Band of the Week: Dungen

Hometown: Lanna, Sweden
Members: Gustav Ejstes (pictured above in orange sweater, with Dungen's touring lineup), and whoever else he feels like working with
Why they’re worth watching: The band's excellent third album, Ta Det Lugnt, was recently re-released stateside, and with plenty of buzz.
For fans of: Love, Comets on Fire, Blue Cheer

Everything about Dungen (pronounced "doon-yen") seems exotic. The Swedish band's sweeping, psychedelic sound ranges from beautiful to raucous on its latest, Ta Det Lugnt. After rave reviews last year, the record was recently re-released in the U.S., and Dungen's been in nonstop-tour mode.

"I had no intention of this recording getting so much attention,” says Gustav Ejestes, the band’s polite, soft-spoken mastermind, from a hotel in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where Dungen is taking a few days off. “When you come to a town you've never heard about and 500 people show up, everybody's happy. It's crazy."

Ejstes grew up in a very musical family in a small village called Lanna in Vastergotland, Sweden, where he began playing the piano at age six. After a few years, he started getting heavily into sampled music, citing Public Enemy's "Brothers Gonna Work it Out," as the first hip-hop record he bought.

"That turned out to be my teenage-rebellion punk music," he says. "It was so different from what I grew up with and listened to when I was a child. A friend and I started making our own hip-hop, using a lot of samples, but I got more interested in the music we were sampling than what it became when we used it. I got into a lot of live music—rock, jazz and so on—and I just wanted to learn how to play instruments."

So it’s no surprise that on the lush-sounding Ta Det Lugnt, Ejstes plays all the traditional rock ’n’ roll instruments (guitar, bass, drums), but also flute and violin. And in addition to the majority of the music, he handles the album’s production. Dungen's noodling, psych-tinged guitars echo the '60s in a way many of today’s revivalist bands would kill to pull off. The difference lies in Ejstes' long musical history. This isn't a guy who just picked up a guitar, learned a couple blues progressions and formed a duo that apes The Stooges. Dungen is a fully realized musical vision, one that extracts the timeless essence of the ’60s psych-rock ethos while perfecting it in a way seldom done by its antecedents.

Still, Ejstes says, "There's no one in the whole entire world that can produce an album that sounds good. Most of the music that comes out today is shit anyway. I'm not interested in it. I just tried to [make this album] the way I thought sounded good. If that's vintage, I don't know. It just became what it became."

Possibly the most exotic and refreshing aspect of the record is its Swedish vocals. They add an element of mystery for those not fluent, but also lend the music purity. Once the band finishes its current tour, it’ll be time once again for recording. Some material for a follow-up has already been recorded. And luckily—even with the rampant crossover possibilities—Ejstes has no plans of singing in English anytime soon. "The thing is,” he says, “I want the music to be real. That's why I sing in my native language. I don't like the acting and the gimmicks of rock ’n’ roll. I think that music should be true and honest."