Träd Gräs och Stenar

Håkan Agnsäter is a musician and writer from Stockholm. His book Affischerna 1967–1979, collecting posters from the Swedish alternative movement, was published in 2013. He was the drummer of the band Solen Skiner in the 1970s, and runs the site www.affischerna.se. Mats Eriksson Dunér is an artist from the city of Malmö. In 2018, his interview with Thomas Tidholm was published as part of the International Harvester box, and in 2019, he participated in the anthology Ockuperat! Svenska husockupationer, documenting the Swedish house occupation movement. His latest film, Aktivering Samtal (Act Dialogue) was shown at the Tempo documentary festival in 2020. Jakob Sjöholm is a musician and photographer from Stockholm, and a member of Träd, Gräs och Stenar since December 1970. He previously worked as a math and crafts teacher at the Ekerö junior high school, and as a member of the Hot Boys and Jajja Band. Jonas Stål is a writer, editor, podcaster, and librarian from the city of Nyköping. His writing about Swedish music of the sixties can be found as part of the compilation Stora Popbox: Svensk Pop 1964-1969, and the book Vi har ingenting att göra (We Have Nothing to Do). He is the creator and editor of the literary podcast Litteraturväven.

“Trees, grass and stones” is how the name translates. Operating under this and other monikers since 1967, the Swedish rock band that set the gold standard for counterculture in Scandinavia gets the kitchen-sink treatment in a sumptuously illustrated archival book. While “Trad Gras och Stenar” is best known for cult classic LPs that combine the groupthink of the Grateful Dead with the menace of La Monte Young, shown here for the first time are the paintings, posters, prints, zines, light projections, homemade instruments and ephemera that embodied their uncompromising art ethic. Anticommerce is the theme. The aesthetic is punk and pastoral at once, rigorous, not your typical groovy psychedelia. Interviews with members document the emotional labor that held it all together: all the homesteading, performance art, child-rearing, mediation, budgeting and activism. The total communalism that eluded so many of the Woodstock generation. The real deal. - The New York Times, 2023