The Discreet Art of Failure: Five Years of Gothenburg

For me, Gothenburg is where it all started, the beginning of a new way of finding & engaging with music, my first foray into the international underground. This was at the very beginning of the pandemic, Spring 2020, and all my record shopping had been shunted online. A shop that I used to frequent in Cincinnati, Torn Light—since relocated to Chicago—had posted enthusiastically about two new records from a Swedish label called Förlag För Fri Musik. One was by a group called Treasury of Puppies; the other artist was called Oroskällan. My ignorance of the Swedish language was not the only barrier to entry. The audio samples I could find online were sparse, and I didn't know what to make of them. I took the plunge.

Both LPs arrived in plain cardboard jackets with paste-on artwork. In fact, the art for Oroskällan's Två - Ett Barn Glömmer Ingenting was just a Xeroxed sheet stuck on with masking tape.

The sounds on both records were equally bewildering, alluring, and homemade. I couldn't get enough of Treasury of Puppies in particular: the spoken word vocals in both English & Swedish, the lonely, minimal midnight post-punk sound, haunted by weltschmerz & glockenspiel. I wanted to know where this music had come from—not just the place, but the lineage.



As it turns out, I wasn't the only one getting clued in circa 2020. More than any other scene, Gothenburg has come to exemplify the spirit of the new international underground. To be sure, it is a local scene, with its own shop (Discreet Music, also now its flagship label), record-release parties, concerts, and enduring friendships & collaborations. But at the same time, "Gothenburg" has become a watchword in places as far-flung as Manchester, London, New York, Berlin, Oakland, and Omaha, a secret handshake between terminally obscurantist record collectors. Within one particular microclimate—geographically more diffuse than coherent—Gothenburg is the center of the world, leading the tape trading underground of the '80s into the age of the internet.



This month, Discreet Music marks its five-year anniversary with a wide-ranging compilation featuring new or previously unreleased music from some of the label's longest running acts alongside its latest newcomers. The comp's title, Five Years of Failure, comes across at first glance as a joke—a good one, with a Beckettian flair to it. But like so many aspects of the Gothenburg aesthetic, it's a good joke precisely because it captures something essential & true. Early on, I read a lot of the label's aesthetic choices as at least semi-ironic: the freaky skulls, the collaged inserts juxtaposing awkward family snapshots, Christian imagery, and crude drawings with amateur nude photos by self-styled pinups. But the more time I've spent with this music and the objects enclosing it, the more I've come to believe that sincerity, not irony, is the key to its power. There's a sense of humor there, for sure—as quick as it is wry & bleak. But the figures that Blod's Gustaff Dickson, in particular, keeps returning to are uniformly heartbreaking in their sincerity.

After all, you can't fail without trying. What the Discreet Music crew seem to prize most of all is the sincerity of an attempt—the inevitable failure only makes the attempt more human. The would-be pinups fail to fully commoditize their bodies because their awkward and vulnerable humanity shines through. The forgotten Swedish musicians who recorded private press Christian records in the '70s and '80s may not have expressed the presence of the divine with the grace of a Cathedral, but there's a humble beauty in their willingness to fail trying. The YouTuber exhorting her webcam to fight the monster of depression, that Chronos, that Medusa—she's trying.



And the music on these labels is often defined by its trying, its assaying, its experimentation in the purest sense of the word. Can this genre be rehabilitated?  Can these divergent impulses be reconciled? Can I play that instrument? They try, and then the magic happens.

The political dimensions of this aesthetic come through most powerfully in Arv & Miljö's Jorden Först, a genre-defying record that blends Matthias Andersson's austere & pure-hearted kosmische synth flights with extended clips from interviews, documentaries, and news segments about radical environmentalist groups such as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front. As with everything in the Discreet catalogue, the tone is complex. The activists can come off as strident and self-satisfied at moments, and to the casually cynical, it's hard not to get bogged down by the futility of their quest. But more often, the forest defenders sound cool as hell. The record frames them—despite having absolutely no chill, or perhaps because of it—as modern-day folk heroes, a viewpoint signaled by Andersson's framing of the record with fragments of environmentalist folks songs. The total effect is galvanizing and surprisingly moving, an idiosyncratic tribute to those who are willing to do something, risk something, who have the courage to fail.

There is, of course, more to this strange, mysterious, unclassifiable body of music than a simple openness to giving it a shot. After all, these are folks who've spent years starting side projects of side projects in experimental DIY venues, who own more New Zealand lathe cuts than I could begin to name, whose listening habits range from harsh noise to amateur youth choirs and who have metabolized these disparate influences in completely original ways, crafting a catalogue that is as astonishing in its depth, variety, and invention as it is in its profligacy. Still, at Discreet Music's core, I think, is a latent & laconic—but no less essential & sincere—punk ethos, an energy for action and activity, and even, yes, for change. By all accounts, these are trying times, and they're only getting bleaker. However inevitable the failure, this is no time not to try.