“Oh I don’t know, we call ourselves all, like, different things all the time,” the hesitant voice tells me from the other end of a struggling international phone-line. I’ve asked my anonymous interviewee how I should refer to him in the present article, a question that seemingly catches him off-guard. What I had thought would be a passing formality before our conversation really begins becomes a sticking point, a stifling atmosphere of awkwardness quickly emerging. “But you can call me…” He trails off to silence.

With the sole exception of Christian Johansson, who gave a handful of interviews in the band’s infancy, the identities of Goat’s members have remained veiled in mystery ever since they emerged into the public consciousness two years ago. Although, to refer to them as “members” is probably overly prescriptive. Supposedly hailing from a commune in the remote north of Sweden, Goat functions more as a continuum of ideas and musical activity than a strictly delimited group: a fluid collective of individuals coalescing – albeit temporarily, perhaps fleetingly – around a shared sensibility, a shared music.

“It doesn’t really have a beginning and an end, maybe, you know,” my interviewee tells me later, once our ungainly conversation has begun to flow more easily. His fractured English is spoken fitfully, the musicality of the Swedish accent straining against an unforgiving foreign tongue, his economical clauses strung together with heavy silences and verbal tics. “But it’s more of a way of… A view of the world maybe, a view of music, or of cultures, that everything belongs to everyone, you know? To be influenced from, or to enjoy all cultures, all music, everything. And Goat is mainly somehow a tradition, a tradition of how to live, maybe, how to view things, how to look at things. And that probably doesn’t have a beginning or an end.” Within Goat’s internal logic, the concepts of identity, of authorship and ownership, become irrelevant – if not totally meaningless – as the individual is subsumed and dispersed within the collective.

“You can call me…” Again, he pauses. Floundering, he eventually asks: “I don’t know, what did Rachel say?” By this point, only a minute or so into our conversation, we’d both chosen to ignore my catastrophic blunder of addressing him by his real name, which had been relayed to me by my PR contact Rachel prior to the phone call. (“Hi, is that X?” was my ham-fisted opener. “No… It’s not X,” suspicion palpable, I’d clearly miscalculated, “but is this, er, is this from a paper?”) His name now an open secret, the only option was to plow on in earnest. “Well, she told me to ask you,” I replied with pained and insufficient jocularity. Another pause.

It’s hard not to be reminded of Rudi van der Saniel, a minor but particularly well-rendered character from the surrealist comedy series The Mighty Boosh, during our conversation. Played by Julian Barrett, Rudi is a jazz-fusion guitarist and High Priest of the Order of Psychedelic Monks, seeking to attain spiritual nirvana via his mastery of the phaser pedal and soaring, axe-hero solos. And when, at their first meeting, Noel Fielding’s Vince Noir enquires as to Rudi’s identity, he responds: “I go by many names,” before a long silence. “Well, what are they, then?” Vince eventually prompts. “Some call me Shatoon, bringer of corn. Others call me Mickey Nine, the dream weaver. Some call me Photoshop. Others call me Trenoon, the boiler.” The list goes on and on, culminating in the final pseudonym: “Others call me R-r-r-rubbady Pubbady.”

Of course, Rudi’s character acts as a metonym for the utopian pretentions of late-60s psychedelia, allowing the hipper-than-thou duo of Fielding and Barrett to poke gentle fun at its naïveté, jibing – albeit fondly, one suspects – at its contrived mystique. Throughout his appearances in the series, Rudi’s commitment to the dictum of the Order of Psychedelic Monks – his unerring belief in the power of music to offer blissful loss of self – is continually made quaint by his self-consciousness, his numerous cognitive dissonances, and the unavoidable absurdity of his appearance. In the aforementioned episode, Barrett appears particularly ridiculous: his head and arms poke through a carnival cutout done up to make him look like a disproportioned Jimi Hendrix, in his hands a miniature Fender Strat.

And whilst Goat are less explicit in their guiding principles than the politically charged music of the Woodstock era, the group’s unashamed adherence to an almost mystical sense of universalism places their music within the same category of art striving, perhaps naively, to tear down barriers between people – be they personal, political, spiritual. “There is only one true meaning of life and that is to be a positive force in the constant creation of evolution,” states a heavily-reverbed voice during their new, second album ‘Commune’, released last month on Rocket Recordings. And the group’s intrigue is only amplified by their strictly guarded anonymity: the seductive pull of the unknown emanates from their music, itself wide-eyed and intangible in its eclecticism.

“He said to ring him any time, and if he’s free he’ll talk,” I was told, somewhat ominously, after a long period of attempting to pin the group down for an interview. But just as Rudi’s ambitions and cultivated aura are undermined by his unavoidable silliness, my conversation with this member of Goat is coloured by similar juxtapositions of the lofty and the amateurish. When I finally made contact with my elusive interlocutor I found a modest family man attempting to contain his marauding three year-old in the background. “Do you have kids?” he asks me later over the noise of what sounds like a full-scale riot in the background. “You can never do something, you always have to interrupt something. But it’s great, but you have to be… especially when they’re” – emphasising each syllable – “three years old.”

And these traces of the quotidian – the messy, the unguarded – at the centre of Goat’s elaborate game of smoke-and-mirrors lends a sense of charming artlessness to my interviewee’s responses, keeping his occasional ambiguity from becoming tiresome schtick. It’s not until the end of our hour-long conversation that I finally press him again on his chosen pseudonym. “Just call me… just call me…” pausing, and then, almost apologetically: “Just call me Goatman.” He stops again before adding, “Probably people have used that before but it’s all I can think of now.” Goat’s enigma is clumsy, ill-formed, and, above all, human.

“Well, it’s like ‘World Music’ – like with the first album – [which] begins with the same melody and it ends with the same melody actually. And we did the same thing with this one but in another way. It’s just a nice way to make it circular, you know?” Goat’s latest record, ‘Commune’, is bookended by a hushed bell-like sonority – the sound of a Buddhist prayer bowl, Goatman informs me. A subtle gesture, but one which lends gravity, a sense of obscured significance, to the unkempt music within: the repeated tone forms a frame that draws the album’s disparate sound-worlds together in tentative and partial synthesis. “It ends with the beginning somehow,” Goatman elaborates, “and it gives a good wholeness to the album, I think. It’s mainly a musical thing; it’s no other thing really. It’s a musical thing to make it whole, like a piece of art, you know, it sticks together all around. That’s the main reason.”

And the desire to create a musical experience of tangible, yet fleeting, unity was embedded into the group’s approach throughout the process of writing and recording ‘Commune’. “We worked more with the wholeness from the beginning,” Goatman tells me. “With ‘World Music’ we worked with the wholeness afterwards, somehow, to make it as an album. Now we could do it more from the beginning, which was a little different. And ‘World Music’ was maybe more spontaneously recorded, this time we recorded it – we’re better with the studio now as well – so we recorded it more as an album: we knew it was going to be an album.”

Goat’s debut album, ‘World Music’, was released in 2012 after Rocket Recordings stumbled upon the group’s music online. “We recorded two songs – I think it was ‘Goathead’ and ‘The Sun and The Moon’, it was called – and those songs were… a friend of ours, I don’t know if they’re a friend of me really, but some friend, some friend’s friend or something…” As he often does throughout our discussion, Goatman briefly tangles himself in a moment of self-revision and contradiction before continuing. “…made a video for those songs, two videos, one for each song. And they put them on YouTube, I think, and Rocket found them, I think it was like that.”

As our conversation returns to ‘Commune’, Goatman offers a second motivation – aside from the purely musical reasons he initially noted – for his group’s desire to cultivate a unified musical experience. “And it’s also because, you know, our music sometimes – it’s a spiritual thing, all music is a spiritual thing. It somehow fits, I think. It fits the context of the album, I think.” As his explanation becomes increasingly fragmented, his sentences disintegrating into unfinished clauses, he laughs: “I don’t know how to explain it in English.”

It’s about expressing a completeness that is nevertheless coloured – even defined – by difference, I suggest. Something larger, more elaborate arises from the multiplicity of constituent parts. “Yeah, exactly. That’s what I think both of those albums do. Because they start and they end in the same way, and the song structure – we’re very, you know, this is the thing that we’re very careful about, or we put a lot of thought and feeling into getting the sequencing of the albums to be good, so it’s not just a collection of songs, it’s a wholeness that is bigger than the pieces in a way. That’s the main reason of it in a way – to get a bigger spiritual experience from listening to the wholeness of the album rather than picking songs out.”

Drawing on everything from Afrobeat to druggy psychedelia, from funk to Middle Eastern sonorities, both of Goat’s albums vibrate with internal energy, invigorated by dissonances and contrasts, but also fleeting moments of harmony, between the multitude of genres and traditions that comprise the collage. As such, Goat describe their music, defined as it is by such an eclectic approach to recombination and juxtaposition, using the somewhat loaded term ‘world music’ – which was also, of course, the faintly provocative title of their debut album. When I broach the topic of the label’s undesirable associations, at least in British English, of post-colonial Western consumerism, Goatman concurs, saying: “I don’t know how it’s used exactly in Britain but in Sweden the term is used to…” At this point he pauses, laughing: “my son is trying to speak English…” He continues: “The term here has been used to put together all music that is non-Western, non-European, non-American music. And you put all those different musics together and you call it ‘world music’. You know, if you look at a record shop, and you look at ‘world music’ and you find music from every country that are not nearby. And that is, I wouldn’t say it’s racist, but it’s, it’s really… stupid, in a way. You know what I mean? Yeah, it’s not racist, but it’s ignorant, in a way.

“And so, we also feel that, like, genres are pretty, pretty – I mean, sometimes you need to call things stuff – but it’s pretty old-fashioned also, you know? Because things are mixed up now, things are mixed up all the time and are getting mixed up more and more and more. The world is getting more global and connected with each other. All music exists in all music, so the genres we talk about today are so silly sometimes. And so we call our music ‘world music’ because it belongs to the world and it comes from the world, as simple as that really. You know, it comes from the world and it belongs to all parts of it. That’s how we want to use the word.”

Goat’s use of the term, then, is an intentional attempt at reclamation: an attempt to imagine a way of listening in which music from a culture foreign to one’s own is not heard simply as an exoticism but rather as part of its own nuanced and complex history of aesthetic practice. “I hope so,” Goatman agrees. “And I hope people can, not through us, but I hope people can discover or can change their opinion about music from other places, and not call everything ‘world music’, which does have negative associations over here as well. Music is music, wherever it comes from. Let’s call everything ‘world music’, you know. In a way, everything should be called ‘world music’ – you shouldn’t just call music from non-Western places ‘world music’.”

Given their sensitivity to the myriad complexities surrounding our consumption of music from around the world, it’d surely be a simplification to label Goat’s music – and, in particular, its use of African and Middle Eastern sounds – as an example of crude, or politically suspect, cultural appropriation. Yet, the fact that this charge is not uncommon in discussions of their music is more likely due to the subtlety of the distinction – between Goat’s ideal of ‘world music’ and the more common meaning of the term – than the shallowness of their listeners. As The Guardian’s Michael Hann wrote in his review of ‘Commune’: “After all, the notion of a bunch of Swedes taking African-styled guitar melodies and welding them on to droning psychedelia could easily be taken for cultural appropriation. But then Goat, with their masked players on stage, are reliant upon appropriation for their exotic sense of otherness, which is key to their appeal.”

Hann’s equivocal stance is understandable: Goat’s cultural tourism may well have pure motivations, but their music is nevertheless in continual danger of being consumed almost as a contemporary form of blackface, at least at the extreme end of the scale. Even within the context of our broader discussion of his conception of the term ‘world music’, I still feel a twinge of discomfort at the occasional turn of phrase emerging from Goatman’s otherwise impeccably considered explanations. (Perhaps most strikingly: “if you feel something appeals to you, use it: it’s yours.”) And if these instances are merely attributable to our not-inconsiderable language barrier, then perhaps that only reinforces this point: communication is never free from the spectre of miscommunication, especially within the semantic haze of musical meaning. And, in that sense, Goat’s game is a risky one.