Virke - Hovsjö 80 (FLORA & FAUNA)

WHAT YOUR EARS SAY & WHAT THE COVER LOOKS LIKE

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WHAT WE SAY

​Childhood in tourist brochure neglected Sweden in the 80s sounds like a pretty safe space if the era evoking sounds of this Virke trip down memory lane for Flora & Fauna are anything to go by. A nostalgic, almost wistful lo-fi aesthetic cushions guitar snippets of the era's soundtracks as dub echoes come and go like fading memories in an ageing mind. A future music therapy classic.

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WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY

Early summer mornings, highway transitways, cheap beer & cigarettes and an unyielding hope for the future. Hovsjö 80 is a unrequested soundtrack to a nonexistent movie about growing up as a teenager in Hovsjö around 1980.

Virke are Billie Lindahl, Rickard Jäverling and Henrik von Euler. The basics for the album was recorded in Årsta during the spring of 2020. Add-ons were recorded in Skillinge at Magnus Sveningsson’s house of prayer. The album is instrumental and the main setup is: Aria Diamond drum machine, Juno-60 synthesizer and Fender Jaguar guitars. Extra drums and percussion on selected tracks by Martin Sörbom and Niklas Korssell. The girl on the cover is our friend Anneli Rudström and the picture was taken by her father Anders Rundgren in Hovsjö 1980.

In the spring of 2020, a picture from 1980 appeared on our desks. The black and white photo depicted a small kid in a hat and long jacket standing among the large concrete houses in Hovsjö outside Södertälje and looking into the camera with peculiar cockiness.
We had just started work on a new record according to a simple recipe: one night a week we went down to the studio and wrote one song at a time. It was random at first and that’s how we were used to it. We hooked up the instruments, fiddled for a while and pressed the record button the moment we thought we were on track.
The photo from Hovsjö was pinned down in our notes as a cover proposal and we returned to it often when we worked in the studio. There was a feeling in it that we could not get around and the more detailed the song sketches became, the more we understood that it was some kind of soundtrack we were doing.
We began to imagine life around 1980 as a young teenager in Södertälje when we wrote new games and piece by piece a map unfolded. It went around the high-rises and down to the harbor; along forest areas, apartments, gas stations and discos. At crossed markings, we placed our own memories, such as cycling in light winds with cheep beer to parties where you do not know anyone, sitting up under the highway until it gets light and playing on the train tracks late one summer evening. The pictures and music began to live their own lives.
We ourselves did not grow up in Hovsjö, but in other smaller places where life goes on. Few things separate us. This is Hovsjö 80.

Cover: Tomas Melinder
Mastering: Tomas Bodén​