TagKMH

Creations Festival

Tonight’s the opening night for the Creations festival at Göta Källare in Stockholm. The festival runs for three days and features students from the Music and Media Production programme at KMH. Ivan Höglund and I will be the sound engineers.

Facebook event here.

2015 Nordic Conference on Sound and Music Production

I’m travelling to Aalborg, Denmark, today for the 2015 Nordic Conference on Sound and Music Production hosted by Aalborg University. My fellow master students Anton Näslund, Ivan Höglund, Julia Jonas and I will give a presentation on the music we composed for the 2014-2015 Nobel Creations exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. Jan-Olof Gullö and Hans Lindetorp from the Royal College of Music will also join us for the presentation and Hans will talk about the programming he did that allowed the music to be arranged in realtime.

Nobel Creations opening this week

I’ve been working around the clock the last few days, getting everything ready in time for the exhibition opening on Thursday evening. The weekend was spent recording and editing an audio guide for the exhibition, featuring presentations from all of the students at KMH and Beckmans who have contributed music, art and fashion pieces for the exhibition. The audio guide featured a total of 47 tracks in both Swedish and English and was recorded by Anton Näslund, Julia Jonas and me. The exhibition is currently being put together at the Nobel Museum and we spent yesterday trying to get our music to come out of the right speakers at the right time. There’s still some more work to do. The system running the music is very complex, featuring two computers and a server running together, taking input signals from sensors and iPads in the exhibition hall, continuously arranging the music, and playing it back through 16 discrete speakers. The obvious downside to having a complex playback system like this is that it is hard to get up and running and working the way it’s supposed to. The upside is that it allows us to do innovative and creative work.

Songwriting on the West Coast

Last week, me and the rest of Tiny Union rented a car and drove out to the west coast of Sweden. We stayed at Bella’s parents’ place on the island of Orust, and used her dad’s newly built studio as our base. We had a great time there and wrote five or six new songs in three days. Bella unfortunately had a terribly cold the whole time there, which eventually spread to Gustav and myself…so I’m trying to recover from that as I write this.

Next week I will wrap up the process of producing music for the Nobel Creations exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. The music is pretty much finished by now, so what I have left to do now is to cut it up into smaller chunks of audio, sort of disassembling the puzzle if you will, export those files and then focus on getting the programming right so that everything plays the way it’s supposed to. My teacher and super hero programmer Hans Lindetorp at KMH has put in a lot of work creating the framework and the code that controls the music, and he will help me get the last bit right. As I’ve mentioned before, the exhibition will open for the public on the 5th of December.

There will be a release party and concert for the debut Jean and the Mean machine album (mixed and mastered by me) on Tuesday in Stockholm. Check out the Facebook event for more info.

Nobel Creations

I’m currently composing and producing music for a new exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm called Nobel Creations. The exhibition opens 5 December 2014 and will be on display until 1 March 2015. My contribution to the exhibition is 14 channels of interactive music routed to 16 speakers in the exhibition hall. The composition draws its inspiration from the Nobel Prize and from the 2014 laureates. My fellow master students in music production from KMH are also contributing to the exhibition, as well as students from the jazz institution and students from Beckmans Designhögskola.

Read the press release from KMH here (in Swedish.)

Recording jazz & Brazilian folk music

Last week I had another visit from Vitor Celestino and Neto Oliveira in KMH’s Studio 2. This time they brought along singer/guitarist Rafa Brasileiro, and together they played two Brazilian songs that we recorded live. For the first song, Vitor played a cavaquinho, a small four string guitar, and Neto played percussion. For the second song, Vitor played his seven string acoustic guitar, and Neto played drums, so I had Rafa sing with me in the control room instead in order not to get any spill from the drums into the vocal mic.

Last Thursday I recorded to jazz groups, a trio and a quartet. The trio consisted of guitarist Alf ‘Affe’ Carlsson, bassist Samuel Löfdahl and drummer Hannes Sigfridsson. I’ve recorded Alf before with a different trio, so this was a new constellation. The quartet that I recorded on the same day was also a new constellation, consisting of saxophonist David Bennet, pianist Filipe Raposo, bassist Eirik Lund and drummer Simon Andersson. This group was quite experimental, and Filipe did a really cool thing on the last song where he held his phone up against one of the piano mics and played a recording of the same song. So the song started with an old recording of the song, played through a phone, and after a few bars Filipe just faded out that old recording by moving his phone away from the mic slightly, and the rest of the band picked it up from there. This was a last minute recording, and I had no idea he would try this beforehand, so it was a fun surprise to sit in the control room and hear all of this happening in real time!

Here’s a clip featuring some music I recorded in the studio in September: Daniel Angebrand Trio @ Boulebar Surbrunn