Everyone's Thing

Gustav Ejstes is finally learning to play well with others. It only took 16 years of being in a band for it to happen.

With Dungen, the psych-rock outfit he's helmed since the late '90s, the 35-year-old Swede has long maintained complete control—writing songs in solitude, producing the records himself, bringing in other musicians only for recording and touring. But making a Dungen album isn't like switching on a 4-track, futzing around for a few hours and uploading to Soundcloud the same night. It's a meticulous process, driven by Ejstes' compulsion to make the sounds in his head come out of the speakers precisely as he hears them. After a while, going it alone began to wear on him.

"I've always felt damaged after," Ejstes says by phone from his tour bus somewhere in Indiana. "When I finish, I've been sitting and mixing for, like, half a year, and I never want to hear the music again."

For Allas Sak, the group's seventh album and first in five years, Ejstes loosened his grip in the studio, turning over the knobs to another producer and opening up more space for collaboration with his bandmates. And the result is, well, another Dungen record—that is to say, masterfully constructed, richly textured and utterly beguiling. Drawing on bucolic folk and jazz as much as fuzz-tone psychedelia, the music is so lush and three-dimensional it feels like you can live inside it; the fact that the lyrics are Swedish is hardly a barrier. It's a sound Ejstes has built on with each successive release. With Allas Sak, it has grown expansive enough to allow others to color in the details. That spirit of inclusivity is reflected in the title: Loosely translated, it means "everyone's thing."

It was a different story 10 years ago. Back then, Dungen was almost entirely Ejstes' thing. An avowed hip-hop head growing up in rural Sweden, the project sprang from his fascination with the crackling samples that served as source material for producers like Madlib and Pete Rock. He played practically everything on the first three Dungen albums, including 2004 breakthrough Ta Det Lugnt. Critics marveled at the craftsmanship, with Pitchfork going so far as to place the album on the same plane of immersiveness as Pet Sounds.

But even then, Dungen was never exactly a solo endeavor: Guitarist Reine Fiske's liquid, expressive playing, in particular, is as important to its sound as Ejstes' arrangements and melodies. After Ta Det Lugnt brought Dungen to a wider international audience, increased touring has gradually turned the group, which also includes bassist Mattias Gustavsson and drummer Johan Holmegard, into an actual band. But Allas Sak is the first Dungen album that could be considered a legitimate four-man effort—five, if you include producer Mattias Glava.

"He started the project," Ejstes says of Glava. "It's a lot because of him that we're here now."

Recording live at Glava's studio, the band molded Ejstes' songs as a unit. As with earlier albums, Allas Sak is of a distinctly '60s vintage sonically, but the music is less a replica of the past than a dreamy recollection of it. Dressed with woodwinds, brass and strings, it is Dungen's most pastoral record yet, evoking the feeling of stumbling upon a mystical Scandinavian glen, or a collection of Hans Christian Andersen fables come to life. Of course, the songs— once again sung in his native tongue—are much more personal for Ejstes, who has described them as being about "my everyday experiences, my thoughts and stories from the life I live." But one thing he's learned as he's written increasingly for non-Swedish audiences, is that the listener's interpretation matters as much as his own intent. In other words, once the song is out of his head, it's everyone's thing, and anyone can claim ownership.

"The title of the album relates to the fact that, as soon as the song is done or recorded, it's no longer my song," Ejstes says. "As soon as I get to the studio and play it together with the band, all of a sudden it's their song as well. And when we've recorded it and put it out and you listen to it, then it's yours as well."

SEE IT: Dungen plays Bunk Bar, 1028 SE Water Ave., on Wednesday, Oct. 21. 9:30 pm. Sold out. 21+.

Willamette Week