In the late ’60s, a group of Swedish hippies got together to attempt to play a rock ’n’ roll version of the minimalist, droning music pioneered by avant-garde composer Terry Riley. First calling themselves Pärson Sound, then International Harvester, members of those bands later went on to become Träd, Gräs och Stenar (“Trees, Grass, and Stone”), a more conventional rock-jam band that became a fulcrum of the eclectic, left-wing movement of Swedish music known as progg—not to be confused with prog.
But before that happened, International Harvester released a pair of strange, dark, droning albums: 1968’s Sov Gott Rose-Marie and, under the shortened name Harvester, 1969’s Hemåt. A new, five-LP box set from Sweden’s Silence Records collects both albums along with a bevy of contemporaneous recordings, and they sound as arrestingly batty today as they must have in the late ’60s.