Swedish keyboardist Mats Öberg and drummer Morgan Ågren and band pushed their Zappa-isms into jaw-droppingly tight and precise grooves at the 1999 Stockholm club date documented on Live, released by Cuneiform two years later. The 76-plus-minute album journeys through alternately straightforward and impossibly skewed rhythms, ever-changing keyboard voicings, and melodies and themes sometimes drawing from Zappa's gigantic influence but with a unique Mats/Morgan avant prog/fusion spin. When Öberg and Ågren hit the stage with bassist Tommy Tordsson, keyboardists Robert Elovsson and Eric Carlsson, and Morgan's brother Jimmy on fiery guitar, they were well prepared to wow the friendly crowd, and the home listener will be wowed as well. The band doesn't waste any time getting started. Dedicated to Lars Hollmer, 12-minute album opener "Hollmervalsen" begins "normally" enough, with a snaking synth melody and variations over a two-chord vamp that moves through some mildly tricky rhythmic changes but nevertheless remains situated in a gliding form of keyboard-heavy jazz fusion. Two and a half minutes in, the music explodes into a powerful 7/8 bridge before picking up the tempo and plunging forward with manic clavinet and wah-wah-infused funk. But this is all just a minute-long precursor to the ridiculously off-kilter lunacy of the track's central portion, a panoply of stuttering rhythms nearly mimicking a skipping CD player as man becomes machine and the Mats/Morgan Band transforms into a fusion facsimile of the Bang on a Can All-Stars interpreting Louis Andriessen.

1		Hollmervalsen
2		En Schizofrens
3		Ta Ned Trasan
4		Jigsaw Variations
5		Guardian Pitch
6		Paltsug
7		Etage A41
8		Min Häst
9		Banned Again
10		Igloo
11		Kintörnen

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