Premiere: Skeppet – “Coast Rider”

Skeppet is Andreas Malm and Henrik Wallin, a longstanding Swedish duo and proprietors of the Kosmisk Väg label — a team that comes with all of the attendant psych proclivities you might imagine from the heads behind a label named Kosmisk Väg, “cosmic road” in English. They reconvened in 2014 after a few quiet years for their Phase 3 LP on Not Not Fun, recorded with percussionist Martin Nilsson, so it’s with Not Not Fun that they’re releasing Deluxe, an anthology cassette compiling older tracks from tapes and splits on Scandinavian imprints. For anyone that discovered Skeppet through Phase 3 and stopped there, the trip on Deluxe will seem as pleasantly long-winded; an hour+ of slow-burning “kosmisk” music with a tendency toward the motorik, still wonderfully stoned, while the scope of the collection offers a particularly enticing range of instrumentation and outcomes. The track we’re featuring, “Coast Rider,” comes from their second cassette (via Kosmisk Väg, 2009), and anchors the first part of the anthology with its propulsive, slow-build homage to Mammane Sani. While Phase 3 felt like a fairly contiguous album, Deluxe is too big for one character; a track released earlier in the same year, “Tripolitania,” is a wide-eyed glide into the beginning of what amounts to a lengthy cooldown at the its end. So if you find the prospect of a beautifully coiffed and sequenced hour-long Swedish head-trip appealing, you’ll know which of Not Not Fun’s latest offerings to gravitate toward.

Order Deluxe via Not Not Fun beginning December 18th.