Posts Tagged ‘Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation’

JOSEFIN ÖHRN + The LIBERATION – ” Sacred Dreams “

Posted: November 21, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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London-based psychedelic stalwarts Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation are proud to reveal their third album ‘Sacred Dreams’ for Rocket Recordings. Continuing to dive into the deeper waters of experimentation, ‘Sacred Dreams’ is both a musically hefty amalgamation of reverb drenched space-rock and retro centric electronics, as well as an emotionally cathartic release for the band, marking a new direction and fresh approach.

Since their critically acclaimed album ‘Mirage’ was released, Josefin and writing partner Fredrik have relocated from Stockholm to London and have created a new Liberation around them – this new band consists of the powerful and intuitive assemblage of musicians; Maki (Go Team), Patrick C Smith (Eskimo Chain), Matt Loft (Lola Colt) and Ben Ellis, who’s worked with both Iggy Pop and Swervedriver. ‘Sacred Dreams’ was largely recorded at Press Play Studios (King Krule, Fat White Family, Yves Tumor, Stereolab, High Llamas and many others) run by Andy Ramsay of Stereolab, who also produced and even programmed his non synced drum machines adding a lot of inspiration to the album.

‘Scared Dreams’ invites you into the bands own dimensional soundscape, a world built with transcendental guitars, driving grooves and otherworldly, enchanting vocals, altogether seeped in layers of blissfully produced synths. Opener and lead single ‘Feel The Sun’ encapsulates this new direction perfectly before the anthemic ‘I Can Feel It’ makes the bands intentions known. Elsewhere playful 80s electronics sit alongside a shoegaze sensibility effortlessly and amongst the textured flow of the LP emerge pop hooks like the infectiously bluesy ‘Baby Come On’.

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Josefin tells us “This album comes out of a period of heartbreak, loss and dissolution, but also of deep love, warmth and beauty unveiled in the middle of it. A sacred dream, the way we see it, is not necessarily a golden fluffy cloud river, but instead also contains all the shadows that need to be seen and felt in order to drop what has to go in order to truly live. And the dissonance of such a dream may not be immediately apparent, let alone the meaning of it. In a way all of these tracks seem to emanate from that place where we have almost reached a new shore, or maybe we missed it and are headed somewhere else entirely, but there’s no way of telling until afterwards.”

released April 22nd, 2019

JOSEFIN ÖHRN + The LIBERATION – ” Mirage “

Posted: May 15, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Taking their moniker from the notion of ‘Liberation Upon Hearing In The Between’ from the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation’ took little time to make their mark on the wider world, brandishing a radiant sound that stands effortlessly apart from the increasingly staid and often paradoxically predictable world of modern psychedelia.

Having already been nominated for a Swedish Grammy with their debut EP, Diamond Waves, their full-length 2015 debut on Rocket Recordings, Horse Dance marked out a territory in which beguiling repetition could sashay with sweet pop suss, melodic flourishes with experimental intensity, and it was summarily rapturously received on arrival, making new fans like 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne and earning them appearances at Roskilde Festival and Eindhoven Psych Lab.

Yet clearly this was only the beginning of a journey of discovery ,and few would have guessed how the band’s sound would quickly evolve into still more enchanting and enlightening strains. Their second effort Mirage, which follows a mere year after its predecessor, sees the band sculpting sprawling, hypnotic jams into elegant nocturnal serenades with such serendipity that their actual creation remains a little hazy even to themselves. “We agree on not remembering very much about how these tracks came about, that all of them were written on the road and that most of them came fully formed” note the band. “Most were really long to begin with, but we found it relieving to break away a bit from the mandatory psych jams a little bit. We also just realised that none of them were written in daylight, which might be why memory is so elusive.”

Indeed, this hypnagogic approach seems to fit well with the primary inspiration for the five-piece, which centred on ‘the state where dreams, visions and the present are entwined’ – the domain of surrealists and mystics, not to mention cinematic epiphanies such as Morgiana, Daisies and Tarkovsky’s Solaris.

True to form, Mirage see the band taking a chic tradition of avant-pop that extends all the way from Serge Gainsbourg and Françoise Hardy to Broadcast and Saint Etienne, and warping it mercilessly to their own darker ends.

Whilst the brooding yet sultry ‘Sister Green Eyes’ is no less than a sharp slice of velveteen motorik-pop and ‘Looking For You’ reinvents three-chord garage-rock attack with mighty finesse, The Liberation are just as comfortable dealing out the heavy-lidded and electronically-driven ‘In Madrid’ or the dive in the hallucinatory deep end of ‘Circular Motion’, on which they’re aided and abetted by Lay Llamas’ Nicola Guinta.

Fresh excitement for the band lies in wait, courtesy of a UK tour with Goat and an appearance at Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia, yet amidst the psychic forces responsible for this kaleidoscopic effort who can say what will follow. “Horse Dance was very much about conjuring the strength needed to cut ties” the band elucidate. “Mirage may be about having left but having no clue what’s next – the power in being completely lost and thriving on it” Yet the seductive splendour of these ten songs åmake manifest a parallel world of disorientation and deliverance in which one would be a fool not to want to languish adrift.

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