Swedish BTW Fredrik continue making moody, bleak videos for Trilogi. It’s completely appropriate for their brand of muffled, wintery folk, “Milo” included. Like their clip for “Vinterbarn,” the band uses stop motion to create something dreamy here. The stills were taken with a broken 35mm camera, then processed with old chemicals, which accounts for the out-of-focus scratches and dust. “Milo” isn’t a lullaby necessarily, Fredrik uses ghost harmonies and atmospheric clank to sharpen the lull of the soft melody.

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Anytime we’ve mentioned Swedish BTW Fredrik the word “wintry”‘s been affixed, so, ’tis the season. Fully self-aware, the band’s releasing a video for “Vinterbarn,” from their forthcoming sophomore full-length Trilogi. It’s a chilly bit of developmental psychology via gusty Swedish baroque pop: in their mother tongue, vinterbarn means people born in the months of October to February (vinter means winter, barn means children). “They usually develop clashing personalities in child groups due to age difference,” we’re told, and the lyric holds that up: “the harder the snow the harder they grow,” a somewhat spooky, seasonally appropriate twist on Jimmy Cliff, set in a video with bleak stop-motion and a little surreality.

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Baroque Swedish sextet and BTW Fredrik’s second album Trilogi is out in a couple of months. It’s made up of a previously self-released and extremely limited EP trilogy (hence the name). Some background:

The three EP’s bear the titles “Holm”, “Ava” and “Ner,” all fictional names roughly signifying “Frozen Forest Island,” “Water Through Sound” and “The Inside Underground.” Together they represent a trilogy of contemporized viewpoints of the Lovecraftian dream passage — orientation at great cost and understanding at the risk of sanity.

Together they also offer a more insular, mysterious vibe than Na Na Ni. Trilogi‘s lead track is the dark, icy “Locked In The Basement,” which seemingly has nothing to do with R. Kelly, everything to do with Lovecraft and wintry atmospherics. Whatever the case, it’s a pleasingly gentle bit of downcast (but brightly lit) pop, all the way through to the shuffling percussion, laser-gun electro accents, and final haunting vocalisms.

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The last time the Swedish sextet and BTW Fredrik took to their stop-motion camera aesthetic, we saw only one member in the flesh, and that member was playing a dorsal-finned guitar. The chopped animation remains the same for “11 Years,” although the surreality is dialed down: We see the full crew on a train, a fantastical countryside passing them by, the scene sentimentally set for this affecting, gentle baroque pop ballad about growing apart, being let down, and reminiscing. And even while they’re looking back, they’re on a journey that keep them moving forward. Deep, kid.

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A couple of weeks ago we listened to newly coined BTW Fredrik, the more acoustically oriented Swedish sextet from the men behind previously loved electro pop outfit the LK. Today we get to watch, although most of the sextet sit out the video debut in favor of stop-motion pictures from a child’s imagination: oversized goldfish sidle up to sitting deer, UFOs hover, dorsal-finned guitars are strummed. According to the band, the gentle and faintly whimsical ballad is a “small fable on the discovery of violence in the head of a troubled 7-year old,” so there is some sync between the music and scenery, although its best taken as a new listen to their worthy Na Na Ni LP.

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Earlier this year we shined a light Swedish pop outfit the LK and their electro lovely, wintry gem “Stop Being Perfect.” Had we known the band had a side project sooner, we probably would have written sooner. Instead, we came upon Fredrik de novo, clicking and listening to a few tracks on a whim, finding songs that have since lodged themselves into steady and heavy rotation. At its inception, Fredrik was a side project for the LK masterminds Fredrik and Lindefelt. The band’s a sextet now, more acoustically minded than their parent project, and putting the additional voices and hands to good use. The debut Na Na Ni is in line with the wistful side of the superior songcraft that seems to be an official Swedish export these days (and again reinforces the thought that, as labels crash, we should be doing more to subsidize artists here). We have the album’s first two for you — the group sung marching lullaby “Black Fur” which introduces the album, and the sublimely hushed, picked and brushed melancholia of “Alina’s Place.”

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