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The year's most blessedly weird album is the brainchild of singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes, a twenty-five-year-old space cadet who was raised on a farm in a tiny village in southern Sweden. Ta Det Lugnt, the U.S. debut from Ejstes' band Dungen (pronounced dune-yen), is a blissful collection of psychedelic freakouts, trippy free-jazz grooves and gorgeous, daydreamy folk songs, with nary an English lyric. "It started out as a bunch of instrumentals -- very groove-oriented," says Ejstes. "For a long time all I did was milk the cow and play drums."
Growing up in a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Vastergotland, home to a Volvo production plant and not much else, Ejstes learned to play Swedish folk music from his father, a fiddle teacher with whom Ejstes still performs woodland concerts. With few friends around, he took to painting and discovered Public Enemy and N.W.A through his brother. "I felt like an outsider because of the size of the city," he says. "When I found hip-hop, no one else seemed to understand it. So I decided I would play it by myself."
His first recordings were homemade rap tracks featuring cassette-deck dubs and broken-English rhymes. "It was bad New York slang, gibberish," he says. "I didn't know what I was doing." When his parents divorced in his early teens, Ejstes moved to his mother's farm, and after listening to lots of Jimi Hendrix and breezing through a sound-engineering course, he set up a studio in his grandmother's basement, where he made some folky one-man-band tracks under the name Dungen. For Ta Det Lugnt (whose title roughly translates to "take it easy") he recorded regularly with other musicians for the first time, bringing in friends for overdubs and eventually hiring them as his full-time band.
An import version of Ta Det Lugnt became a surprise indie hit last year, and in the fall Ejstes came to New York to play some of his first-ever live shows. Ironically, for a guy who sings only in Swedish, Ejstes says he has almost no following at home, nor does he particularly care to. "I don't know anything about the music scene in Stockholm," he says. "I love America. My songs are in Swedish because I don't speak English so well, and I want my music to be honest and real."