Hi

I am a Swedish-Icelandic musician/composer, doing a little bit of everything (see, Project Gallery). As a solo artist I have released 17 tracks through Nettwerk Music Group (see, my Music), but I also compose music for other artists as well as scores for adverts, films, and computer games. Indeed, my most recent single, Wilderness, features wonderful folk-singer Austin Basham. My music has been licensed for adverts for VY-Gruppen, one of the largest train-companies in Scandinavia, and for the Netflix series Atypical. I recently composed and co-produced an EP for Spanish vocalist Mei de la Cruz in collaboration with Toontracks co-founder Mathias Eklund and Mexican lyricist Alicia Luna Menguante. Mei’s first single, Vamos, is now out. 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 the EP I’m Sorry (2020), the album Nicotine Bunker (2021) and have started releasing singles from my second full length album. I’m sorry and Nicotine Bunker came out of a couple of intensive recording sessions with producer Tyler Johnson. The first two tracks that 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. In 2022 I then recorded my second album in Mathias Eklund’s wonderful studio Farkosten, with Mathias as co-producer.

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 two latest songs, Abandoned Places and Lines in Your Palm have again a new sound. They can be described as “cinematic”. The latest, Wilderness, is an alternative folk-country crossover.

The early years

I started learning the flute at 6 in the Suzuki-programme offered by the 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. 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, when my dad did a postdoc there, 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