There's nothing like pumpkin soup. It makes my heart warmer, my throat a bit less sore and it fills my body with vitamins it hardly encounters. I know it's still Summer etc but i'm sick. So i'm sitting in front of my computer listening to Swod's Gehen, in a cold sweat, wondering if that draught will ever, ever stop.

I don't really like the name, but well, as you all know, it's the music that matters. "Gehen" means "Go" and it's a reliable title. I hate people who approach music intellectually and flood my brains with cheap concepts and technical considerations. I don't need to understand music to like it.

Swod are two German gentlemen making music with a piano, drums and computers. It's sometimes hypnotically repetitive sometimes soothingly minimalist and never pretentious or boring. It's very cinematic and lively, highly emotional yet delicate and soft, a score for a movie that never was. Computers are used cleverly and the modern/experimental edge of Swod's music always serves the pieces written and never interrupt the listening experience or sound like Sylvain Chauveau's slacker pieces. In a time when musicians seem to shelter in the past or in senseless conceptualisation Gehen shines like the northern star.

-Barbara H

/sept 1st 2004/