Erik Sandqvist – Bingo i lokalen LP

One of instrumental music’s greatest strengths is its subjectivity. Stripped of narrative, soundscapes that sprawl, twist and turn are open to interpretation, and can give each listener their own little mirror of themselves, waking up their own memories within the musical journey. The debut solo record from Swedish musician Erik Sandqvist, Bingo i lokalen, fits into that genre – his sashaying, spellbinding and euphorically colourful creations, blending together jazz, funk, soul and electronica, are deeply suggestive, making little pools of self-reflection, where the deeper depths of life can live.

Inspired by his own childhood memories, Bingo i lokalen is the musical equivalent of a Pick’n’Mix bags of sweets – a dizzying, varied and playful grab-bag of sounds brought together in the same space, and one that gives you a sugary enthusiasm about rummaging through them. Each of Sandqvist’s cosily-crafted packages holds a tasty little treasure within, with flavours ranging from candy-cane electronica, smoky jazz, or snaking psych-prog. Picking a path through what lies within is all part of the fun.

Sandqvist grew up in Nacka, a suburb of Stockholm, but the story of Bingo i lokalen focuses on his connection to another place – the little village of Lynäs, about 250km north of the Swedish capital. That’s where his grandfather was from, and had a little summer house, and that house and the stories around it form a loose concept for the album. Sandqvist spent a lot of his childhood there, and not being able to visit during the pandemic got him thinking about it – thoughts he invested in the record. “Lynäs is where my relatives are from, where my grandfather is from”, says Sandqvist. “But it was something I felt I had lost a little bit of a connection to, during the times when you had to stay at home. It also comes from my grandfather, who is no longer with us. I found out after he died that he played a lot of music, a lot of piano. I grew up in a family that listened to a lot of music, but no-one really played. So it was a discovery, to find out that someone in my family did play music, a little further back. Part of the album was about exploring that idea, to try and get close to that connection in some sense. A lot of the song titles come from things like that, old phrases my grandfather used to use, places that have a connection to him, things like that”.

Sandqvist’s own memories are buried deep in the songs. “Really! A Plié?” draws on a trip to New York with his friend, and mixes being “high on life” with the sense of the “end of a chapter of our lives, the last time out having fun together while being young”. The record’s title comes from the dry voice of a drive-in bingo announcer. And the self-reflection is born a little of the pause-time of the pandemic, when thinking about other places was all that was available. “Some of it came from conversations with my partner”, says Erik. “She’s from Finland, and so even if we in Sweden could travel a little and see people [during the pandemic], she couldn’t go home to see her family. So we spoke about it a lot, about missing places and people, about our feelings about it all. She’s not Swedish either, and there’s a little bit of antipathy about it, being from Helsinki but living in Stockholm. It woke a lot of ideas about what it’s like to be in a city that’s not your own, when you can’t leave it. Those thoughts, and those ideas, that helped spark the concept for the album”.

The album is rich with a sense of memory and place. But it’s also a showcase of Sandqvist’s deft creative touch, his ability to play around with different sounds, to find a little spark in each of them. There are songs on the album like “Sankan’s Dream”, that revel in a blurry, dizzy wooziness. There are songs filled with a sunny joyousness like “Le monsieur sur le bateau, c’est moi”, with its cute, chunky synthlines, like the soundtrack to a children’s television programme. And there are songs that are sparklingly adventurous, like the proggy “Kroken”. Apart from the drums, the instrumentation on the record is nearly all Sandqvist’s own work. A self-taught musician, the sound is the result of his curiously messing with instruments, seeing what he could do. He says “I was playing around a lot myself, and through that having a lot of loose ideas bouncing around. So it felt like it was time to do something with it. So it came both from curiosity, a desire to see what I could do with this stuff, but also just the desire to do something with it, to get some direction with it. Most of it I played and recorded myself, except for the drums, so it was a little bit of an experimental workshop. To just do it, and see what it could be. Many of the instruments I don’t play to an amazing standard, but it’s fun to try things out with them”.

All of those qualities – memory, curiosity, playfulness, a touch of melancholy – come together and cohabit happily on Bingo i lokalen. It’s a record where the feelings and the fun put into the songs really shine through, and just to listen is to be absorbed by the emotion. It’s a warm, open-hearted piece of art, with enough evocativeness and spark to let the listener find their own sense of time and place within it. What you find in there is up to you.