It would be fair to say that I was personally quite heavily under the sway of this fanzine during the years 2015-2019 or thereabouts. While I’d been tentatively marinating in strange, low-fidelity, experimental and murky noise musics a bit for some years, I credit Matthias Andersson’s Fŏrdämning for helping give me the language with which to rank & order it, along with a host of intensely underground bands and artists to check out. My record collection and my podcast at the time absolutely were the better for it. I can’t say he’s for certain the exact person to turn me onto Stefan Christensen, Neutral, Sarah Mary Chadwick, Blue Chemise, Drunk Elk, Enhet För Fri Musik and others, but I’m pretty sure he’s the fella. 

My relationship with difficult, rock-adjacent music can sometimes be fraught, as I still set a higher bar than some of my peers might for repeat listenability, and I can get pretty easily triggered by the circle-jerking of the collector/fanzine underground over records & tapes of questionable merit. I once did all sorts of online scouring for mp3s of the New Zealand lathe-cut 45s Andersson raves about issue to issue, as well as the back catalog of the Metronymic label, written about here in Fŏrdämning #13. I found most of what I was looking for, but I also found a ton of formless, pretentiously unconstructed noodling given a smudgy, low-underground sheen through anti-production. But was it shit I’d actually listen to again? Come on. 

As I wrote about a few years ago, the Swedish Andersson was creating Fŏrdämning in his second language, English, like a goddamn native-tongue speaker, while also navigating the distribution challenges and high shipping costs that I’m sure were more acute in his Gothenburg than in my San Francisco. Yet the breadth of this small thing is pretty phenomenal, and he’s on top of every exciting micro-artist creating strange & enveloping DIY music in this year of 2017. Cover star Stefan Christensen, for instance. He’s a gifted shape-shifter who came out of conventional loud garage rock music (Estrogen Highs), discovered New Zealand’s fertile back catalog, and himself began crafting these exquisitely noisy and flummoxing records that I truly can’t get enough of. He’s a big favorite in this household, and I thank Fŏrdämning for being such an enthusiastic champion of his that I couldn’t help but getting on the bus with them. 

Fŏrdämning #13 also explores the great Australian DIY label Albert’s Basement, run by Michael Zulicki. It’s a short interview, but it cuts a little meat off the bone as to why this oddball pop label is worlds different from the rest. Andersson says in this issue’s intro that people have been “complaining” that he’s straying too far from coverage of pure, unadulterated noise, so he tosses them a bone here with Eric Nystrand’s overview of the Gothenburg Blood Cult label’s tapes. I mean, even here there are descriptions that totally propel me out of my chair toward the computer for further investigative research: the Vårtgård tape from 2007, described as “a huge heaving and patiently swelling mass of moist rot….feels like slowly being force fed dung while sewer rats flop their hungry tongues in your ears”. Do I dare?? It’s been nineteen years now; is it sometimes better to let these things stay buried?

You may or may not know that Matthias Andersson was also concurrently running the I Dischi Del Barone record label at this time, which pretty much acted as the aural representation of this fanzine: limited-run, bewildering music from some of earth’s best and most obscure artists. That morphed into Discreet Music, very active to this day. He turned these passions into a career of sorts, and you can see it all germinating in Fŏrdämning, should you be fortunate enough to stumble upon a copy or two.