Alte Kaker Still Music Making in 2023

I’ve been very busy this past year doing my small part to add to the currently 100,000 songs per day being uploaded to streaming services. Not sure exactly why, in the face of that data, but there you have it. Superfluity and all—the joyous bounty of energy in the universe, as Alan Watts puts it. Or whatever it is that we humans do. And more music is on its way, I’m always in the process of trying to finish things I’ve been working on for a long time! Probably this is all about that I’m turning 60 on September 3 and freaking out about all that, gotta get it all done before I expire. The truth is that making music is all I really want to do, always has been. And you gotta really want to do it, like I just read yet another musician saying, “to make an album, you have to really want to do it, because there’s no payoff in doing it.” (In this recent instance it was Rich Williams from Kansas, but pretty much everybody knows this and says it, from those who once made money selling albums to those that never did and do it anyway.) So it’s all just exploring creativity… but then my personal OCD sets in when projects are unfinished, and I have to get them done. And then once a recording is done, it has to be sent out into the world, because music is communication. Though of course, what music I make is some form of what music I want to hear; that is, I do make it so that it sounds like I want it to sound, and I do love listening to it when I’m making it, sculpting it with overdubs and edits, effects and mixing, but once it’s done I don’t have to listen to it anymore! Then it’s my presentation to the people of the world, here look what I did! It’s funny how much you listen to the things you’re working on—until they are done, then you never listen to it again.

But I know there must be a few people that like this music. I bet there’s actually a lot of people who would like it, if it ever came to their ears, but that’s beyond my skill set, and apparently the streaming algorithms. I get Apple Music notifications every Friday regarding plays and Shazams of tracks I’ve got up on Apple Music, and the numbers range from 0 to maybe 50 in a great week. A high of 50 plays of various songs from the several hundred I’ve got up there in the net, 50 people worldwide out of the billions of people and billions of songs. That’s worth a few cents. (Nobody is playing Chaos Butterfly anymore, it seems, been zeros for a few weeks. I wonder how many tracks exist on these services that are never played! AI-generated music being listened to only by AI, probably. )

In my Facebook feed, it must be about 75% other musicians: every post is about somebody’s newest song/album/gig/tour/whatever (my posts included). I actually listen to a lot of these peoples’ musics, and, while making my own, I like to think that I am in conversation with other (many more successful, though not always) musicians and writers, that we are advancing the language by continuing to record and acting and reacting to one another¹. Though I know that the truth is it’s more likely just me responding to them in a vacuum, and not the other way around (c’mon, Radiohead aren’t listening? I’d swear Nigel Godrich used some of my SuperCollider code…) That willful ignorance of facts keeps me going, though. And so long as I have something to work on, I feel ok, like I’m still valid as a living being doing something important. I’m not as blasé nor excited about it as Alan Watts, still stuck in this validation gravity well dharma.

I’ve had a tough time keeping going since I moved to Sweden, to be honest. I feel very cut off from my ‘scene’ (including the incredible new music and improv scene that existed in the SF Bay Area! especially) and I don’t think anyone here gets my joke at all. Too much NorCal baggage, I guess. Try making a stoner joke in Sweden, you’ll get arrested. I rarely play live here anymore, it doesn’t seem worth it, nobody comes. I did several solo shows at Larry’s Corner in the past couple years, (many on youtube!) and there were usually only accidental attendees, people waiting for a late train or something. I mostly made money by doing odd computer jobs for people or recording or mixing tracks at home, and back before 2020, touring with Camper Van Beethoven brought in about $10k a year, so combined with my wife’s enormous salary as a pre-school teacher we could pay the rent. No CVB touring since January 2020 meant that several of those guitars that I wrote about in earlier blogs are now sold. (Oh I miss that Les Paul!) I’d guess the thing is I’m psychologically damaged from the trauma of a decade ago, getting fired from Pandora with a small child, losing the house and life savings and moving to a foreign country, trying to learn a new language. I never really melded with whatever scenes there are here, it seems. Stockholm is very success-oriented, music that is successful is considered good, I don’t think anybody actually has any taste of their own. They love Eurovision crap. It’s sort of sad. I hear Gothenburg and Malmö are better in this regard, but here, the underground is very dispersed, and wherever it can be found is nowhere near where I live, so I’m not showing up for shows often. Also I’m old, dagnabbit. I do get to Great Learning Orchestra events (and rehearsals for such) occasionally. (Fingers crossed, I’m trying to get Fred to come here to work with us next year!)

I tried to get things going with Sista Maj, but those guys all got too busy with other projects (but like Kungens Man, who are hugely important to the psychedelic music scene throughout the EU, plus they have spin off bands that are moving forward!) so I just kept doing my thing. Madly. I make a ton of music all the time, glob knows why. Always have.

During the pandemic of course, I thought, hey, I’ll be a writer like everyone else. I mean, I had written things before (mostly reviews.) So I finished up 600+ pages of autobiographical crap about the 1990s, or more specifically the period from when I got kicked out of Camper Van Beethoven in 1989 and the point where Camper Van Beethoven started playing again for real in 2002. I shared it with a couple people, but in the end it’s incredibly cringey and embarrassing, despite and because of the humorous pathos and hi-jinks of being a drunken bartender riding a motorcycle around San Francisco, or the things of actual musical interest from the era in which I played in Sparklehorse. Or the time at Mills studying with incredible people like Pauline Oliveros and Fred Frith. Or working for Dane Davis at Danetracks in LA.

….Eh. Too much of that already available for people.

The last time I was in the US was almost two years ago, touring on the West Coast with Victor Krummenacher and Greg Lisher playing acoustic versions of Victor’s Silver Smoke of Dreams album. Driving from Portland to the Bay Area, I stared out the window and thought a lot about how things had changed during the period I had been away, still within Trump and Pandemic manias. It was a real mess, Southern Oregon and Northern California were weird, very mean and divisive. I grew up in Davis and thought a lot about the shit we did as teens there as we drove. Subsequently, I came home and a little later got covid, and in my fever dreams this all coalesced into a story about some kids living in the northern Sacramento Valley in the mid 1970s (about five years prior to my time period). When I was out of bed again I typed it all up. It’s a novella, I guess. But the end result was me realizing that I’m not a great writer; this blog is maybe as good as it gets. Imagine 600+ pages of this crap proclaiming my idiot life. So anyway, there’s another word file sitting around. Maybe that should be a blog… except that I hate the format, it’s all upside down. Nobody reads a story chapter and then scrolls up to the next chapter, they should be in order, top-down. Even this blog should be. The internet is ruining everything. People just put up with it and then suddenly movies are all going to be vertical aspect. Yay. Kids these days, etc.

Back to the music, though, having covered the why and how let’s move on to who, what, where and when. I’ll start a little over a year ago, summer 2022. Since the pandemic, the Øresund Space Collective hasn’t really been on tour much either, though we’ve done swings of 3 shows or so, mostly spring or fall. I played most but not all, I didn’t play with them at KozFest in the UK that summer nor this past one, because 1) I was out in the countryside and 2) it was my daughter’s birthday. So out in the country place …like everybody in Sweden that lives in a city, [my wife’s parents] have a country place, it’s a 16th century log cabin essentially, but there’s a barn, a toolshed and a former cabin that a lady lived in with her goats. I record there every summer, it’s all birch inside and sounds excellent. Shine Out, for example, entirely recorded there.

I had almost 30 half-songs from starting ideas during the pandemic and never finishing them, which irked me. I got really depressed etc², saw no reason to work on them. Stopped Facebooking all the time also. But now (ok, back on meds) I thought I’d finish them all, these shitty nuggets. I finished as many lyrics and singing and overdubs as I could through July and August, in between doing overdubs for various Astral Magic albums from Santtu Laakso (I mean, I recorded parts for 7 Astral Magic albums in 2022 and maybe the same in 2023!)

In August, Øresund Space Collective played at the Crescendo Prog Festival in France, it was a great high-energy show and a great one-off trip to France. I flew without guitar so I got to use guitars from a festival sponsor, one of which was a fanned-fret baritone, super cool.

Then in the beginning of September 2022, I went to Quinta dos Azeiteiros in Portugal to record with the Øresund Space Collective. I’ve been playing and recording with various combos of these guys for almost a decade now! Scott Heller, the fulcrum and PVI of the band (that is, Primary Visual Interest. No sexy dancers up front unfortunatley, but we got a wizard on modular synth!) sold his place in Copenhagen and bought a place in the hills in Northern Portugal and built a goddam studio. So we got to shake it out and see if it was working. A bunch of people were there over the week, starting with the guys from the most common touring band of the past few years, Tim Wallander on drums, Jiri Hjort on bass, Mogens Deenfort on keys, and of course Scott on synths. (Scott’s been making massive numbers of solo records in the studio as Dr Space and also with Martin Weaver as Doctors of Space!) We have played with this group with various other guitarists for the past few years, very intense groovy long jams. Sometimes we had Vemund from Black Moon Circle or Johann from First Band From Outer Space. This time, Scott had invited Luis Simoes from Saturnia in Portugal, and he brought a doubleneck electric sitar and guitar. Another synth player whom we had played with in Malmö, Pär, was there also. (He’s a neuroscientist who researches psychedelics, so that seemed appropriate.) From the beginning, Hasse Horrigmoe was there to help Scott set up the studio and then alternate on bass with Jiri or play guitar. Hasse has done several recording sessions with ØSC but rarely plays with us/them live. His playing and Jiri’s playing are completely different, Hasse usually sets up a mode and an odd rhythmic riff of some sort and keeps at it, while Jiri plays very freely melodically coming down hard on the beats or accents to propel the jam—or keep with Tim, who goes nuts and rhythms the place up endlessly. 

Jiri, Luis, Pär at the studio, deck looking over the valley

We started out and it took a bit to make people be able to hear what was happening (guitars are usually too loud and playing too much, of course) and the synth players suffered having a weak monitoring system so on several tracks the synth player(s) turned up to hear themselves and distorted the input to the recording. There was a lot of band leakage on the drums, drums felt isolated from communication with the overbearing guitars. Regardless there a few good recordings in the first couple days. But Tim got discouraged and felt he couldn’t play up to his own acceptable level of competence, so he split for a while to get his head together and walked in the hills. (Note, Tim joined Ozric Tentacles the following month!)

Studio recording room. Hasse on the left.

Tim wasn’t staying the whole time anyway, but we did get back in the studio for a day to record some great stuff (in my opinion). Right before he and Pär left, Aaron Peacock (Ocelot) came by to hang and jam, we had met him playing at the Aum Festival in Switzerland, he’s an American electronica guy who lives in Portugal. He played a little drums, but the recordings from that day aren’t great. 

Then Mattias Olsson came in as clean-up drummer. This was a potentially controversial move, I sort of pushed it into happening, because Mattias comes from a very prog (and essentially anti-jamband) background. Not that he’s not an improviser! But he works in a very different way than Tim. Now, I’ve played with Mattias for years, he’s on Superfluity for example, and we’ve played live with Hasse on bass. The next few days we recorded many more jams of different sorts, marking a whole different sound for the band. 

I spent most of the fall mixing the ØSC or Shitty Nuggets, or recording more Astral Magic. I mixed maybe six of the ØSC jams that we recorded with Mattias and four or five of the ones we did with Tim. The most interesting right off the bat was number 29, which became “Everything is Evil”. Scott started mixing other ones. There’s a lot of upcoming music from that week! 

I finished overdubs and mixing the Shitty Nuggets and planned a C-90 cassette. I got a few extra background vocals from people, notably Hanna Francis on “We’re All the Same”, Kelly Atkins, my Superfluity and more co-conspirator on “Whatever Happened” and “World of Trouble” (the sequence remained alphabetical, so these are all toward the end!) and Eyelids Chris Slusarenko and Jon Moen on “Compartmentalize”. Jon also played a tenor recorder on “Every Little Thing.”

With these all done and out of the way, I started working on another set of unfinished and newer songs, some of which go back a few years and some of which are very recent. This is in limbo currently, not quite sure where to go with it all. 

So to clear my musical head, I applied for a residency at the Stockholm Elektron Musik Studio, and oddly got quickly accepted, so I got the keys in the winter. I was working with my old SuperCollider patches as well, my old Chaos Butterfly stuff. I had already made on electronic music album that winter, “Superposition of States” with guitar or violin and SuperCollider. 

In January of 2023, the 50-cassette and digital release of Shitty Nuggets came out on my Bandcamp page and all the digital worlds. I’d been getting into mastering software for Astral Magic so when an indie film project, See You At The Bar, about the Casa Loma in San Francisco from the early 90s asked to use “Another Beer” from Jack & Jill’s first album Chill and Shrill, I decided to remaster all the 90s albums, both Jack & Jill ones and the 3 Hieronymus Firebrain ones. Completely coincidentally I got a couple thousand dollars in royalties for digital mechanicals on an old Hieronymus Firebrain song, so that could keep me going for a while. One time thing, though, something probably got used on a podcast or something and sat in the black box of digital mechanicals for years accruing. Glad they caught that one! After using that money to gain some interest for themselves for 25 years. Anyway all the remasters are on the bandcamp page.

I did a few podcast/vlogs with Chris Leroy for his Lo-Fi Lounge (#124, 133 and 136) about the state of things in January, like this:

When I was in the Stockholm EMS there, they had a huge Buchla synthesizer system and a great multi track studio, I was there usually two days a week December through March. I had played with Buchla and Moog modular systems as an undergrad at UCSC in the early 1980s and then again at Mills in the early 2000s. SO I guess every 20 years I need to go back to it. They also had a Halldorophone, which I recorded a lot and then tried to pitch map it and get the Buchla to play it, etc… Anyway, I generated a lot of recorded audio during this period. Additionally I had some instant SuperCollider + guitar/vln albums that came out of rehearsing to play this live for a gallery opening and closing settings for an art show from a guy I know from dog walking, Victor Rangner, who paints in a low-brow pop psychedelic style. The albums are Current Motion and Downstream Motion, both live recordings of me at home.

ØSC had a gig in Copenhagen that was good, at a small festival with other interesting bands. I like riding the train down to play. I just like Copenhagen, it seems much realer than Stockholm (plus the food is better.)

Also in March of 2023 Mogens and Jiri came up from Copenhagen to Stockholm and we went to Mattias’ studio, Roth Händle, for a week to see what we could do. Mogens took the audio home to work on it, I believe it’s about all done now and may eventually come out on Mattias’ Roth Händle Bandcamp site. The “band” will be called “Tall” (as in, “a little short”.) 

In April, Hasse came to start on his new project. His band TangleEdge had ceased after decades and he was on to the next thing which was sets of related modal repetitive riffs in odd time signatures that I had to learn and make melodic parts for, and we would record at Mattias’ one week every month for the next four months. This is perfect for Mattias who not only is the most amazing drummer who can rock any time signature, but has a billion musical instruments in his studio including several Mellotrons and odd old synths or noisemakers. This was intense music and I knuckled down to get it good, it was super fun to be with those guys and record this stuff. I played a lot of guitar and violin, and even took some stabs at various keyboards and even vibraphone and bass marimba. Can’t wait till it’s all out, this is amazing music. 

In between, I was sorting through and making pieces out of the Buchla recordings, which ended up as a 5-volume set of EPs, the Stockholm Elektron Music Studios Series. Each volume is made of of several sonically related pieces, whether straight Buchla or with SuperCollider or field audio, or even some that gained pulse from Reaktor or that I played bass on. 

In May 2023, ØSC played the Spaceboat, an annual gig on a boat in Hamburg, we played two days there. “Everyone is Evil” came out and we go the double vinyl to examine, this is an intense album—the title track is 64 minutes long in multiple sections. Side 4 is a mellower Synth-based piece that Scott mixed, now titled “Everyone is Good.” The CD comes with two other pieces from those sessions. More to come!

I came back to Stockholm and did a solo show at Larry’s Corner with Donald Lupo/(L Don Ohkami). The next gig I had was a full band gig opening for Oruã and Built to Spill at the Debaser Strand in Stockholm in mid June, so I hired Mogens and Jiri and Mattias, and Hanna Francis to sing with me. This gig was amazing, I hadn’t played electric guitar songs for a long time, and the band were amazing. Good thing I kept that guitar. It was all filmed by Jonas Holzberg, it’s out on YouTube (Sept 3 premier date) here: 

Jonathan Segel band at Debaser Strand, Stockholm, June 19 2023

A week later I was back in Denmark to play with ØSC sans Scott at the Thy Lejren festival which was very interesting. A total hippie festival, these folks left Christiania to go to northern Denmark in the 70s and it’s an “alternative community.” Also, several of the stage people that lived there had come from Norway where they had worked in historical re-enactment viking villages. It was one of those gigs that works like a black market society, right when we got there we got paid and drink tickets and anything else we wanted, playing that night at 11pm. The band before us was old hippie dudes who had made an impact on Danish music in the early 70s, including one guy who was a lawyer and had made sure that the artists (then) got paid and had health care and that sort of thing. Everybody seemed to know some of the old power ballads and rockers they played. We played after them with Mogens in front with his modulars and keys, and the stage had great balance so we could hear each other and played a smash show. Super fun all around. I should mention that often when we play in Denmark environs, Mikkel Toft is playing guitar, and sometimes also Per both of whom also play with Jiri in his and his sister’s band Fri Galaxe, who are super groovy. Their old drummer Martin has played with ØSC many times as well. 

ØSC setting up at Thy Lejren, Mogens and Jiri in foreground. Viking in Background.

We stayed at the festival the next day and saw the bands and then drove back to Copenhagen on Sunday and I came back to Stockholm for more recording with Hasse and Mattias, then back out to the countryside to do more Astral Magic overdubs and work on the other ongoing projects.

The Stockholm EMS series have been coming out on Bandcamp and digital month by month, 4 of 5 are out now. The other ongoing projects and coming along… the Halldorophone pieces received drums and percussion added by Andreas Axelsson (from Sista Maj among other things) moving them into new territory, so I asked Daniel Boregård Älgå (from Neon Heart among other things!) to play on several as well, he’s done some flute+electronics and I’m still hoping for some bass clarinet. Tom Djll played trumpet and electronics on one. I did several passes with guitar or lap steel or violin, then edited it all back. It’s very dense, semi-tonal droney music— the instrument itself is a feedback based electric cello type thing. Used a lot of film soundtracks (like The Joker, for example.) A lot of playing it was tuning the sympathetic strings and then finding notes on the fingered strings that resonated. This has become an enormous set of pieces, now called “Hall of Mirrors”. Not done quite yet. 

For anybody that has read my occasional write-ups like this, I know I’ve been promising Dog Days forever, but we’re finally moving into a probable wrap as Kelly Atkins does her magic on the mellow improv acoustic recordings that Victor Krummenacher and I made in the goat house in the country several years ago. It’s extremely trippy music. 

Songs, yeah. The ones I have still unfinished are disparate. I can’t promise anything yet. While I have been wrestling with them I’ve also recorded a bunch of cover songs, which started by Larry asking me if I had recorded the songs I played at some solo show acoustically, several from All Attractions or Honey, for example, and so I started doing that and got hung up recording “North Star Grassman and the Ravens”, a Sandy Denny song. I’m not sure what to do with these recordings as they stand. It’s tough to put out covers on Bandcamp, you have to license everything and even at the cheapest digital license I’d be paying $20 per song for a maximum if a hundred downloads sold, and I don’t believe I would even sell that many. Imagine there are 15 or 20 covers, that’s $400 minimum so for selling it at $10 and getting $8 or whatever, I’d have to sell 50 copies to break even. That’s about what Shitty Nuggets sold. Dunno. 

Anyway, now, beginning of September 2023, I’m heading back to Quinta dos Azeiteiros in Portugal for a week to record with ØSC again. This time, Mattias and Hasse are back, as is Luis and other local players, plus we have KG Westman coming. I last recorded with KG with ØSC in 2014 (ØSC Different Creatures album for example!) , he was backing off from playing guitar as he had done in Siena Root, and was playing more sitar and synthesizers. Since then he has devoted himself to sitar and spent a lot of time in India studying and performing. Should be an interesting session! And the recordings from last year’s sessions will be coming out for a while as we comb through these sessions. 

When I get back from Portugal, I have to get to Estonia. Really this is sort of a glamor trip for me, I’m not playing but will be seeing music I made for Cid Pearlman’s Dance Company, for a set of films they made called (home)body. These premiered in 2022 in Santa Cruz, CA at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and will be showing in Talinn as part of the Rännak Festival.

Alrighty, so anyways that’s my life. Besides feeding the kid and walking the dog. So far it’s still happening, anyway. Probably have to sell another guitar soon, but I still have some. I should get my Swedish driver’s license and get a job driving a cab maybe—haven’t actually owned a car or motorcycle since moving here. Hardly need it, but it’s also way beyond our means. What’s a 60-year-old anti-social alte kaker musician do in a foreign country once music cedes its importance entirely in the modern world?

1. Ya know… I do this all the time, have been forever. See here for an example, Hanna Francis’ Self-Help Songwriter podcast talking about “Sleep for a Hundred Years.”:
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2. Among other things, like dealing with nerve issues in my left hand from crushing my violin to my shoulder, after getting sick/covid (unknown, it was Jan 2020 so before the Pandemic, while on tour on the West Coast with CVB) I developed Reynaud’s Syndrome! This is statistically very odd for a middle aged man. And not great for living in Scandinavia. I did see several new articles about it during the pandemic, but none actually mentioned any causation nor correlation to covid, even with the micro-capillary clotting biz. Anyway, equally oddly, I think it’s abating now, though we’ll see for sure this winter. I did see this past summer that my daughter also has this going on a bit, so it’s possibly genetic or post-covid as well. Human bodies, I swear. ↩︎

About Jonathan Segel

musician. real person. that's my real name, go ahead, look me up.

‹ The Rest of the Extant Dark Stars, #101-222

Tagged with: Øresund Space Collective
Posted in Øresund Space Collective, Camper Van Beethoven, Guitar, Music, recording, Sparklehorse, Sweden, Technology