From Aural Innovations #30 (February 2005)
I was not sure how many people would show up on this Thursday night for the Swedish band Dungen and the Danish band Aron. As usual, at these cult underground Psychedelic rock shows put on by the one and only Ralph, I know a lot of the people. Aron, ex-On Trial guitar player, has released two solo records of strange and really unique dark music and this was the debut live show for this material. His band consisted of Nicholai (guitar) and Nick (bass and vocals) from his current band, Ghost Rocket, and Lene from the Davolinas (drum and backing vocals). They started about 10:30 and played for 40 minutes. I recognized the songs from his records and these arrangements translated to the live stage very well. It was DARK, spooky stuff, but I love his vocal approach and Lene really added a lot to the tracks. Morten played some wicked cool guitar and it mixed together with Nicholai in a very psychedelic way. Phew… The band were called back for an encore and just did a very Syd Barrett inspired jam. Cool cool stuff.
Dungen have released a really cool record on the Subliminal Sounds label. Anyway, I had no idea how they would be live. About 80 people were here for the show now, which was not a bad crowd. The band opened up with a cool jamming riff and they were off. The main singer-songwriter in the band, he also played guitar, flute and organ (Nord Electro, I think?). The guitar played in a very special way, making cool use of sounds and odd sounds. He rarely played chords, it was all leads that melted into the songs. At times I thought his playing was really brilliant and other times really awful. Strange. The basic set was only a little over 30 minutes and they had one cool long jam and he played some really nice flute. The bass player really had a cool groove during their jams. They came back for an encore and played like a 20 minute jazz instrumental. It was really cool and totally different from the rest of the music they played. The guitar player sat on the floor and just played really cool guitar! What a cool show. I hope to see them again!
Reviewed by Scott Heller