How are you, man?
Yeah, I'm good. I'm good.
Where are you?
I'm at home in Gothenburg, Sweden. Born here and I've been living here all my life.
What got you excited about music when you were young?
There are some pictures of me with the big headphones listening to my parents' albums. Apparently I was into music pretty early. But it wasn't like a musical family only. There were some records my dad used to sing when he was younger and my mom liked music, but she was not that good at taking notes. I started playing guitar around 13. No one actually played that much at home at all, but the guitar was there, so I picked it up and started playing and that's when everything took off.
Were there certain records as you progressed through your teen years that really got you excited?
Yeah. So, the first record that me and my brother bought together was Break Machine [by Break Machine]. We were into breakdance and that was very poppy, breakdance music. I was seven, I think. But it wasn't until, I guess 13, 14, that's when I actually had my musical awakening in a way. Like being into both learning the acoustic guitar with The Beatles and bossa nova on one hand with my dad, and also starting to play in bands. Playing bass and at first with a couple of punk bands. The stuff that we were into was Misfits, Black Flag. I was never a record collector, but I would go to my friend's house and I would have tapes. I listened lots to Dead Kennedys. And then there was skateboarding… Dinosaur Jr. was a big influence. Me and our friends got into hardcore. So, it was like going from punk to metal hardcore. Our first seven inch was in ‘93 with a band called Renaissance, and it sounds pretty rough. [laughter] We did that recording with one of my sound engineers that had been recording with Junip and that I played live with.
That might surprise a lot of people to hear that was your path into music, because what you're doing now is just not anything like that. Junip has some of that feeling to it, but actually reminds me so much more of CAN and Neu! with the incessant grooves and the meditative, longer songs, and the way things progress is just very different than hardcore and punk.
Yeah, there was a transition from the loud music to a very soft music. And so late ‘90s, especially me and Elias, the drummer in Junip, we got into Songs: Ohia, Cat Power, and all these post-rock bands. So sometimes loud, and sometimes very suggestive and mellow. I think that was what propelled me into the combination of influences that led to my first album. Having the influences from home, Latin American music and Paul Simon, and later Nick Drake and Elliott Smith [Tape Op #4]. But then having these other styles that were a bit more moody and that had a bit of darkness to them that I felt was interesting to explore.
You've always helmed the recording process for yourself. I read that you pirated some software, and had some cheap gear when you made Veneer.
Yeah. I have to mention Don Alsterberg. He was the one who used to record many of the hardcore bands. Nowadays he's well known for recording Refused and Graveyard and these Swedish rock bands. Back then I asked him for tips how to record. I had my 4-track cassette tape recorder, and he helped me to record in a way where you have the EQ in a certain way, so you don't get too much hiss. He got super excited by the first two tracks when I recorded “Hints” and “Deadweight” on Velveteen, and then put out my first 7-inch in 2001. He was very excited that you could hear the tape compression, even though it was a very lo-fi recording. So since then, it's been one of my go-to things; to think lo-fi, even though many of the recordings have been just mic’ed straight into the computer. The first two tracks were on the tape, but then for the rest of the album, I was recording through tube amplifiers to get that initial distortion, the one that it's difficult to get rid of later. So, you sort of commit. [laughter] And then the guy who mixed the first album, was around the time that you got these reverb emulators, so you could get pretty nice sounding reverbs that sounded like real rooms and impulse reverbs. It's been part of my aesthetic ambition to make it sound not necessarily lo-fi, but to have character, and not go for a clean sound. So therefore, I like some distortion, and I like to use my voice for dubbing to get a bit more variation.
I was going to ask you about the distortion, because there's quite a bit of it on all the records.
