About

I’ve been creating music for as long as I can remember. As a kid I made electronic music with a 4-track porta studio, cheap synthesizers and tracker programs – and punk with electric guitars and happy screams. Quiet music, and very loud music. And I still love both.

I think about music all the time. Everything I create has an underlying idea. Even if it’s as simple as ”the feeling of crashing into a wall with a smile on your face”. That idea lies behind almost all the music for Dada Life (which resulted in two Guinness World Records and hundreds of millions of streams).

Sometimes the ideas end up as sound art. I have built (together with Martin Lübcke) a huge gramophone that plows and plays the earth called Harvest, that won prize at new media festival Ars Electronica. We also created New Flesh Network – a human choir that can be controlled in real time from a keyboard and midi-controller.

A few years ago, on a Swedish desolate island, I started composing arpeggios. I don’t remember why, but I instantly felt they filled a void inside of me. And thinking back now I realize I’ve always been drawn to arpeggios in all forms. I remember being mesmerized by the melancholic notes of Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi as an 11 year old boy – in the C-64 game Delta (and not realizing what it was until many years later). Or hearing Bach at the same age, again on a computer, but not knowing what it was. The arpeggios I wrote on that island later became the first Night Gestalt album.

Arpeggios are simple, but they are also the essence of music: melody, rhythm, sound, harmony and form – all at one note at the time. I’ve been almost possessed with these ideas the last few years. I think about this music as a music that doesn’t need a listener (or creator). Music so simple and transparent that it’s unbreakable. This music doesn’t take you on a journey, it just exists, like a point with no surface or extension, floating in space now, then – and forever. It’s the music we need in our chaotic world.

The same search has guided me in my notated music. My piece Three Sisters (for percussion) was selected for the ISCM World New Music Days in 2024. Right now, I’m finalizing a string quartet titled The Circle and The Void, recorded with the Malva Quartet, where I try to find the intersection between notation and the void.

Sometimes I think that this music doesn’t exist. That it’s just a utopia. But most of the time I can feel that it exists. Somewhere beyond cities, noise, people, politics, days and nights: a place just on the other side of this thing we call reality.