Part 2

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

When I sit down to start making the pieces I have no idea what they will become. I cut and paste the different sound files. In this sense you could say I am building the music. It is a balance between the original idea and a greater part intuitive construction.

I like to take chances and test things. It can sometimes become exactly as intended and sometimes create unexpected surprises. So on the whole I do not know where it will end when I start and you could therefore call it sculptural. I find this way of making music and sound to be the most satisfying.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

I have spent a lot of time in nature when I lived in the countryside for many years. It makes me as a human observant.

How sounds are perceived at different distances, how weathers and seasons affect them and how sound from the wild can be the foundation of rhythms for example.

My piece “Grönskan” on the album is completely made up of field recordings from nature related sounds and I would personally describe it as the most rhythmic piece on the album. It is mainly made up out of rhythms that have been emphasised and made even more repetitive.



This, I feel, shows how nature, with all that it encompasses, is made up of rhythms and also distributes them accordingly to ones subjectivity – albeit unconsciously.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?

Yes absolutely. A lot of my thematical thoughts concerning man – animals circumfere it.

I had a very special experience a couple of years ago: I was walking in the forest close to where I live, in the countryside in Ångermanland in the North of Sweden. The area is mainly surrounded by forest and mountains and I am walking on a highly situated forest road – enabling me to hear sounds within a vast area.

On the way up the mountain my attention is caught by a sound. I stop and listen. At first I hear a raven. Then the bark of a dog from the nearby village. I then notice the raven and dog giving out their calls in turns. The raven answers the dog and after a while it sounds as if it tries to repeat the dogs bark. They are clearly listening to each other.

The raven and the dog are talking to each other – one wild animal and the other domesticated. It was a very special experience. I wondered if they were aware of my presence as well and my participation as a listener in that moment, where they were so clearly communicating with each other.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

As I have described before and often personally come back to; silence is very important for me. I even savour it. Partly it soothes me, but I also feel it is a prerequisite for freedom of thought. I need a lot of time to process impressions so silence is a way of resting.

Creatively I think it is important. I believe it would be difficult to create something intuitively if I were to stimulate my mind with sounds or music to greater degree.

Even though you are inspired creatively, directly or indirectly, by listening to music I do not wish to be overly influenced by what I am experiencing at the moment and let this affect the creative process, for example the musical progression and the shape of the sound image.

But apart from however it affects my creativity, silence is, as I've mentioned before, very important to me and my well being.

Further on the subject of free thought; silence is very recuperative. I can meet myself in any state and thereby both process thoughts and discover new thoughts that I didn't know I had. Sometimes it leads to poetry, sometimes to music and sometimes recovery.

The thought of sound and silence in relation to life and death was one of the starting points of my piece “Evighetssyster.” It revolves partly around searching common denominators between all living creatures concerning the beginning and end of everything. Also the thought of eternity, that which we all have in common. The thought of it having a sound is comforting.

But if “Evighetssyster” affirms the pain of the transient and its uncertainty, the piece “En Början ett Slut” frames it as the obvious way it has to be.



Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I think it would definitely move the perspective from ourselves and anchor us more in our surroundings. It would possibly give us more intuition to interpret the surrounding world in what is happening and what surrounds us, on another level than what we may perceive from a superficial overview.

I have, through a course in sound art, come in contact with exercises to practice Deep Listening which is based on Pauline Olivieros' teachings on the subject. Björn Eriksson who held the course and who is a certified Deep Listening instructor said at one point:

“By active listening and giving time and space to the listening, it offers an excellent opportunity to establish yourself in a specific place.”

I have taken this to heart and try to pause and be aware of this. I may help to both establish yourself in a known place, but also to get a feeling for and experience new places. In this way we place ourselves as a part of the place, and the place as such as a part of the direct moment in which we are. It may be a good starting point in many instances.

But on the other hand, as I've mentioned earlier, you may sometimes wish to shut out sound if they are experienced as too intense in which case headphones with music are excellent!

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]