Joakim Skogsberg

The album “Jola Rota” is about Joakim Skogsberg's love for the grandiose Swedish landscapes, which has put its imprint upon his songs. On “Jola Rota” Joakim single-handedly created a minimal psychedelic and acid folk masterpiece infused with incredible soundscapes of derailed fuzzed out violins, soaring guitars, rattling hand percussion, droning vocals and pulsating bass rhythms, complimented by Joakim's “jolor”, a special singing style with roots in an ancient Swedish tradition of folk music. The album was for the most part recorded out in the woods, with a portable Nagra-reel-to-reel-tape recorder and a simple Philips-cassette recorder. Upon completion it was suggested for the album to appear on Gump Records, a subsidiary of Metronome. The reason was that the music was just too underground and weird to be in Metronome's register. Apart from Joakim's original recordings, some overdubs and effects were done in the studio during the autumn of 1971. Some of the droning sounds on the record were recorded in a tiny closet in Kärrtorp; a suburb to Stockholm where Joakim was living at the time. The album was pressed into approximately 1000 copies and only about 300 to 400 copies were actually sold. The rest of them were melted down and used in the pressing of other Gump records, making “Jola Rota” a much rumoured and sought after Swedish droned-out and mesmerizing psychedelic artefact.