Våren 2025 lanserar Fasching en konsertserie som hyllar hjältarna bakom musiken – fyra svenska independentbolag som spelar en avgörande roll i landets musikscen. Under fyra kvällar lyfter vi fram bolag som representerar allt från klassisk och avantgarde jazz till nytänkande folkmusik och lekfull improvisation.
Varje bolag kurerar sin egen kväll med konserter, skivförsäljning och mingel – en chans att uppleva deras unika bidrag till musikkulturen. Dessa bolag, ofta drivna av musiker själva, är en viktig del av det ekosystem som håller svensk jazz och alternativa uttryck levande. Utan deras passion och uthållighet hade många kreativa projekt aldrig blivit verklighet. Därför är det viktigt för oss att ge dessa bolag det utrymme och den uppmärksamhet de förtjänar.
För oss så är denna kulturgärning det verkliga Svenska Musikundret!
Pt3: Thanatosis
Thanatosis and Fasching present a packed evening with eight high-octane acts, where we also take the opportunity to celebrate no less than four new albums on the Stockholm label in question! Thanatosis was started in 2016 by Alex Zethson. In 2019 there were two records in the catalog, in 2021 eight … and in the spring of 2025 the catalog has grown to no less than 44 physical titles, and in addition a variety of digital releases and singles. Through the releases, the label creates a partial but weighty documentation of the contemporary Swedish and Stockholm experimental music scene, while strengthening the community and creating new meetings between musicians and audiences.
The label’s profile is eclectic in terms of genre, moving from jazz, to noise, contemporary music, post-rock and EAM, often with a minimalistic aesthetic and a muted, intense approach. The British magazine The Wire wrote in its feature on the label in spring 2024: “[I]t’s hard to imagine what [thanatosis] must feel like. One could guess that it’s a dissociative but alert feeling; a lucid stillness and clarity marked by heightened sensitivity to sound, touch and vibration.”
Alex Zethson / Johan Jutterström
Alex Zethson (Angles, Goran Kajfes Tropiques, Vathres etc.) and Johan Jutterström (STHLM svaga) have been playing together for over a decade, exploring the standard repertoire together. They are currently playing songs with titles starting with If I and It Could in an attempt to let their doubts define the melodies and the irrevocable choices that jazz music’s space to improvise requires. On April 11, the debut album It Could / If I will be released on American Astral Spirits in collaboration with Thanatosis. It could have been beautiful … if only I …
Alex Zethson, piano
Johan Jutterström, saxophone
Rotem Geffen
Singer, pianist and composer Nelly Klayman-Cohen, who performs under the name Rotem Geffen, conjures up a dream world that is both refined and raw. She has recently created a unique sound, with echoes of Nico and Björk. With lyrics in German, English and Hebrew, Rotem Geffen has become one of the most acclaimed names in experimental pop today, and the Thanatosis album The Night is the Night was internationally reviewed and received a 4/5 in Dagens Nyheter with the words: “If you were to compare Rotem Geffen’s music to a house, you could say that it is a drafty, old palace”. In the live format, Rotem Geffen creates a space that is a burning moment of devotional listening.
Nelly Klayman-Cohen, piano, voice
Miharu Ogura
Japanese, Frankfurt-based pianist Miharu Ogura is, without exaggeration, one of the world’s leading pianists today. Ogura made her international breakthrough in 2018 when she won seven prizes, including the composition prize, at the Orléans International Piano Competition. Since then, she has performed at concerts and festivals across Europe, including several visits to Sweden, and has received composition commissions from Radio France and the Biennale di Venezia, among others. Her live recording of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I-XI at the Thanatosis festival MONOPIANO has attracted much attention in the international press, which has compared her to legends such as David Tudor and Aloys Kontarsky. In addition, she is a composer of rank, as could be heard on the album Ogura plays Ogura (Thanatosis 2024). This evening we will hear a Swedish premiere of her newly written work “Rifrazione” plus Unsuk Chin’s “Toccata from Six Piano Etudes (2003)”.
Miharu Ogura, piano
Lovers
Lovers is a Paris-based duo consisting of singer Linda Oláh and guitarist Giani Caserotto who met in 2008. They have since explored an electro-acoustic music that elegantly maneuvers between several musical genres: improvisation, classical music, jazz and pop. Lovers takes the musical anthems from the air, brings them back to earth and plants them – like Baudelaire’s wild seeds. In their new form, the songs capture the diversity of love; the gritty as much as the graceful, the ugly as much as the beautiful; letting harmony and dissonance sound together in complex and evocative unisons. Their upcoming album “Lettres d’amour” will be released in September 2025 on Thanatosis and consists of music compiled over a continuous period of 9 years (2016-2025).
Linda Oláh, vocals, electronics
Giani Caserotto, guitar, electronics
Christer Bothén 3 (w. Kansan Zetterberg & Kjell Nordeson)
We celebrate Christer Bothén’s release L’INVISIBLE with his new trio featuring jazz veterans Kansan Zetterberg on double bass and San Francisco-based Kjell Nordeson who in this group mostly plays vibraphone, but also drums. The trio has shaped a visionary jazz music characterized by both compositional and improvisational clarity. Different time layers run in parallel; rhythmic and melodic fragments are repeated and shifted, and mixed with improvisational flourishes.
Christer Bothén (born 1941 in Gothenburg) is a living legend in Swedish musical life. His main instruments are bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, donso n’goni and guimbri. Bothén spent 1971-72 in Mali, where he studied hunter music and donso n’goni with master Broema Dombia in Bougouni, Wassoulut. In 1977, he began studying gnawa music with master Maalem Abdellatif Elmakhzoumi in Marrakech, with whom he studied until the master’s death in 2017. From 1970 onwards, Bothén collaborated with Don Cherry and he also taught Cherry donso n’goni. From 1990 onwards, Bothén has regularly performed as a soloist and continued to lead his own groups, collaborating frequently with Mats Gustafsson, performance artist and musician Sara Lundén and cornetist Goran Kajfeš, and in trios with Vilhelm Bromander and Konrad Agnas. 2020 saw the release of the three-CD box set AMBROSIA on Thanatosis. In 2023 he was awarded the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s large music scholarship.
Christer Bothén, bass clarinet and inside piano
Kansan Zetterberg, double bass
Kjell Nordenson, vibraphone, percussion
Finn Loxbo
Finn Loxbo is a guitarist with a focus on free improvisation. His music is usually on either side of two dynamic extremes: quiet and acoustic or amplified and very loud. On the quiet side, we find him in his own ensemble Kommun (releasing the album Kalpa on May 2), as a solo act and in collaborations with, for example, Skogen. Examples from the louder side are Kyosaku and Anna Högberg Extended Attack and previously in bands such as Doglife, Strändernas svall and Fire! Orchestra. But it is in the solo format that we get to meet him tonight, where he with dazzling clarity and conciseness composes sound and silence in real time with an improvisational thinking that takes the listener into the core of the music.
Finn Loxbo, acoustic guitar
Angles & Elle-Kari – The Death of Kalypso (chamber version)
The Death of Kalypso, who won Manifestpriset “Jazz of the Year”, was one of the most acclaimed jazz records of 2024, with its eclectic mix of haunting songs (by Küchen), string/wind arrangements (by Zethson), explosive improvisations and ruthless vocals by force of nature Elle-Kari Sander (known from The Tiny and The Other Woman, among others). One reviewer said that this surreal jazz opera was the best jazz opera since Carla Bley’s “Escalator over the hill”. After three stage performances at moment:teater, concerts at concert halls and festivals in Sweden, and at festivals in Belgium and the Netherlands, a scaled-down version is presented tonight.
Elle-Kari Sander, voice
Patric Thorman, double bass
Mattias Ståhl, vibraphone
Brusk Zanganeh, violin
Mats Äleklint, trombone
Martin Küchen, saxophone
Alex Zethson, piano
Vilhelm Bromander Unfodling Orchestra
Album release for Jorden vi ärvde, bassist Vilhelm Bromander’s long-awaited follow-up to the success of In this forever unfolding moment (2023), which won the Golden Record and Manifesto (Jazz of the Year), and ended up on DownBeat’s year-end best list. In his ensemble – which has toured Scandinavia and made an acclaimed appearance at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 2024 – the composer and bassist has gathered 13 of the most distinctive voices on the Swedish jazz scene today, for whom he composes music that fuses free-flowing cosmic jazz with intricate arrangements and influences from folk music, and North Indian classical music traditions.
Vilhelm Bromander, double bass
Katt Hernandez, violin
Martin Küchen, alto saxophone
Elin Forkelid, tenor saxophone
Alberto Pinton, baritone saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
Christer Bothén, bass clarinet
Emil Strandberg, trumpet
Mats Äleklint, trombone
Alex Zethson, piano
Mattias Ståhl, vibraphone, marimba
Stina Hellberg Agback, harp
Dennis Egberth, drums
Anton Jonsson, drums
