It seems fitting that some listeners will first encounter Fastingen-92 as a reissue, even if only three years after its original release. Each track on this album from Stockholm multi-instrumentalist and studio wiz Daniel Ögren has the air of a record collector’s prized find, rescued from obscurity and turned into a cult favorite. After a limited-run release in 2020, it received a wider audience this year via the long-running UK label Mr Bongo, whose catalog is filled with reissues of the sort of crate-digger classics of global dance music that Ögren’s work clearly channels.
Though Ögren played, recorded, and mixed nearly everything on these primarily instrumental pieces himself, together they feel like a breezy early-evening DJ set, traversing styles, eras, and continents from one selection to the next: a dembow rhythm that could have been lifted from a dancehall record, a live drummer expertly emulating the sampled breakbeats of ‘90s rap, percussion loops that hiss and wheeze like the early drum machines Sly Stone used to use. Atop these funky rhythms, Ögren arranges all manner of guitars, synths, and keyboards, most of them sweetened with vintage-sounding echo effects—psychedelic, but in the sense of a microdose to go along with your orange wine or mezcal negroni: a gentle heightening of buzzy sensation, not a disorienting head trip. The grooves are too buoyant, the melodies too insistent, for anyone to stray too far into the portals of their mind. You could dance to it, but it’s probably best suited for the moments just before full-on revelry breaks out, when people start to wiggle on their bar stools as they lean forward to order the next round.
Though Ögren’s apparent influences are far-flung, the music on Fastingen-92 is also rooted in his particular Stockholm milieu. The way he combines dreamy psych-pop textures with hip-hop-inflected drums, and emphasizes midrangey analog warmth rather than the booming lows and tactile highs of digital-era pop, suggests an affinity for Dungen. (By extension, that means Fastingen-92 sometimes also recalls the heavily Dungen-indebted early records of Tame Impala.) And like his sometime collaborator Sven Wunder, Ögren seems to have a fondness for library music: records created in the mid-20th century for the express purpose of licensing to movies, advertisements, and the like, whose composers-for-hire were often more adventurous in soundtracking these scenes not-yet-imagined than the job strictly required.
The best tracks on Festingen -92 occupy a similarly rich middle ground between specific detail and evocative elision, giving you just enough to invent your own settings for them. “Picasso,” with its romantic acoustic guitar melody and clattering percussion, suggests tropical humidity and ferns parting to reveal a tableau you can’t quite glimpse in full. “Maj (For Tintin)” has the relentless pulse of a rave anthem, but without any low-end heft; its vaporous sonics give the feeling of a bustling nightlife scene viewed from the clouds far above it. Though Ögren takes elements from existing styles, the sonic locales he dreams up are only loosely rooted in real-world geography: the main thing is that they’re very far away from wherever you are right now.
Like those library music composers, Ögren is capable of rising above the call of duty. Though Fastingen-92 could get by well enough on groove and tasteful atmosphere alone, it also has hooks that will stick with you long after the party winds down. A couple of them are almost too familiar: one melodic tidbit from the joyous “Hjälmarsfjorden” might as well have been flown in directly from Shuggie Otis’s psych-soul totem “Strawberry Letter 23.” The verses of “Idag,” the album’s lone vocal-led pop song, sound uncannily like a stylish Swedish-language trip-hop remix of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” Intentional or not, these flickers of recognition don’t take away from the experience of Fastingen-92. If anything, they heighten the sense of a skillful DJ controlling the decks, mixing a few bars of a crowd-pleaser in with the deep cuts.
But Ögren’s vibe-centric approach to composition does have its limits. His focus on sustaining a single mood for the length of a given track leaves little room for surprise. Most toggle back and forth between two or three sections repeatedly; with rare exceptions, if you’ve heard the first minute and a half or so, you know how the rest will go. That’s not a knock, exactly: sitting alone at home and feeling the emotional tug of some unexpected chord change isn’t really what this music is for.
DJs and sampling producers are attracted to library records and other dusty obscurities for a reason. They have a certain blankness for the listener, whether baked intentionally into music for soundtracking visuals, or arising like a phantasm in recordings now far removed from the social and cultural contexts in which they were created. And within that blankness lies the possibility for all sorts of new resonances that the original musicians could never have foreseen. Like the old records that inspired it, the tracks of Fastingen-92 might find new life through recontextualization. In other words, they would sound great in someone else’s DJ set.
