Ever since the debut album in 2015, Vasa's flora and fauna have belonged to the most peculiar musical phenomena you can find. A trio with high integrity, but with at least as close to totally disarming nudity. The combination of razor-sharp social considerations and everyday recognition has given the band a listenership that constantly returns to its oeuvre - regardless of whether it's at a sold-out Kulturhuset in Stockholm or a garden cafe in Ostrobothnia. The albums - "Släkt med Lotta Svärd", "Veneziansk afton" and "Möte med skoggardisterna" - can be seen as modern classics created in a Swedish-Finnish context. As loved by the critics as by ordinary listeners.
Vasa's flora and fauna tell us something about the present and about the history on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia - about life now and then, and thus, by extension, something about ourselves. The world of Vasa's flora and fauna feels just like that: created in the pull between narrator and recipient, with a directness that feels unusual nowadays.
This summer saw the release of the new studio album "Man blåser bort", which Mattias Björkas describes as follows:
"There are many of us who are disappointed in many things, and you deal with it in different ways. Some crawl back into their shell and remain there for the rest of their lives, others go on the attack against friends and acquaintances. You can sink into the worst kind of backwardness, or into substances. "Man blows away" is the disappointment as an atmosphere, the dawning collective suspicion that there will be nothing more. It takes place in a square that these days seems too big. The wind is directed from the motorway straight into the square. There it is absorbed by three friends who sit there because they need each other in the middle of life.”