Audiopile Review: There’s something lip-smackingly satisfying about Civilistjävel!’s music. It’s a delicious blend of tactile analogue and glitchy digital sounds. Plus, it’s seasoned with engagingly ominous moods and arrestingly beautiful melodies. It has great… uh… ear feel. Sorry, this metaphor is getting away from us. Less speculatively, the appeal might be something to do with a certain timelessness. That’s not an easy ingredient to source (uh-oh, here we go again) in electronic music. But Civilistjävel!, aka Sweden’s Tomas Bodén, claims to habitually mix archival recordings from the 1990s with completely new tracks. And we certainly could not tell one from the other. His new album ‘Brödföda’ is another essential entry in the Civilistjävel! discography. What marks it out into from previous entries is the number of collaborators Bodén has allowed into his studio this time around (which also suggests these are mostly new recordings, in case you’re keeping score). Civilistjävel! music can sound hermetic, but there’s a real warmth and openness to this one. ‘VI’ even has some distinctly ECM-esque ambient jazz stylings. Even more notably, Beirut-based singer Mayssa Jallad, adds incredibly haunting vocals to ‘IV’. Maybe it’s due to Bodén’s great ear for melody, but shit really kicks off on the rare occasions he works with a vocalist. That happens like three whole times on this album, but it’s ‘IV’ that hits the hardest. Still, that track feels less like a standout and more like the centrepiece of this brilliantly coherent epic of an album. Bodén himself is the standout. He’s streets ahead of most electronic music producers currently releasing records. And you can expect to see ‘Brödföda’ popping up on many an album-of-the-year list in a couple of months’ time.

Civilistjävel! returns with Brödföda, the successor to 2022’s Järnnätter and his fourth release for FELT. The record features collaborations with Laila Sakini, Mayssa Jallad, Thommy Wahlström, ELDON, and Withdrawn.

Tomas Bodén is a revered figure of the aural murk, known primarily for his work as Civilistjävel. It’s an alias that has spawned a catalogue of self-released peculiarities, featuring music that scorns traditional form, instead opting for unfussed symphonies of ice-hued minimalism; soft murmurs that emanate from his studio in the High Coast of Sweden.

On Brödföda, his latest album for Fergus Jones’s FELT imprint, subtle new developments in mood prevail. Across its 75 minutes, Civilistjävel! unveils a breadth of emotions that on previous releases seemed distant. He also invites collaborators on record for the first time: Beirut-based singer Mayssa Jallad mournfully croons on “IV”, “VIII” hosts Coldlight’s ELDON & Withdrawn for an abstracted session of dub-hop murk, Laila Sakini offers a hallucinogenic monologue amidst melodica, sticks & bells playing on “IX”, and Thommy Wahlström floats scant acid dub stylings on “VI”. These additions and developments bring a forlorn intimacy to the music, and suggest an ambition that few artists of his ilk strive for.

FELT’s (un)reliable cast of audio ghouls routinely summon the odd, with Civilistjävel! often its primary culprit; Brödföda gently modifies this path to pursue some of his and the label’s most quaintly beautiful music yet.