recorded on Columbia Records a couple of years later, in 1970), but taken even further down that Highway to Hell! In fact, I think that is a very good approximation of this crazy spellbinder and trance-dance swirl of electric dervishes lost in an inward spiral of conscience imploding loudly, in an almost intolerable intensity. Star-crusher music; a screeching, howling matter marauder of a black hole! The universe is bursting at its non-existent seams with energy, so why save it! Let those Planck-length strings vibrate at the Core of Everything! Let matter and energy swap places (They always do!) Thomas Tidholm’s soprano saxophone is decisive here.

The music is as heavy as on the previous track; Gartz’s and Fredholm’s holy throbbing rhythm and Abelli’s spiraling bass motion providing a solid rock bottom base for the slithering, winding, swaggering persuasion of Bo Anders Persson’s wizard axe! Thomas Tidholm’s saxophone emits golden garlands of unanswered questions from way inside the unforgiving might of the music. Arne Ericsson’s electric cello pleads and begs inside the endless pain of countless rebirths, and the elusive possibility of enlightenment and liberation glows at the other end of a bead of good deeds…

This is indeed the earliest piece on these two CDs, featuring Bo Anders Persson in one of his more experimental moods. He achieves a tremendously interesting music, and I can only lament the fact that Persson didn’t keep on keeping on in this experimental soloist direction in addition to his role in Trees, Grass and Stones! These are really early tape experiments, and yet he achieves a trance-drone-khoomei atmosphere that not many have been successful with. Through these whining, wobbling, soaring, many-facetted layers of sound he lures you into an enchanted realm of purple and violet dreams, at the very edge of everything. A Glimpse Inside the Glyptotec is a probe into the unknown, sort of reminding me of the last minutes of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Der Kinderfänger (The Pied Piper), composed 20 years later, in 1986. It is possible to associate to Terry Riley’s tape experiments in Bird of Paradise from 1965, but Persson’s sound rites reach deeper into the subconscious. On an atmospheric level, this Persson piece has a lot in common with Jan Bark’s long, trance-inducing work Memoria in Memoriam (1975), released by Kning Disk and Ronnells Antikvariat in a retrospective Folke Rabe/Jan Bark CD release – but it also soars in a loftiness that it has in common with Sune Karlsson’s tape work Megametentelosis from the 1980s.

Bo Anders Persson’s A Glimpse Inside the Glyptotec comes across in an elastic, gluey bee swarm urgency, that, in spite of the urgency, feels laidback: an anxiety attack in a very comfortable armchair!
I could listen to this for hours, so after I’m done with this text I’ll aim at a glass of Cragganmore and some hours of A Glimpse Inside the Glyptotec on repeat – or I’ll remix it and make it loooong! I wonder if Persson keeps more music like this stacked away on brittle reel-to-reel tapes in some rural cupboard of his?

Funny thing, I remember what I was doing during these days. I was 18, and had reached an age when I was allowed to work shifts (i.e. night shifts), so I had a summer job at the Glass Works of Oxelosund, with some of my best friends, amongst them Sune, who’d already lent me Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL and later turned me on to the music of Terry Riley, and Sture, who never stopped trying to recruit me for the Maoist movement. During breaks I was sitting in the space where we ate – a sort of glass cage in one corner of the large factory hall - reading New Writing In America.

In Stockholm Paerson Sound – precursors of Trees, Grass and Stones – were playing a restaurant in The King's Garden.
It was a rattling and clattering experience – as you might expect from a restaurant gig! – and the force was imminent and persuasive as usual, but inside the thunder you can perceive a tender, romantic streak; an acoustic softness behind electric eyes of steel. Gartz’s drumming is more varied than usual, spreading the silver of high-hats, which, when mixing with the golden tones of Tidholm’s flute, even reminds you of some San Francisco signs of the times, like The Charles Lloyd Quartet’s Love-In, recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium in 1967.

However, another aspect of the sound catches your ears here; the soaring sound in between sounds that rise like a haze; a summation of all other hectic sounds at play; an essence of the concert: a standing wave of sonorities that remains static and immense, like the sound on La Monte Young’s Day Of Niagara (1965) with Young, John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise and Marian Zazeela, or John Cale’s Stainless Gamelan (1965) and Sun Blindness Music (1967).
The stirring vocals on Paerson Sound’s One Quiet Afternoon creep upon you in an eerie sensation, as they slowly transform into a radio transmission of some kind of popular scientific lecture, like the Sunday afternoon ones my father always used to listen intently to, when I was a kid in the 1950s. Brilliant!

Starting off like a 1960s’ pop concert, with a jaunty vocal exclamation, it gets into a pop-minimalist repetitious figure, that keeps on keeping on, with certain varied vocal shreds detectable at the fringes, but not getting any interesting-where until the jolliness comes to a halt and Bo Anders Persson’s slow, droning extensions are let loose on top of the forest floor of drums and bass. Persson’s organ – I believe – paints in nuances of blue Nordic distances, conjuring up recollections of cow herding chalets in remote northern areas, where dreams and fantasies are as real, as hallucinatory real, as the dream of reality we call here and now and common sense.

The band builds a stronghold of dreamy silences inside their slowly growing intensity – and here – in the section called Till Indien - they have reached the full significance of what we call Trees, Grass and Stones: this shamanistic flow of sonorities through the dreamscape of Bardo existence; this irresistible and overwhelming pulsation of overtone-glimmering drones, in which you can hear so many sonic events appear, unfold and fold back, always opening new views, like in a poem by Tomas Transtromer called Roman Arches:

Here is my makeshift interpretation:

When the music ventures into the last part of this Night Studio medley, it also shifts atmosphere radically, switching from hallucinatory dreamscape flights into the laconic, poetic peculiarities of poet Thomas Tidholm, which he so brilliantly indulged in on his Obevakade Ogonblick (Unguarded Moments) album in 1985. Sov gott Rosemarie is written and performed in that same absentminded and empathic/laconic atmosphere: a more meditative and reflective Lucy Jordan, if you will (Sung by Marianne Faithful 1979, but nota bene: text written in 1973 by Shel “Bury Me In My Shades” Silverstein!)

May 1968… Wow! We’re in the very midst of the revolutionary late 60s here. In Paris, the students AND the workers very nearly overthrew the government, weakening de Gaulle’s position considerably. We recall Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and we remember Rudi Dutschke in Berlin. I have vivid recollections of the tennis match between Rhodesia and Sweden in Bastad, or rather of the absence of that match, since we stopped it and had the bastards fly to France to play without an audience.
I still have the ticket that I got from the demonstration administration; a valuable artifact from a successful uproar and determined action directe! We rode down to Bastad in a bus from Stockholm that stopped outside Nykoping to pick us up. Sherman Adams was aboard, and the driver kept playing Pata Pata through the night. After the mission was accomplished, we retreated from of a very hostile bourgeois town and spent the night with the leftists students in Lund, celebrating, drinking wine.

Many artistic spin-offs came out of the heavily political 1968, like a new kind of poster art – and graffiti sometimes was a viable method of spreading the word. Luigi Nono composed some works from the slogans written across the walls, like Non Consumiame Marx, which quoted the slogans from Paris walls of May 1968.

This piece from the outdoor concert at Skrubba School is massive, in intensity as well as in duration: one continuous, ear-shattering, spellbinding and hypnotic wave of will and determination for almost half an hour. For sure, this kind of music provides the uproar of Western Europe with a fitting musical raiment, and since Trees, Grass and Stones were in direct spiritual as well as physical proximity to the surge of change that flooded Europe – actually a part of it -, their music – especially when charged like this – was an obvious organic consequence of the continental outrage, while also fueling that same international outrage and its domestic expressions: it worked both ways; it was like breathing. Jimi Hendrix couldn’t have done it better. Skrubba levels with his Woodstock Spangled Banner howl; moves in the same piercing and offensive tour-de-force, in that same Holy Disappointment that explodes in the fat faces of the social monsters in power; those Masters of War that are destined for really lousy rebirths! I can envision the Huey helicopters flying in like deadly grasshoppers over the rice fields of Vietnam in this music by Trees, Grass & Stones. There’s so much rage in this music. Villages on fire. People on fire. Napalm. Agent Orange defoliating the country, still causing miscarriages and birth defects. “What are we fighting for, don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam…”

But Trees, Grass and Stones – still called Paerson Sound – plays out this enormous rage on a lawn by a school outside Stockholm, in a peculiar mix of atmospheres: that of fierce war and unbearable atrocities far away, and the cozy sense of safety, confidence and optimism that permeated the late 60s’ Sweden, where power was handed down from the loved patriarch Tage Erlander to his brilliantly intellectual and witty – even poetic – crown prince Olof Palme, who would stand up against our former brethren in the USA, in statements sharp and shiny as glimmering samurai swords!
Sweden was a place of orderliness and safety and a functioning social welfare system, basking in the social warmth at kitchen tables charged with hot, black coffee and home-baked wheat buns (except when it came to the Gypsies and the Saamis and those social and psychological outcasts who the system picked out for forced sterilization!)
Nixon was in charge in Washington; a paranoid but highly intelligent person, and, like all presidents of the United States, finally becoming a mass murderer and a war criminal. I think about Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof, who says, in one of his poems:

“Hur sällan mänskan äger makt att avstå makt” (“How rare for Man to have the power to abandon power”) (Tag och skriv, from Farjesang, 1941)

The enormity of the musical expression on this spring day of 1968 is haunting, almost scary. I feel indebted to Torbjörn Abelli for securing this recording for posterity. Music is so much more than music. Skrubba has really made me think.

It really feels like you’re stepping through the door into some barren rehearsal space, that, judging from its name, very well might be a factory hall of sorts. Trees, Grass & Stones’ music here sounds like heavy machinery at work, in a production process that mangles matter into desired shapes and forms. My own background as a worker at a steel plant in the 1970s reinforces this alloy of thoughts and feelings into a joyous and almost feverish recognition of the lust of heavy production; this magnificence of bridled might; flowing red iron and the molding of glowing slabs of steel into sheets of hardened qualities for ships’ hulls and heavy construction. Damn it, when the heaviest steel presses at the steelworks were jolted into full force, the lights flickered through town! That’s rock n’ roll, isn’t it? Rock n’ roll hard as Krupp steel! Hart wie Krupp Stahl!

Trees, Grass & Stones shake the Giants of the Earth here!

Yes, the birds weren’t mentioned in the booklet, but believe you me; they have a major role on this here recording! Especially the Redbreast (Erithacus rubecula) makes himself amply heard. In fact, either the microphones were placed just under a tree with this insistent singer, or Persson has added him later. Can’t tell, really – but probably the bird was sitting right next to the mike, and thus he happily keeps spreading his silver till this day with Trees, Grass & Stones on this unusually acoustic recording.

It’s really an easygoing summer atmosphere throughout, a far cry from the previous factory furnace of steel industry audio. The air is clean in this music, and velvety. It’s nothing less than a Trees, Grass and Stones pastoral; an idyll – probably with hippies gathered on blankets in the grass with wine bottles and cheese and grapes – and perhaps, perhaps some whiffs of wolf tobacco too! The melody sounds Western Eastern, you know, in the vein of what was happening in the U.K. those years, with groups like Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, and the great impact that one single 1965 LP album with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakah - (Portrait of a Genius: BGO Records BGOCD99) with Tala Rasa Ranga / Dhun / Tabla-Dhwani / Song From The Hills / Tala-Tabla Tarang / Gat Kirwani – had on the West, and in connection with On How To Live I especially hear similarities with Shankar’s and Alla Rakah’s Tala-Tabla Tarang and also Song From The Hills: “A Summer Day Reflection Song”, to quote Donovan Leitch. A devastatingly beautiful sound artifact from a Golden Age.

Have you heard Terry Riley’s layered saxophone improvisations with his “time-lag accumulator”? This is something in the vicinity of that, loosely speaking, because the saxophones are there – and other wind instruments as well – and the soaring dream-drone atmosphere hovers like mist in a moist forest in Blaslaten. The incident is too short to really get into the groove, and right before the end, a saxophone breaks out in loud and jagged exclamations, breaking the spell – and it’s time to rise and pace the room a couple of rounds, to contemplate this incredible double-CD, which carries riches far beyond expectation.

Fiske and Kéry have worked wonders when they traveled the cupboards and basements and attics of aging musicians from the progressive Swedish music movement of the 1960s and –70s. Without them, all this fantastic and crucial, decisive music, would have been lost. Here’s to those stubborn enthusiasts! And the layout of the set is beautiful, too, wonderfully executed, concerning color, photography, information. Top-of-the-line!