Sven Wunder - Eastern Flowers (2020 Swedish Piano Piano Vinyl LP)

Sven Wunder - Eastern Flowers (Doğu Çiçekleri) | Vinyl LP - 2020 Swedish Piano Piano Records Repress (PP1001)

• Sven Wunder's debut album, originally released in 2019 in Stockholm as Doğu Çiçekleri: thirteen instrumental pieces drawing on Anatolian rock, Levantine folk music and European jazz-funk, built around the Saz, organs, synthesizers and electric bass
• The record that established Piano Piano as a label, selling out on word of mouth through a single Stockholm record shop before international represses reached wider distribution through Mr Bongo
• "Lotus" was sampled by Czarface (Wu-Tang Clan's Inspectah Deck with 7L & Esoteric) on "The Czarlaac Pit" from their 2022 album Czarmageddon
  

Joel Danell is a Stockholm-based composer and double-bass player who grew up around jazz, spent his teens listening to Anatolian and Eastern European music, and built a career writing for television and film under his own name. In 2018, between soundtrack commissions, he sat down and recorded what would become Doğu Çiçekleri, a Turkish word meaning "Eastern Flowers," under the alias Sven Wunder. The record was pressed in a small run and placed in a single Stockholm record shop, Record Mania, with no promotional campaign. It sold through on word of mouth. Danell and partner John Henriksson founded Piano Piano Records around it. The international repress renamed it Eastern Flowers and gave it the wider reach it had already earned, distributed through Mr Bongo in the UK and Light in the Attic in the United States.

The album takes its subject from the flora of the Levantine coast and the wider eastern Mediterranean, thirteen tracks named after flowers — tulip, magnolia, lotus, hibiscus, chamomile, the Gilboa Iris of the mountains straddling Israel and Jordan — and built from instruments that place the music geographically: the Saz, the long-necked Turkish lute central to Anatolian folk and rock traditions, moving over groovy organs, far-out synthesizers and a locked-down electric bass. The frame of reference is library music and 1960s and 1970s jazz-funk, but the Saz pulls the whole thing eastward, and Danell's instinct for groove keeps it from becoming pastiche. The music sits in a similar territory to Ananda Shankar's East-West fusions and the loopier end of Madlib's globetrotting library investigations. "Lotus" was sampled by Czarface — the group formed by underground hip-hop duo 7L & Esoteric and Wu-Tang Clan's Inspectah Deck — on "The Czarlaac Pit" from their 2022 album Czarmageddon, a track that also featured Tom Hardy.

This is the second edition repress on PP1001, released in Sweden on 19 June 2020, one week after the international release of Wabi Sabi.