Urtidsdjur is a band from Uppsala, Sweden playing a mixture of country flavoured psychedelic rock. They’re influenced by artists such as Bo Hansson, Dungen, Atomic Swing, Slowgold, and Den Stora Vilan.

The members all have their roots from different parts of Sweden. In the summer of 2019, the band spent a week in a small chapel in the countryside of Uppland. Salvation or remissions of sins did not occur, instead the band taped their self-titled debut album in front of the altar.

“A spiritual being from which all rest descends from”

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

Kettil: Our background as a band goes back to the year 2016 when I had just moved to Uppsala. I didn’t know anybody in this town and my way to make new friends is usually to find some people to play music with. Through some online “contact ads”, me, Gustaf and Emil got together and started playing, and Affe would join us a couple of years later.

The thing with Uppsala is that it’s one of Sweden’s biggest university cities, and therefore is kind of a hotpot of people from all over the world and not least all corners of Sweden. So it’s a little ironic that none of us actually studied here, but still came here from four different parts of the country.

Affe: It all started the year of 1989, a cold winter mornig, hehe. Before Urtidsdjur I played for many years with friends in a band called VCPS (Vietcong Pornsürfers). We toured a lot, but eventually lost the appetite and decided to split. I also been playing tenor saxophone with a friend’s folk punk project called Vraket.

The other members in Urtidsdjur have played together for a few years before I joined them. So I don’t have that detailed history from before I got the opportunity to join the band.

When I moved to Uppsala I put out an ad looking for a band. I think the ad was for me as a saxophonist, not a bass player. Cause I ended up auditioning for Urtidsdjur on the horn. The other guys in Urtidsdjur claims “that there was no room for a saxophone at the moment”, but I think I did a quite crappy job convincing them about my virtues since I didn’t get the job. Luckily for me, a few months after my audition, while on tour in Germany with Vraket, I received a text message from the singer Emil, asking if I wanted to play bass with Urtidsdjur. It turned out that their previous bassist was moving to my old hometown, and they needed a replacement. This time I didn’t even have to audition. They had a few live shows booked and I guess they didn’t have any other options left. So that’s a win for me.

“Music is something to be done together with others”

When did you decide that you wanted to start writing and performing your own music? What brought that about for you?

Affe: This is a hard question. I’m pretty bad at writing music on my own. For me music is something to be done together with others. And that includes writing. My creativity comes from being part of a process where ideas get developed and shared back and forth.

I think I realized that process was the way I wanted to create music in the summer of 2007. I hung out with a friend that whole summer writing songs and making grand plans.

Kettil: There was never any doubt that Urtidsdjur would write and perform our own music. We occasionally play some covers, as you probably know our new single is a cover. And there was no discussion about how we would structure and write together, we were just lucky to have a very productive singer/guitarist Emil.

<a href="https://urtidsdjur.bandcamp.com/track/djur-som-jobbar-5">Djur som jobbar by Urtidsdjur</a>

I, myself have not unlocked the secret to songwriting. I really admire people that have. I read a quote once by the artist Jean Michel Basquiat. It goes: “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time”. Another person said that “time is an illusion”, and that would make music an illusion too. You can write the music on paper, both the lyrics and the notes. But the work only really exists when it’s being played and then it disappears. It’s a delicate form of art, and to be a part of the process of writing, arranging and playing your own music… There is not much that can beat that feeling.

What does the name “Urtidsdjur” refer to in the context of the band name?

Affe: Since I was not in the band when they decided on the band name, I don’t really know what their intention with the name was. But I think it summons up the atmosphere we musically want to present. Some kind of traditional and ancient primal pulse performed on electric guitars. Urtidsdjur means “prehistoric animal”, “ancient animal” or “primeval animal” in English. But I think the translation leaves out some of the depth in words. Urtidsdjur has some sort of grandness in Swedish that the translation lacks. It breathes mysticism and hints at being some kind of spiritual being from which all rest descends from. That dates even from before the birth of time itself. Maybe, I think at least.

Kettil: Well, it may come as a disappointment that it’s just a word… Because we were about to do a gig and really needed a name. Urtidsdjur means “ancient animal”, but it’s not a reference to something relevant at all, it just sounded good. In retrospect it could mean that we’re hopelessly nostalgic.. Unwilling to give up their old guitar solos and traditional rock sounds, haha. We have grown into the name now though, somehow it fits the sound and the genre, but man, it’s hard to come up with a good band name.

Urtidsdjur | Photo by Pernilla Ekenståhl

It must be quite frustrating that you didn’t have the opportunity to present your new album to the live audience.

Affe: Yes that is correct! But in the context of what others have had to endure during this pandemic I don’t think we are in a position to complain too much. We have been talking about maybe doing a retroactive release party. The problem though is the physical copies of the album are almost sold out. And it would be a bit goofy to celebrate an album which is not possible to get at the party. So we need to come up with some creative and good ideas for what to do for cover art if we are going to do a re-pressing of the album. Since the covers for the vinyl are all handprinted, we are not able to reproduce the cover art without carving out a new printing block. And then there is still the enormous task of printing all the covers.

We also have the task of learning how to play our songs live. When playing them live, before the album, they always ended up sounding different from each time. The lengths and forms have never been in any fixed forms. Not until we recorded the songs. And because of all circumstances we haven’t had the chance to try to play the songs live in these forms that we ended up recording them. They might end up sounding a bit different.

Kettil: It was devastating. I’d say that the reason this band was formed was from a desire to play live. For me it’s the best part of music, to be able to perform it live in front of an audience.

An album release is an excellent excuse to get out and play, and it could really be a good way to get booked for concerts, it often means you got something to show. With the pandemic and all, we lost some momentum and with almost a year since the album release we lost the element of being “topical”. Although, maybe it was a blessing in disguise, since we’ve had a LOT of time to put in the production and marketing of the album instead.

How do you usually approach music making?

Kettil: The typical way of song making for us is that someone (usually Emil) comes up with a rough version of a song, some melodies and maybe the lyrics. He plays it to us and we just jam on it. From that sketch we all work together in the rehearsal studio to fill in the gaps and make it complete. It’s quite beautiful, and most times it feels that we’ve all been a part of the creative process.

Affe: I think Urtidsdjur is a typical jam band. Someone has an idea, and together we work and develop that idea.

“We wanted to have the freedom to create sounds, experiment and be creative when recording and mixing”

Can you share some further details on how your latest album was recorded?

Affe: Yes I love to!

We recorded the whole album ourselves. We wanted to have the freedom to create sounds, experiment and be creative when recording and mixing. Our rehearsal space is a bit too small for live tracking the whole band. Also the acoustics in that room are not the best.

Our drummer Kettil works as a gardener/grave digger for the church, and he found this small (almost) abandoned chapel out in the middle of nowhere that we got to borrow for the recording. It is called Ebeneser chapel and it’s a medium sized wood house from the late 19th century. It has a big room where we could set up all our rock and recording equipment. The drums went in front of the altar and repurposed the bathrooms for amplifier rooms. There was equipment and cables all over the place. We had one weekend in August where the whole band was free. We devote one full day to transporting everything to the location. And one full day to rig all the equipment, soundcheck and get everything to work. Then we spent two days recording. The third day we rested, and we blessed that day and sanctified it. No, no rest, we had to rig down all the equipment and transport it home to Uppsala again. Then we spent the rest of the year mixing, goofing around with sounds and overdubbing. Gustaf has this big old Leslie speaker that we experimented with re-amping a lot of sounds through. He also has a small toy xylophone that we used on some songs. We recorded ‘Ocean Sounds’ with me rolling around in a bathtub and I even managed to sneak in a discrete saxophone solo on the opening track while no one was listening.

Kettil: We had found this old chapel through my job that we were lucky enough to borrow for a couple of days. The acoustics were great, it was pretty remote and it had a charming feeling about it, as if the time had stopped there somewhere in the 1960s. We owned pretty much all the gear we needed, set it all up and recorded everything by ourselves. This was a weekend in the summer of 2019 and after those days we had recorded the majority of tracks for all songs. I’m not much of a studio person myself… But we had a lot of fun, and I think we’re all proud of the DIY spirit we got out of that weekend and continued to channel into the rest of the production. The post production would take some time though, but we were cautious not to rush anything, we wanted to do something we could be proud of.

<a href="https://urtidsdjur.bandcamp.com/album/urtidsdjur">Urtidsdjur by Urtidsdjur</a>

What are some bands/musicians that have a big influence on you?

Kettil: Well, there is no point in denying we all like 60-70s rock music, American, British and Swedish. All four of us probably occupy different parts of the huge organism that is rock music but there is a big overlap in the bands we like and inspire us of course.

We first bonded over the music of the folk rock band Slowgold from Gothenburg. Gothenburg (but also Stockholm) has had a rich folk/psych/rock stage for many years now and produced a lot of great bands that much like us have been influenced by the Swedish progressive movement in the 70s. Slowgold, Den Stora Vilan, Dungen for example. Then there are the giants, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead and The Band, they’re always somewhere in the background.

Affe: This is the wrong question for me. My brain always gets overloaded with examples. What should I say to make an impression? What band should I drop to not seem like a geek? What artist do I even like? And then my brain freezes up and I can’t even manage to think of one good example. But I like David Bowie. I’m also a big fan of straight forward rock like The Hives, The Hellacopters and Turbonegro. Also some Swedish pop and rock artists like Stefan Sundström, Hello Saferide and The Ark. But I can’t say if any of those is a big influence on me.

A while back you mentioned that you managed to salvage two singles from material that was not included on the debut album released earlier this year. A cover song and a new recording of a previously released song. Do tell us more.

Affe: We did record 11 songs in the chapel. 8 new songs, 2 re-recordings of previously released songs, and 1 cover song.

‘Gå på’ is a cover of Neil Young’s classic ‘Walk On’. The lyrics are in Swedish and are basically just the original lyrics put through google translate. But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret. We intended for that song to be on the album. Unfortunately, you need the permission from the author to publish derivatives of their works. So we asked permission and got denied. The song is recorded, mixed and mastered. But we are not allowed to publish it. Fortunately, there is a loophole. 70 years after the author has died the copyright of their work becomes public domain. Then we will be able to release our song ‘Gå på’. I will be at least 102 years old then though…

The other song that didn’t make it on the album is a re-recording of our song ‘Djur som jobbar’. Me and Gustaf did most of the mixing. And when we got to that song, we got stuck. We couldn’t get it to sound good, and we lost the inspiration. So we gave up.

We had grand plans of recording a follow up album while releasing the first one. To be able to present something new before being forgotten. But the world disagreed, and we have not even been able to rehearse since early 2020.

So here we are today. We decided that we couldn’t wait (at least) 70 years. Instead we re-did the vocals with the original (non google translated) lyrics in English. (You don’t need the permission if you didn’t change anything in a copyrighted work). Instead of releasing ‘Gå på’ we are releasing ‘Walk On’. It is also Urtidsdjurs first song with lyrics in English.

The other song, ‘Djur som jobbar’ has a very nice guest performance by Nicke Widén on pedal steel that we wanted to be able to release. We sent all the recorded tracks to Mattias Jansson, a friend of mine, and told him to mix it for us.

Now we have two new singles to release despite everything.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

I have rediscovered Frank Zappa! ‘One Size Fits All’ and ‘Hot Rats’, such great albums, and there’s also a pretty new documentary called Zappa that I really recommend. Otherwise there’s a lot of country on my plate now… Willie Nelson’s ‘The Willie Way’, every album Gram Parsons ever been involved in and Merle Haggard’s ‘Someday We’ll Look Back’ are just some of them. A new release I would recommend is Sturgill Simpson’s concept album ‘The Ballad of Dood & Juanita’.