Hi

I am a Scandinavian musician who has just released my second full length album as solo artist— Night and Day—through Nettwerk Music Group. I also compose music for other artists as well as scores for adverts, films, and computer games. My most recent single, Wilderness, features folk-singer Austin Basham. My music has been licensed for adverts for VY-Gruppen, one of the largest train-companies in Scandinavia, for the Netflix series Atypical, and the Dutch TV-series Goede Tijden, Schlechte Tijden. I recently composed and co-produced an EP for Spanish vocalist Mei de la Cruz in collaboration with Toontracks co-founder and head of sound-design Mattias Eklund and Mexican lyricist Alicia Luna Menguante. Two of Mei’s singles are out, Vamos and Mi Sueno . At the same time I am composing music for Viktor Jonssons new computer game Snowtracked. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with offers of collaboration.

Solo-career

So far I have released an EP (I’m Sorry, 2020), and two albums (Nicotine Bunker, 2021 & Night and Day, 2023). I’m sorry and Nicotine Bunker came out of a couple of intensive recording sessions with producer Tyler Johnson. The first two tracks we  released as singles—Over My Head and I’m Here—helped me get signed to Canadian Nettwerk Music Group to do 11 more songs. The rest we recorded during an unforgettable month in Vancouver. Today, I’m Here clocks in at +6 million plays on Spotify.

In 2021 I got an invitation from Mattias Eklund to come down to his wonderful studio Farkosten in Altea, Spain, just to see if some musical magic would happen. It did. We clicked immediately and the result was the above mentioned 5 track EP with artist Mei de la Cruz, and a plan to record an album in the summer of 2022. In the early spring of 2022 me and my partner packed everything we had into our leased Seat Arono and moved from Luleå in northern Sweden to Wiesbaden in Germany where she had gotten a research position at a cancer clinic. A distance of 2200 km. We spent 2 weeks in an Airbnb while hunting for an apartment to rent. Once the tension of the move subsided a rare period of music inspiration took over. I basically wrote an entire album sitting on the floor of that Airbnb. I went down to Altea in May and together with Mattias recorded most of the 12 tracks for the new album. The completing touches were made later in the summer and the first single, Abandoned Places, was released 13 January 2023. The video for the song was produced by my partner and myself in Singapore, where she was invited to do research during the last three months of 2022. Check it out

It is difficult to put my music in a single genre. Over My Head is at rock bottom an acoustic folk-tune but with a good dash of atmospheric ambient.  Avalon has an edgy trip-hop touch to it, reminiscent of Massive Attack. Surveilling Sky may remind people of Ásgeir Trausti. The two tracks Nicotine Bunker and  Modern Ages are more light and playful and may make you think of a mix between Jose González and Kings of Convenience. Permission to Lose is fragile, thoughtful and melodic á la Nick Drake. American Poster is a fusion of flamenco, rap, folk and trip-hop. You Want Love may be the folkiest piece I have ever written while Departure is a dreamy mediative instrumental track. The tracks on my forthcoming album again have a new sound. There are a couple of more upbeat songs that border on rock such as Why Aren’t You Satisfied With Love, but most of my music can be described as “cinematic”. One of them, Chilling in the Park, is a funky tune with Spanish influences.

The early years

I started learning the flute at 6 in the Suzuki-programme at Umeå Music Services. At 12 I got into Umeå Music Classes, which is a regular school except the students get one hour musical training every day in the form of choir and brass-band practice, as well as and pop/rock band practice. It has produced a lot of celebrities such as Lisa and Carolina Miskovsky as well as Tove Styrke, but has now been scrapped. There I learnt the basics of playing drums, bass, electric guitar and piano. At fourteen I was admitted to F-linjen at Umeå Music Services, which allowed me to add classical guitar to my repertoire. At 13 I also spent a year in Durham, UK, where my dad did a postdoc, and joined the guitar club at the Durham Johnson School. Since then I have been endlessly playing.

At 14, me and some of my classmates in the Umeå Music Classes started the band Thingvellir, which later morphed into The Slingshot Theory. We played melodious progressive rock, with the occasional growling thrown in. We made as far as being runners-up in a couple of regional band-competitions, and actually recorded an album which however never got released. The band split up when two of the members went to music college in other parts of the country. Me and Lucas Enquist, the two remaining band members, became the duo Brother North. Brother North self-released a self-titled album in 2014, which the online-blog Beehype selected as one of the Best Icelandic Albums of 2014. You can listen to the album on Brother North’s soundcloud page. The bands are all in hiatus now, but we made some great music and still get together now and again for a jam.

Brother North

My parents moved to the UK when I was 16, but I insisted on staying in Umeå. They rented their house to students, and I lived there as part of that collective while finishing my A-levels. My friend Lucas later moved into the collective, and gradually other musicians moved in too. First Ludvig Söderström which has a very eccentric style on electric guitar, as you can hear on Fristad. We hit some kind of inspirational high and created material for a whole album over a couple of weeks during the summer of 2012 which we later recorded but never got to release. Our project is called Lärkträdet (The Larch). At that point the number of musical collaborators that were regularly coming to our house to jam was running close to 30, so we formed a music collective that also was called Lärkträdet, simply because that was the name of the property we lived in.

Some time later two rappers joined the household and we all joined up to create the big band Högkvarteret (Headquarters) which plays melodious pop with rap lyrics. We recorded material for an album, but weren’t totally happy with how it turned out, so it never got released. But here is a taster of how we sounded: Känslan (The Feeling) The core members of the collective shared a detached house in Umeå for 3 years and we played so many gigs in various constellations that in 2015 Umeå City Council awarded me the annual Travel and Culture Stipend for having “contributed to the strengthening of Umeå’s status in Sweden and the World as a city of music and culture”.

Lärkträdet

Högkvarteret