Fantasy Sex – Fantasy Sex LP

* Limited LP. Two-sided insert with liner notes by Matthias Andersson. Mastered by Lasse Marhaug * Utmarken was a combined venue, record shop and recording space in Gothenburg that existed between 2008 and 2011. A short-lived under the radar hub for outsider art and fringe music, the place quickly became an oasis for an wide variety of local misfits and a hotbed for interesting sounds. The creative, multifaceted atmosphere spawned acts like Ättestupa, Lust For Youth, Street Drinkers and Arv & Miljö but also became a temporarily home for then already established names like Sewer Election and Poppets.

Fantasy Sex consisted of Dan Johansson (Sewer Election) and David Eng (Ättestupa) and existed on and off during those three years and the few recordings the duo left behind them captures the true spirit of the time and place better than most. It’s still hard to try define exactly what Fantasy Sex really was all about. They almost became a house band, albeit one that necessarily didn’t perform in front of an audience. The two major recordings sounds very different to each other and they almost did as many sound installations as they did proper live shows. Very fittingly, the duo pretty much stopped their activities at the same time as Utmarken closed in 2011.

In late 2022, David and Dan revisited the old recordings and came out with a brilliant 34 minute long LP edit. The A-side consists of a new mix of the massive recording that became known as the ‘Blue lagoon’, originally released in a tiny edition on the short-lived imprint Inkasso Kassetter in 2009. Sort of inspired by the then exploding new age-y movement of spraypainted DIY cassette culture, the track is a suggestive blend of tropical loops and brittle, hazy electronics with an almost Yeast Culturian approach to continuous longform composition. ‘Desperate Attempts’ on the flipside was originally released on Joy De Vivre in 2011 as a split cassette with Elisha Morningstar. You’re never better than your record collection and the track shows a very different side of the project. Initially chaotic and almost FMP-like free jazz skronk mixed up with severe slices of what was once upon a time refered to as “Swedish tape noise”, the track suddenly slows down to something that predates a sound that Neutral perfected and cemented a couple of years later. The LP closes with ‘Waves Of Skin’ which was their contribution to the Ett Annat Göteborg compilation cassette, a track that used source material from the Blue lagoon session.