The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie (1992)

I first achieved an admittedly dim awareness of En Halvkokt i Folie back in 1984 or thereabouts as one name amongst many to feature in the catalogue of the Swedish Selbstmord label. Years passed without my actually managing to hear anything by them, at least not directly, although Lars Larsson seemed to turn up as a performer on other things I found myself enjoying with some regularity; and by 2020 I'd become sufficiently familiar with underground music from Sweden to wonder if there might not be something in the water, because most of what I've heard had been exceptional. Significantly, the name of En Halvkokt i Folie has been a constant presence lurking in the background as either an influence or even as a source of members in the stories of most of the Swedes whose work I've enjoyed, presenting me with the impression of their having been the Swedish equivalent of Throbbing Gristle, culturally speaking. Anyway, having finally made the effort to track something down, I realise that none of the comparisons quite fit and possibly the closest we'll get is that they are, or possibly were, the Swedish En Halvkokt i Folie.

That said, we're not talking music with no resemblance to anything else you've ever heard, but there's nevertheless something absolutely weird and unique about The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie, which feels like a compilation but may not be. Musical styles are stolen and interfered with depending upon the demands of the track, although the production values are very much expensive samplers of 1992, at least as a starting point. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is how much of this disc resembles house music, and house music as in the pastel coloured stuff with a shitload of piano and vocal samples, although there's also a bit of rapping, and the general vibe is maybe if Front 242 had appeared on an episode of Father Ted and spent most of the time trying to get those samplers to impersonate a Bontempi organ; so it's kind of a great big stupid riot, but with a poker face of such intestinal fortitude that Laibach would have told it to maybe lighten up a little. Sebastian Jensen Grundberg of the AUT label, who acts as my Swedish music advisor, suggested that much of this may get lost in translation given that my understanding of Swedish doesn't extend much further than one song by the Stranglers, but it feels as though whatever the hell they were trying to do is communicated reasonably well even to me, and of course it helps to have a couple of titles in English, notably Housecleaning with Narcotics and Germans Reminded of Their Nazi Past (by Foreigners). Also of note is the creation of an entire new musical genre on this disc, specifically Mongo House, which is actually a lot like regular house music but with greater emphasis on the planet Mongo from the old Flash Gordon serials.

Having a root around on the internet, I find a number of live clips showing a band vaguely closer to my original idea of their having occupied the same cultural bandwidth as Throbbing Gristle except in Sweden, and admittedly with an element of the Bonzos thrown in there somewhere; so I guess the Father Ted version of Front 242 was probably just how they were feeling at the time of recording. This also means that there must have been a whole shitload of variant incarnations of En Halvkokt i Folie which we've been cruelly denied these last three decades. Someone really needs to get onto that because this is magnificent.