Jakob Olausson and Sus&Jakob [Salvage Vanguard 7/19]

One might be forgiven in applying the "New Weird America" term to Landskrona, Sweden's Jakob Olausson. After all, his debut solo LP, Moonlight Farm, came out in 2006 on Minneapolis' De Stijl Records, home to such groups as Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, Samara Lubelski, and Ed Askew. Olausson's reverb-heavy psychedelic folk ragas also offer similarities to Six Organs of Admittance, the more song-oriented moments of No Neck, or a Sanskrit Skip Spence. On record, his lonesome folk ballads are multitracked with flutes, hand drums, gimbri, cello, piano and electronic garble with a sense of orchestration missing from most of his contemporaries. It's shambolic but far from cosmic slop.

As part of a rare stateside tour that hits the Salvage Vanguard on Sunday, Olausson will be playing solo as well as in Sus & Jakob, the girl-boy duo that's more Brother Ah/Sun Ra's Strange Strings than She & Him. Sus & Jakob will release their debut LP out on De Stijl later in the summer, and it promises to have no small impact on the international freaky mess that we call "modern music." That said it's hard to imagine Olausson's various projects being blueprints, so original and well-executed they are. The whole thing kicks off at 9:30, so it won't likely impinge on your Monday morning blues.