VARIOUS ARTISTS
Living On The Hill - A Danish Underground Trip 1967-1974 ESOTERIC
Excellent overview of a music scene that deserves to be much better known.
It’s no longer a surprise to discover that just about every country had a thriving ‘underground’ music scene from the late 60s onwards. What is surprising, given the contents of this superb three-CD collection, is that there hasn’t been more focus on the bands coming out of Denmark during this time, because there’s a real consistency of both innovation and quality on display here. And while no overview like this can ever be entirely comprehensive, it does showcase an identifiable ‘Dansk rock’ sound, one that takes elements from American psychedelia, British blues rock and prog, and German krautrock, but is still its own thing. It’s noticeable how fluid this melding of elements is, with a kind of Scando-jazz sensibility prevailing. Bear in mind, too, the depth of Denmark’s counter-cultural engagement over the years, with the anarchist community of Christiania still extant in Copenhagen.