Vanligt Folk
Dischorealism
iDEAL Recordings
We’ve been tracking Swedish trio Vanligt Folk for over a decade on this site now, and yet I still feel just as flummoxed by their work, just as incapable of expressing anything of substance about its nature, charms, and points of irritation today as I did back in 2013 when their self-titled debut EP came across our desk. That’s partly due to how off kilter that record’s deconstructed approach to post-punk was at the time, and of course like any properly disordered group of oddballs Vanligt Folk haven’t stayed put since, moving from the panicked body music of Jag Har Utvecklat Mig Till Både En Hund I En Katt to the deliberately abstract dub of Allt E’nte. Now, with Dischorealism they’ve alighted upon a glitchy, fragmented bricolage of house, EBM, and techno markers in order to, in their own words, examine themes of “sucking the life out of somebody, exploiting and over consuming trust in any form”. There’s certainly something there which could be connected with classic EBM and industrial, but when you read that the album started off as a concept record about milk, all bets are off, as they generally are with Vanlight Folk.
The core sounds Dischorealism have one foot in the preceding Allt E’nte; its predilection for deep and sustained bass crops up here and there throughout the record, alongside plenty of house, minimal techno, and EBM. But from soup to nuts the metallic distortion and woozy detuning that’s applied to just about every element and instrument on the record overpowers those sorts of genre distinctions and becomes its defining characteristic, lending the percussion a tin foil crinkle and the vocals a wind tunnel intensity. Even when the album title is taken literally and we get some classic Studio 54 disco on “SKABBE”, the listener’s likely to be more drawn in by the squalling high end distortion that’s been applied to the organ than to the funk on the rhythm section.
A sense of alienation not just from genre but from groove and immediacy is the record’s calling card, but even when things are a bit more traditionally memorable or hooky Vanligt Folk are likely engaging in some sort of situationist mindfuckery. “GLE” sounds as though its unparsable, pinched and distorted vocals might be lifting melodies from “Warszawa” and “I Feel Love” at various points. Far from drawing the listener in with familiar comfort, though, they’re prompted to wonder why those particular moments of art rock and disco soulfulness might be being connoted two thirds of the way through a resolutely confrontational record. In the same way that Art Of Noise type bricolage is dragged through the analogue muck of early 80s lo-fi synth experimentation on “Dischora”, those allusions raise more questions than they could ever answer about the band’s framing of disco as a notion, an era, a topos, an identity.
“It’s not just you or the language barrier,” a couple of Swedish friends have told us when the subject of Vanligt Folk is broached. “We don’t know what they’re up to, either.” That’s a small measure of comfort, but one that isn’t likely to resolve the conundrums the band pose at a sensory or phenomenological level. Something about the naive structures, the familiar yet disaffected sound design and distortion, something about Vanligt Folk themselves invites repeated listening even when their methods and intent remain wholly obscure.
![Cruise [Ctrl], “…Are Not What They Seem”](https://www.idieyoudie.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CC-ANWTS-High-Def-440x264.jpg)
