Following on from Att Förstå Ensamhet, here's some more Swedish goodness delivered in cassette form by Stockholm's AUT label. This time it's a sort of reissue, or would have been a reissue had the thing been released back in 1984 as intended, which apparently never came to pass. The previous label, Psychout Productions, famously first released Controlled Bleeding's Knees and Bones as well as material by HNAS, but this, a tape split between two individuals involved with En Halvkokt I Folie, remained sadly in the can.
Beppria Bepria very much sounds like something from 1984 in terms of technology, but nevertheless retains the element of shock through sonic effects seldom heard since we all discovered fancier, slicker means of doing this sort of stuff. Mostly it's heavy use of tape collage, with someone giving their pause button a serious hammering in the process, combined with what I'm pretty sure must have been a Boss DR55 drum machine with the tempo wacked up and used as a source of sound rather than rhythm. The DR55 - or whatever this was - is pretty basic, just clicks and pops with a stab of hiss in lieu of snare, and the result is arresting and hypnotic, particularly when multitracked with itself, achieving more than one might expect on such a budget; and apparently it was on loan from Roger, later of Brighter Death Now, if that makes a difference for anyone.
Lars Larsson's side of the tape is more reliant on tape collage, musical rather than spoken. As with Göran Lundh's half, a lot of the material seems to come from Swedish radio, so I'm probably missing something given my being unable to understand the language, but the overall effect suggests the sonic equivalent of collages by Hannah Höch or John Heartfield. Furthermore, contrary to any impression I may have given of this having been some noisy lo-fi exercise, Beppria Bepria seems to have been constructed mostly from tapes chopped up on a reasonably fancy music center, so we have the high resolution clarity of an expensive sampler without the usual predictable rhythm or gloss. Quiet sounds, breaths and clicks spill from the speakers without warning, amounting to something quite powerful, full of tonal variation, and almost hallucinogenic - weird and outstanding stuff.
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