It seems fitting that some listeners will meet first Fastingen-92 as a reissue, albeit only three years after its original release. Every track on this album by Stockholm multi-instrumentalist and studio wizard Daniel Ögren has the air of an award-winning record collector's find, rescued from obscurity and turned into a cult favorite. After a limited release in 2020, it received a wider audience this year via long-running UK label Mr Bongo, whose catalog is full of reissues of the kind of world music dance classics that clearly channel Ögren's work.
Although Ögren played, recorded and mixed almost everything on these mostly instrumental tracks, together they feel like a cool early-night DJ set, crossing styles, eras and continents from one selection to another: a dembow beat that could to be from a dance record, a live drummer expertly mimicking the sampled breakbeats of '90s rap, hissing percussion and hissing like the early drums used by Sly Stone. On top of these funky beats, Ögren arranges all manner of guitars, synths, and keyboards, most of which are sweetened with vintage sound effects—psychedelic, but in the microdosed sense that goes with orange wine or mezcal negroni: a soft increase in buzzing sensation, not disorienting head throbbing. The grooves are too dynamic, the melodies too insistent, for one to escape too far into the gates of one's mind. You could dance to it, but it's probably best for the moments just before the full-on feast breaks out, when people start swaying on the bar stools as they lean forward to order the next round.
Although Ögren's apparent influences are distant, the music lives on Fastingen-92 it is also rooted in its special environment in Stockholm. The way he blends dreamy psych-pop drum textures with hip-hop and emphasizes analog midrange warmth rather than the booming lows and tactile highs of digital-age pop suggests a kinship with Dungen. (By extension, this means Fastingen-92 sometimes he also recalls the Dungen-overdubbed early Tame Impala records.) And like his one-time collaborator Sven Wunder, Ögren seems to love library music: records made in the mid-20th century with the express purpose of licensing films, commercials, and the like, whose composers-for-hire were often more adventurous in soundtracking these as-yet-unimagined scenes than the job strictly required.
