Listener Victor writes in from Minneapolis with a photo of private press LP from the late ’70s or early ‘80s that he recently came across at a flea market stall in Duluth, too intriguing not to buy, even though the record itself was MIA. Being the global center for private press Scandinavian LPs that we are (especially ones with front covers that depict strange-looking dogs), he naturally wrote to us wondering what could tell him. Well, Victor, we know a little, but wish we could tell you more.
Back when the “U” in WFMU still stood for “Upsala” and the station was part of a Lutheran college campus in New Jersey, we used to get occasional donations of record collections from former students or their families. There was tons of Nordic/Scandinavian dreck, and a few DJs went through Swedish country music phases. But for a brief period in the late ‘80s, the hands-down DJ favorite was an extremely rare LP from Stavanger, Norway by the group Kasvot Växt with the improbable but absolutely real name í rokk.
It was such a favorite, in fact, that within a year or so our copy of í rokk walked away with a certain now ex-DJ. And so rare that it was only at our annual Record Fair a few years ago that we’ve even seen a copy since, albeit at a price that would’ve cut well into the Record Fair’s profits had we reacquired it on behalf of station’s library.
What we know for sure are their names, at least as they were credited on the album--Horst Guomundurson, Georg Guomundrson, Jules Haugen, and Cleif Jårvinen--though no instruments are credited. (One very stoned DJ had a theory that the bandmembers actually played in different configurations on each song.) í rokk was pressed in Stavanger, and there’s a label credited, Elektrisk Tung, but who really knows if that was a real label or just a joke by the band or one of their friends?
The lyrics, which we guessed were in Norwegian, were impossible to understand, of course. There were weird synthesizers that sounded either homemade or like some obscure European model. One song, “Liggur í Gegnum,” I believe, featured chanting and became a hit on the dance floor at the DJ holiday party that year, not long before the LP disappeared.
During that all-too-brief period when the album was at the station, though, we tried to get some of the song titles and lyrics translated by enlisting the help of a Norwegian minister visiting campus for a semester. And, if you think inviting a Norwegian minister into the den of iniquity that was our college radio station in 1988 was a bad idea you, dear listener, would be absolutely correct. There’s a good chance he was put off by the smells emanating from the DJ lounge before he even got to the listening station at the record library, but he tried to be polite. At least at first.
From the jacket, he could only tell us that the band’s name was actually in two languages, which was news to us, and when he listened to the record itself, he told us that the lyrics seemed to be possibly in even more than two languages. Besides Norwegian, at least one of the languages seemed to be Finnish, and maybe also Swedish, though he wasn’t sure, and clearly was in no mood to figure it out.
What is indisputable is that the words he did understand seemed to upset him greatly, and the visiting Norwegian minister didn’t even make it through the first side of the record. In DJ lore, the troublesome chorus had something to do with what he hastily translated as “the cubes,” after which the young minister reportedly departed the record library while remarking that he didn’t think that anybody should be singing about such topics, let alone to a potential audience of young music fans. Cubes? Fuck if we know.
It’s a record we dearly hope surfaces again someday in playable shape, and we’re keeping our eyeballs peeled. Frankly, we don’t care if some wealthy collector hoards a copy as long as they make mp3s for the rest of us. We’d just like to hear it again! And if anybody knows anything about those fucking cubes, please get in touch.
