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MNW 3005CD
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"One of the smallest and most introverted prog albums from the early 1970s. Short poems arranged with the dose of fantasy that only A&F are capable of. Soft whispering songs mixed up with stonerfuzzy epic doom parts like Heavy Eddy. The CD is housed in a nice digipak with booklet. The album includes the classic line-up: Bosse Skoglund, Tord Bengtsson, Ove Karlsson, Roland Keijser, Torsten Eckerman and the strange poet Rolf Lundqvist.
Rolf Lundqvist was studying at secondary school in Falun, northern Sweden, when he first came into contact with Arbete & Fritid and Ove Karlson. On Christmas day of that year, they met up and made their first recordings together. The songs from the resulting demo are to be found on this CD. During this period, members of Arbete & Fritid came and went, but by New Year's Eve of 1971 their lineup was complete. The new band's first undertaking was to record with Rolf Lundqvist, which they did in Vaxholm, just outside Stockholm, in January of 1972. Christened Slottbergets Hambo & Andra Valser, the resulting album was released in April the same year. Rolf Lundqvist debuts as a poet with this album, singing and reciting his long texts; sometimes alarming yet ingenious comments on reality, often displaying disdain towards the falsity of today's way of life. Arbete & Fritid give the poetry a suitable audio backdrop ranging in styles from waltz, jazz and tango to folk and rock music. A bonus track is provided in the form of a newly-penned song by Roffe, linking back to his texts from the '70s."
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MNW 2011CD
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Originally released in 2005; career overview compilation of their best material. "In the late '80s, Union Carbide Productions were an essential live rock & roll experience whose on-stage theatrics made anything happening in front of the stage seem pretty tame by comparison. The underground was a very self-conscious place, where nostalgia for anything prior to the Ramones revolution wasn't as celebrated as it was when Nirvana covered the Shocking Blue's 'Love Buzz.' There were exceptions, of course;The Cramps were self-exiled freaks whose outrageousness (and age) gave them license to pillage the '50s freely, but not many folks were really tapped into the '60s punk shamanism vibe of the Stooges with as clean a feed as these Swedes. The early UCP recordings bear this connection out best on 'Ring My Bell' and the hilarious corporate hedonism of 'Financial Declaration.' Later, though, as they trudged on into the '90s, they embraced a jangling, folksy tenderness that they originally lampooned on earlier work, especially the ultra-snide 'San Francisco Boogie.' The rending of their high-octane fabric probably led to their demise after 1992's Swing. That's not to say that tunes like 'Golden Age' are bad; they just signal some awkward growth within the Union Carbide ranks, growth that ultimately led to greater fruits for Björn Olsson and Ebbot Lundberg's next project, the Soundtrack of Our Lives. To be honest, though, there were plenty of high-octane moments on their later records, too, and Remastered to Be Recycled does a good job of capturing the full picture of this very dynamic and influential Swedish group that can be heard echoing in the campy Turbonegro, the Hellacopters, and their own work with the Soundtrack of Our Lives." --All Music Guide
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