There are easier ways to run a record label in 2026 than refusing to put one of your defining tracks on Spotify.
When Högt I Tak and Mindbender returned to “Anticapitalista” in May this year, six years after it inaugurated their When Disco Goes Wrong label, they could have treated the occasion as a conventional anniversary exercise. Remaster it. Repackage it. Feed it back into the streaming machine.
Instead, they made the remaster available as a free download and explicitly kept it off Spotify.
“No algorithms, no playlists, no corporate streaming,” the label explained. The record was free, they said, “because that’s how it should be.”
For a track called Anticapitalista, at least you can’t accuse them of fudging the branding.
HIGH CEILINGS, LOW FREQUENCIES
Högt I Tak is Jan Berglund, also referred to as Janne Berglund, a Swedish producer and DJ associated particularly with Gothenburg and nearby Brännö. The name translates roughly from Swedish as “high ceiling”, although the musical architecture Berglund has constructed beneath it tends to be considerably murkier.
When Disco Goes Wrong’s original biography for Anticapitalista describes Berglund as having been involved in the scene since the early rave days. His own rather better description of his music is “trailer techno with a pinch of psychedelic disco and acid masala.”
That’s useful because Högt I Tak doesn’t sit particularly obediently inside one electronic genre. The catalogue moves around acid house, techno, indie dance, dark disco and psychedelic electronics. Beatport’s Högt I Tak discography now stretches across labels including When Disco Goes Wrong, Paisley Dark, Nein Records, Solemne and others.
There are traces of Berglund’s activity well before When Disco Goes Wrong. A Högt I Tak SoundCloud account contains recordings dating back years, including the long-form The Oldest Story and sets with SvenAllan, while another account carries a three-part sequence called “Marknaden”, “Köparen” and “Säljaren” uploaded across 2018 and 2019.
But the clearest chapter of the story begins with When Disco Goes Wrong.
Berglund established the label with Mårten Attling, aka Mindbender, another veteran of Sweden’s underground electronic scene. The label’s own history says Attling began producing in the late 1980s, becoming active as both a DJ and producer in the Swedish club scene.
The pair weren’t merely putting their names on releases. They became recurring collaborators, remixers and producers around a wider circle of artists. By 2024, Paisley Dark’s Swedish Fika Sessions could describe Högt I Tak, Mindbender and The Machine Soul as founding members of the Swedish-based When Disco Goes Wrong collective.
And there is something pleasingly literal about the label’s commitment to acid.
Its 2024 compilation Free Acid Vol 1 featured Mindbender, Högt I Tak, Random Loop Generator and The Machine Soul under the slogan:
“Acid should not just be free, it should be mandatory!”
Which is either a manifesto or an unusually specific public-health programme.
ANTICAPITALISTA
The beginning came on 1 May 2020.
Not accidentally, May Day.
Anticapitalista was the first When Disco Goes Wrong release and a collaboration between Berglund and Attling. It arrived in three forms: the Original Mix, A Dub New World Mix and A Rave New World Mix.
Context matters here.
May 2020 was the first extraordinary stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clubs were closed. Dancefloors had disappeared. Much of the infrastructure on which independent electronic music depended had suddenly stopped functioning.
Six years later, Berglund and Attling remembered it very simply: “The world was shutting down and we put something out anyway.”
That first release already contained much of the vocabulary that would follow.
When Disco Goes Wrong described the original as beginning with a thick bassline before opening into a mellower passage of voice and hypnotic dub chords. The Dub New World version pushed further towards the dancefloor and incorporated the “Anticapitalista” chant. A Rave New World raised the pressure again, bringing a harder beat, dusty groove, energetic bassline and additional samples.
More interesting than any individual production element, though, is the collision in the title itself.
Anticapitalista. A Rave New World.
Rave has always had an awkward relationship with capitalism. It can mean expensive tickets, sponsored festivals and superstar DJs. It can also mean warehouses, improvised sound systems, white labels, illegal parties, shared spaces and music circulating outside conventional commercial structures.
Högt I Tak and Mindbender don’t require us to pretend those contradictions have been solved. But they do make their own position unusually legible.
In 2026, they returned to the record.
The “A Rave New World Remaster” was released on 1 May, exactly six years after the original. Berglund and Attling said that When Disco Goes Wrong had reached 50 official releases since Anticapitalista, and that the track now felt “more relevant” than it had in 2020. It was again issued through their label, mastered at Mindbender Master Works and offered as a name-your-price download.
The accompanying statement sharpened the point further:
“Always Antifascist. Always Acid Punk.”
That makes the politics difficult to dismiss as decorative titling. So does the decision to keep the remaster away from Spotify.
Six years after releasing an anti-capitalist rave record while the world’s clubs were shutting down, they reissued it by deliberately declining participation in the dominant corporate streaming ecosystem.
The gesture is small.
That’s partly why it works.
Nobody is overthrowing capitalism with a Bandcamp download. But there is a difference between using rebellion as dance-music styling and allowing your stated principles to inconvenience you occasionally.
ACID ISN’T A PERIOD PIECE
If Anticapitalista establishes one side of Berglund’s musical identity, “Acid Voices” brings us to the other persistent word in the Högt I Tak vocabulary.
Acid.
Not acid as a late-eighties museum exhibit. Acid as a language that apparently never required retirement.
Berglund had already made the allegiance explicit with the four-track ** Acid Rave EP**, released by When Disco Goes Wrong in October 2022. Its tracks were “Acid Rave”, “Jittery Acid”, “Refuse” and the wonderfully literal “Three O Three Am”. The label introduced the record with little ambiguity: four “acid-fuelled” tracks, written and produced by Berglund and mastered by Attling.
Then came Acid Fever in 2023 and “Acid Veterans” on the first Free Acid compilation in 2024.
By this point, calling acid a recurring interest would be underselling matters slightly.
“Acid Voices” arrived on 3 October 2025 through Embryonic Soundwave, the UK label created by Mark Bailey, who also produces and DJs as MAN2.0. The release sits explicitly across electronic, house, progressive house, acid house, electro and techno in the label’s own categorisation.
And this is where another veteran enters the room.
Jon Dasilva remixed “Acid Voices”, turning it into the Jon Dasilva Acid Italo Remix.
Its existence is confirmed both through the release’s Bandcamp ecosystem and, rather wonderfully, by FAC51 The Haçienda itself: when the Haçienda spent a day with Dasilva in Manchester for its Out & About series in October 2025, “Högt I Tak – Acid Voices (Dasilva Italo Acid Remix)” was among the music used in the episode.
That connection gives the record another little historical loop.
Here is Berglund, a producer whose biography reaches back to the early rave scene, having his acid track reworked by a DJ inseparable from the history of Manchester’s Haçienda.
This isn’t revivalism so much as continuity.
The interesting thing about Högt I Tak is that acid doesn’t appear to be treated as a costume from 1988. Across Acid Rave, Acid Fever, “Acid Veterans”, the Free Acid projects and “Acid Voices”, it behaves more like an operating system: old, eccentric, remarkably difficult to kill and still capable of running new programmes.
There is a broader lesson hiding in there.
Electronic music has a peculiar habit of declaring things dead while people are still happily dancing to them.
Acid survived its own moment.
Rave survived its own moment.
The underground survived streaming, although not without bruises.
And people like Jan Berglund never received the memo telling them any of it was supposed to have finished.
OPEN FORMAT
Which explains why Högt I Tak turns up twice on OPEN FORMAT TRANSMISSION 2026.07.
Early in the transmission, at 00:04:01, it’s the newly remastered Högt I Tak & Mindbender – “Anticapitalista (A Rave New World Remix Remaster)”.
More than an hour later, at 01:10:00, Högt I Tak returns with “Acid Voices (Jon Dasilva Acid Italo Remix)”.
They make unusually good bookends to Berglund’s story.
The first takes us back to May 2020: Högt I Tak and Mindbender starting a label as the world shut down, then returning six years later to the record that started it and refusing to hand the anniversary over to the algorithms.
The second belongs to the continuing acid lineage: a Swedish rave veteran’s track refracted through a Manchester rave veteran and sent spinning back onto a contemporary dancefloor.
Between them is the reason Högt I Tak is interesting beyond two excellent records.
This isn’t really nostalgia.
Nostalgia wants the past preserved.
Högt I Tak wants to plug the bloody thing back in.
OPEN FORMAT TRANSMISSION 2026.07
00:04:01 Anticapitalista (A Rave New World Remix Remaster)
01:10:00 Acid Voices (Jon Dasivla Acid Italio Remix)
