The black and white mural to the upper left is one of the early inspirations for this entire project. Although the mural, itself, is located at the Bergshamra subway station, which is seven stops to the north, it is Slussen that is pictured. The ghost-organ rises, massive and haunting in silvery night hues, over a now-disappeared Slussen, turning phantoms of figures and crowds around this former place.
Slussen lies between Gamla Stan and the northern edge of Södermalm, at the heart of the city. It once had a wholly unique architecture, looping in circular roads and walkways under the main square, with music clubs, secret rooms, gathering points, record shops and cafes embedded in its evocative 1930s spirals. But in 2022, Slussen has been torn down, and is being rebuilt as a franchise-filled shopping mall, its looping roads and round cafe replaced with a huge bridge in dull, self-consciously tacky gold. The local businesses and secret gathering places have all been destroyed, and the new mall is planned without one, single space for music or culture, to replace the three music venues that were torn out.
These recordings are of Slussen's machinery, which is also changing drastically. The first is a recording of the old Sluices (Slussen means Sluice), torn out and replaced in the massive, partially underwater construction project commencing there. The second is a hyrophone recording of the subway entering the old station, taken together with Jacek Smolicki, who has done extensive work about Slussen as a place in transition.1 The third is of the concrete, spiral staircase that once led up from the bus station to the subway entrance. The fourth is the subway entrance itself, teeming with rush hour crowds. I have chosen a longer array of recordings here because the transformation of Slussen has been so total.
Not recorded, because I arrived in town just as everything in the Slussen complex was shutting down, are the music clubs, konditori, bus depot diner, or the many small shops that lined the downward spiralling corridors of the old complex. Not recorded is the man who sold bread from a pile of plastic boxes, calling out to passers-by to Passa på! ("Check out what I'm selling!") next to the spiral staircase. He had already been cleared out by the time I started to record. Although Stockholm's punk scene took place in the venues here, it had since flown the first times I walked through Slussen. I heard only one concert at Debaser Slussen before it shut down.2
It is often the most taken for granted things whose disappearance is most noticable later, like the sound of the older subway trains that have been replaced with slick new cars that lack seating, or the classical music playing in the now-demolished konditori. Did the machinery hear? Does the water still remember? Pictured just under the title image, next to an aerial photo of the last of the previous Slussen, is an architectural model of Nya Slussen (The New Slussen). The new shopping mall will dominate the once open square, and will undoubtedly be festooned with franchise shops, instead of the small, local businesses that once characterized this area. The iconic round building that was once the center of Slussen – so ghostly in the mural – has been torn out. The new, matte-gold bridge was Made in China, and shipped via industrial barge to Stockholm in a single, massive piece; it was the talk of the town the week it arrived in 2020. On a cement traffic block in the middle of the massive construction, someone has written: "Först Klara, sedan Slussen" (First Klara, then Slussen). At the time of this writing, construction is still underway, and the future evocation of ephemeral space in the new places being built remains to be manifested.
In 2017, I found a lithograph of an imaginary place that looked to be Slussen in the late 1800s. The iconic Katarinahissen (Katarina Elevator) has been a hot point of contention in the long, ardent protest movement that grew up around trying to save Slussen. Here it is pictured over an almost pastoral version of Slussen, before the iconic, looping wheels of highway and structure were even conceived of. As I walked the rapidly transforming city, I kept it on my wall, evoking an ephemeral Slussen lost to all living memory, golden and summer-like. As I think about the lost music venues, record store, sunglasses seller and guitar shop, I wonder if there were people yearning for the old footbridge in the 1930s. Or were they looking to the modernistic future portended in the Slussen of that era, which I saw the twilight of? Ephemeral Slussens glance off each other in the red-lit windows of the evening city, as I gaze from the subway entrance at the massive construction below.