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.

Here I do want to mention that I don’t mind hockey, in fact I think it’s quite fun – maybe my disinterest with practicing it has to do with the fact that the slightest tackle would send me flying two meters.

But when I did first start 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. I wrote lots of music, some of it good, some of it bad, but in terms of what I actually wanted to do with my music, I was at a loss.

Eventually, a fascination with quiet tension, exposedness, fragments, the incomplete, the imperfect, and vulnerability has sprung to the fore. These days I like to deal with different contexts and references. For instance Nocturnomania, a recent piece for Athens State Orchestra in their Pilot Lab, is a hyper-depressive microtonal Chopin remix. Just another campfire song, meanwhile, exists in some sort of intersection between contemporary music, microtonality, blues licks, and the guitar as a singer-songwriter instrument.