While I can’t speak for everyone growing up in Östersund, my high school years were marked by an enormous disinterest in sports. My hometown, somehow, seems to have a world cup of some sort of skiing or other every year. I was lucky to find a mentor in Johan Ederfors, a local composer, an exceedingly rare thing in my home county of Jämtland.

When I first started composing, I felt like I’d come home. Studying it, even more so. Focusing 100% on writing music for the first time in my life, I was somewhat like a kid in a candy store.

However, beginning my studies at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm also brought on a confusion of musical identity. Writing the work Half-light on desolation represented a culmination of a melodic style informed by Stravinsky, Lutoslawski, and more. But in terms of what I actually wanted to do with my music, I was at a loss.

The work andas, upphör (2015) represents, I believe, an early indication of what would come to be my new direction. While the melodic material borrows from Half-light on desolation, the character is more subdued, the expressivity withheld.

Per Mårtensson, who began teaching at the Royal College in 2016, came to be an important mentor of mine. With his guidance, I started to find my purpose – exploring, or more precisely searching for, an intimacy in my music.

Since then, my music has focused on quiet tension, exposedness, fragments, the incomplete, and the imperfect. A recent obsession of mine is “bad timing” and simultaneous processes. Discovering Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s haunting work Stille und Umkehr has also sparked a special interest in the unfulfilled.

Nowadays based in Copenhagen, I feel (at the time of writing, early 2019) like I have found my focal point at last – but that is likely a naive notion.