NIGHT GESTALT
With Night Gestalt I strive to create simple, transparent music. Music that is as straightforward as light—or its opposite—darkness. It all began as an electronic love affair with arpeggios, and since the start, almost all the music has been constructed along this simple idea: one note at a time.
The arpeggio is everything: melody, rhythm, harmony – ringing out like a bell in space forever.
Nothing is hidden.
Since the first album (One) in 2015, I have been pressing the B-sides from the singles onto unique vinyl records and burying them in different parts of the world. These songs can’t be listened to anywhere else and will never be released (they are even deleted from my hard drive). They are buried in the ground, with only the rough coordinates posted.
I love how a future civilization—even after all our knowledge is lost—could find these and play them. And if they did find them, they would hear music that no one has ever listened to before.
Field Rituals, Vol. 1
I have always been fascinated by the unique sensory qualities of different places – their acoustics and the layers of ambient sound that reveal themselves when you stop and listen. Some places have a certain feeling – and a certain sound.
For this album I composed six pieces of music for six specific locations and then recorded them in those spaces.
These rituals unfolded at beaches at nighttime, in an abandoned slaughterhouse, in a rain-soaked forest glade, and in other magical places.
Field Rituals, Vol. 1 is the documentation of these rituals.
Staring Light
I want to create simple, transparent music. Music that is as straightforward to experience as light. And as beautiful.
With the album Staring Light I took the idea even further. The music was recorded during the spring of 2022 with the aim to follow the light as the days in Sweden became longer and longer – investigating the different shades and gradients of the coming spring – and in the music. The ritual was completed with the release of the music exactly one year later – mirroring the recording of the songs, and once again following the light.
The first single – False Azure – was released on the spring equinox (March 20) – and the album on the summer solstice (June 21) – those magical 24 hours consisting of one endless bright summer night.
Thousand Year Waves
On Thousand Year Waves the world is falling to pieces. But not with a crash. The world is decaying in waves. Be it climate change, a global pandemic or financial turmoil – they all come in waves.
On the morning of New Years’ Eve 1995 an oil rig outside Norway detected and measured the first rogue wave ever. The platform was built to withstand a wave height of 20 meters – something that was calculated to happen statistically 1 time in 10,000 years. The monster wave that covered the platform that morning was 25.6 meters high. The waves just before and after were around 12 meters high. But one wave was higher than what was statistically possible.
This is how the world will end.
Thousand Year Waves is the third – and final album – in the trilogy that started with One.
Sudden Rituals, Vol. 1
With this album I had a very simple idea, what happens if you mix A with B? I wanted to be the mad scientist and in order to do that I had to let other people in on the creation of the music.
Sudden Rituals, Vol. 1 is an album of collaborations – from Swedish folk violinist Lisa Rydberg to Persian setar master Behdad Babaei.
The Art of Stillness in a Noisy World
The official soundtrack to the book The Art of Stillness in a Noisy World – by Magnus Fridh – a book on silence, meditation and how to live our lives in a world that just gets noisier and busier.
I created three loops following the three chapters – and settings – of the book. Each loop build up with instruments, and then start to degrading. At the same time more and more of the sounds of that specific space is layered into the music.
Even though these three settings are far away from the noisy world, not even silence is silent – as John Cage famously showed in 1952.
New Glasir
“Sometimes when I was working in the fields my thoughts wandered all the way back to the summer nights in our little cottage by the sea. I didn’t remember much, or at least my mind didn’t allow me to remember, but I remembered one thing: the light just after having dinner. The golden rays searching their way through the leaves and finally hitting our faces so we could keep talking about nothing, drinking wine, and just be there. It was so bright back then. Where did all that light go?”
New Glasir is the second album in the album trilogy – telling the story of the society that created the spaceship One.
One
Sometime in the future, the last 7000 men and women of earth leave our destroyed planet to find a new home. But something goes wrong. A few weeks into the journey they lose control of the spaceship and it keeps going straight into nowhere. Forever.
Finally the main computer calls everybody and they gather and kneel in her hall. First comes the brightest light ever seen – then suddenly she starts to scream inside all people. After that: silence.
The name of the spaceship is One. This is the story of One.
One is the first album in a trilogy. It tells the story of the end – going backwards in time.