“Please keep the reverb on; I don’t like the sound of my voice.” A request to the sound engineer. What does one write about a band that—in the most literal sense of the word—refuses to perform? A band known only to die-hard fans, yet one that has released its fifth album, Glass and Bones, this year.
It’s difficult. Almost impossible.
Five musicians on stage seem to be somewhere they’d rather not be. The stage almost seems a necessary nuisance that unfortunately comes with the territory.
Makthaverskan, a Swedish band, play at the Albani in Winterthur for a modest audience. The scene comes as no surprise; the band’s music, rooted somewhere between post-punk and dream pop, is dense, complex, and unwieldy. In the small club, the sound loses its subtle nuances and becomes a massive wave. And then there’s this feeling that creeps up on me: they don’t actually want to be standing there at all.
This inevitably leads to the question: why are they doing it at all?
I can’t recall any act that hides so completely behind their music. Not least because hiding like that is frankly career suicide. The world craves performers, heroes and villains. Makthaverskan offer none of that, but they do offer something quite extraordinary: honesty.
Here, the music isn’t a means to an end—namely fame—but pure expression. Therapy. Not an option, but a necessity. The Swedes don’t play with in-ear monitors; they play with earplugs. And yet they’re virtuosic. Fingers dance passionately across the strings. The hi-hat is worked breathlessly. The desperate purity in the voice, pleading into the cold night. Absolute mastery, deployed against display itself. Unwavering artistic confidence, coexisting with a refusal to become performers for the performance’s sake.
Yet a cool detachment remains, even on soundwave-shattering post-punk tracks like Comfort or Leda. The highlight: Black Waters, guitar and vocals, raw and sophisticated. Honesty in its purest form.
Janosch Tröhler-Nordström
Here, a band makes music for itself, not for the audience. The latter is merely accidental. That’s extremely rare, and, I’ll admit, merely my perception on this rainy Wednesday evening. Perhaps it’s simply a rebellion against the personification of music, against the hero worship of artists. That, too, is rare enough, for much of the music business operates precisely on this principle.
Are Makthaverskan thereby putting obstacles in their own way? Of course. Does that make their art any worse? Not at all. But to presume to measure art, to assign a metric to success, is in itself a mad endeavour.
Whether my perception is deceiving me or not, you have to engage with Makthaverskan consciously. There’s no open door, no easy access. Don’t expect an escalation to match the escalating guitar antics. No, here you’re confronted with your own expectations of music and of what a performance should be.
Makthaverskan won’t meet you halfway. The question the band asks is the one worth taking home: why are you here?
