Civilistjävel! - Verktyg (2024)

Rub those peepers again; outta nowhere, YYAA, the small but perfectly-formed label behind *that* classic TCF tape, reactivates with a true bewt by another cult Scandinavian artist, Civilistjävel!, measuring a discrete dose of electronic dream food made using a single synth and an old digital delay as a primitive looper.

Between 2013-2016, YYAA were one of those labels we were watching with the keenest ear, due to their seminal run of cassettes that included TCF’s blink ’n miss ‘YYAA002’ piece; an incredible touchstone for deconstructed dance music, presented in some of the most beautiful packaging out there. They would issue a handful more by likes of Linda Spjut, Trevor Lee Larson, and Hiele, and then nowt, simply gone in a puff of smoke.

Eight year later they return from the dark clutching Civilistjävel!’s ‘Verktyg’, locating the Swedish enigma stoking the myth surrounding his music with 40 minutes of entropic ambient embers meant to be read like charred runes in the hearth. They suitably cap the project’s 5th year of releases with one of its most romantic, skin-tingling suites, emitting pine-scented synth smoke that catches the back of the imagination with its ritualistic procession of barely-there but richly vivid sound imagery that evokes an isolationist bliss with patented sensuality at a glacial pace.

Picture a mycelia-riddled studio cabin in the woods where the synths whisper to one another at the witching hour and the fire burns just gently enough to keep them all active, and one is in the headspace of ‘Verktyg’. Dream-spun webs of pitch-wobbled melody spool across the scene on ‘fem’, and gel in bittersweet pulses of ‘sex’, oozing like Jan Jelinek in tristesse on ‘ett’, and singing like sore circuitry in ‘femton’ or the choral arabesque ‘elva’, with ‘tjugotre’ faintly recalling Torsten Profrock’s Various Artists in miniature, while ‘sexton’ surely catches the breath with its AFXian SAW II overtures and ’tjugotvå’ feels like the wind outside harmonising the indoors on a Gavin Bryars elegy.

It’s totally gorgeous and reserved but fanciful stuff in a way worthy of the YYAA label, who may or may not have something to do with releasing that early ‘00s folk delicacy Women & Children, for those looking to join the nodes. We can only hope and wish that a long mooted reissue of TCF’s may be on the horizon with the label’s return, but honestly fuck knows. We’ll happily make do with this for now.