Matthias Andersson and Gustaf Dicksson founded Discreet Music in Gothenburg in 2020. Principally, Discreet is a record shop, tucked away down a side street in the city’s centre. But the pair also operate Discreet as a record label and distributor, as well as an umbrella of sorts for a number of associated sub-labels, including private press Förlag For Fri Musik, the 7" label I Dischi Del Barone and reissue imprint Fördämning Arkiv.

Andersson and Dicksson are both music lifers – Andersson previously ran the Swedish label Release The Bats and makes solo synth music as Arv & Miljö, while Dicksson’s records under the name Blod explore a strange hinterland between folk, improv and church music. Through Discreet, they’re cultivating a rich seam of underground sound that’s largely from Gothenburg, but with tendrils snaking out to affiliated scenes and creators across the world.

Enhet För Fri Musik
“Orden Du Aldrig Säger”
From Ömhet & Skilsmässa

Much in the Discreet Music universe can be traced back in some way to Enhet För Fri Musik, a deliberately obscure Gothenburg collective that includes Andersson and Dicksson, along with scene linchpins Sofia Herner, Hugo Randluv and Dan Johansson. Enhet’s albums are made to a set theme, members working in isolation and handing recordings over to Johansson, who assembles them using reel-to-reel tape. 2021’s Ömhet & Skilsmässa has a patchwork quality, as if its constituent parts – plaintive piano, clattery improv, naive folk and Herner’s crisply enunciated monologues – have been stitched together by a careless seamstress. But from it emerges a distinctive mood: a haunting sadness, stark in its intimacy, but also cultivating a sense of mystery, as if not quite ready to give up its secrets.

Blod
“Hans Smärta Är Din Tro”
From Helvetet På Jorden

Interviewed in The Wire 459, Gustaf Dicksson spoke of his fascination for religious music. Two years on, he’s completed his first album featuring a choir. Helvetet På Jorden – it translates as Hell On Earth – finds Dicksson’s halting folk songs blown up into fully-fledged hymns on the voices of a ramshackle chorus. As the forthcoming record’s title might suggest, there is a bleak and quality to Dicksson’s music, one you can read as relating to his struggles with anxiety and depression. But these songs aren’t out to subvert the familiar tropes of Christian music. On the contrary, Helvetet På Jorden is presented with a sincerity that feels desperate in its intensity; read it as both a purging of personal demons and a plea for redemption.

Treasury Of Puppies
“Bränna Känna”
From Mitt Stora Nu

One of the younger Gothenburg groups that emerged in the wake of those early Enhet För Fri Musik records, Treasury Of Puppies – the duo of Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson – offered an early sign that this isolated sound was blossoming into a legitimate scene. The duo’s first album for Discreet Music, following their 2020 debut on Förlag For Fri Musik, Mitt Stora Nu finds the pair further refining their homespun mix of quaint library music, bleary eyed new age and lo-fi garage pop. From such humble means, they make a music of real emotional weight: see “Bränna Känna”, which sets Malmenholt’s gentle spoken word to twinkling keyboards and ringing chimes.

Jon Collin
“Årstabron Arch No 2”
From Bridge Variations: The Song Of Stokholm

A Lancashire born musician today based in Stockholm, Bridge Variations finds Jon Collin swapping his principal instrument, the guitar, for a nyckelharpa, a type of Swedish keyed fiddle. The album’s six tracks were recorded to tape in locations across the city, Collin setting up beneath bridges and engaging in extended improvisations that explore both folksy melodies and the dynamics of drone. Bridge Variations has all the hallmarks of a solo recording, but in places at least, the city itself emerges as a participant, contributing a gust of wind or a dull drone of traffic. The result is a suite of music that feels simultaneously still and in motion, an analogue for the waterways and underpasses that cut through urban environments.

Arv & Miljö
“Vindens Kommando I Furans Starka Gren”
From Vålnad Av Fornskog

Matthias Andersson has been recording under the Arv & Miljö name since 2010. Early Arv & Miljö releases explored various permutations of noise. But over the years Andersson has redirected the project to explore a sort of Nordic kosmische concerned with nature and the changing of the seasons. “Vindens Kommando I Furans Starka Gren”, from 2022’s Vålnad Av Fornskog, is a good example of the project at its mostly coldly desolate. Slow revolutions of icy synth intermingle with environmental field recordings, all sprinkled with a topsoil of tape muck. Then midway through comes an unexpected twist, as Andersson drops in some bursts of percussion, courtesy of Mark Anderson of the New Zealand improv group Greymouth.

Astrid Øster Mortensen
“Hvem Er Det Som Stj æ ler Min Ungdom”
From Skærgårdslyd

You might, at a stretch, call Astrid Øster Mortensen a folk artist, although the Denmark born musician’s take on the form feels profoundly deconstructed, pared right back to the brink of abstraction. Her second album Skærgårdslyd is a nod to the remote islands of the Gothenburg archipelago where she often chooses to record. Its spartan production and simple instrumentation – brittle plucks of guitar, droning organ, the occasional scrape of violin – communicates something of the rural isolation of island life. Don’t mistake Mortensen’s quiet manner for reticence, though: when she steps up to sing on “Hvem Er Det Som Stj​æ​ler Min Ungdom”, she does so with cool purpose and a confidence that is gripping.

Roy Montgomery & Friends
“Dear Imprudence”
From Broken Heart Surgery

Discreet Music has cultivated links to the New Zealand underground, reissuing lost Kiwi groups like The Strange Girls and Dress through the Discreet sub-label Fördämning Arkiv, and taking a deep dive into the world of New Zealand lathe cuts through the zine and CD set Speaker Crackle In The Garden. 2024 has also seen an appearance on Discreet from a legit New Zealand legend, Roy Montgomery. The topic of Broken Heart Surgery is a tragic one – the death of Montgomery’s partner, Kerry. But the album finds the veteran guitar experimentalist is on elegiac good form, assisted by female vocalists including Martha Skye Murphy, Alizia Merz and Emma Johnston – the latter of whom takes the lead on “Dear Imprudence”.

Eftergift
“Jordens Slöa Kreatur”
From Vatten Över Vatten

One constant thread running throughout the Discreet Music catalogue is a fascination for analogue recording techniques. It’s particularly evident on Vatten Över Vatten, the forthcoming debut from a new Gothenburg artist going by the name of Eftergift. Here, tape is not just the medium, but the primary instrument, the whirring reels locked into murky loops or sheets of radiant ambience that sometimes reveal some half-buried sound source – the mangled strum of guitar, or the hollow chime of a bell. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug, the full album is due out on Discreet Music sometime after the summer.

Read Louis Pattison's print feature on Discreet Music in The Wire 486. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital library of back issues.