Civilistjävel!: Live CS

Civilistjävel!’s enigmatic world-building surfaces on a new tape edition for Perko’s Felt label, five years since his self-released debut snagged a lot of ears. Civilistjävel! has become a cult figure for his brand of ambiguous ambient, drone and snow covered rhythms, mostly pressed up in elusive editions, but more recently more readily available via his output on Felt, who here follow thru with two side-long spectral snapshots of his live practice. Both sides ideally characterise the way Civilistjävel!’s music treads the finest line of bezonked states of mind and more febrile restlessness, hypnagogic jerks included. His ‘Live at Spanners’ in London draws you in to the sounds of far away pads and etheric apparitions crossing the stereo field, but is soon enough disrupted with more wayward, raw electronics rankled by nervous ambient pipes, fracturing into brittlest jungle breaks like Christoph De Babalon’s fever dreams. Playing closer to home on the flipside, recorded at Nonagon Festival in the former oil tanks of Sväno island, Sweden, feels more bombed/bummed out and reverberating, practically passing out into lush oblivion for 15 mins, before flinty breaks congeal into a brilliant darkside D&B reverie of wraithlike mentasms.