Name: Spunsugar
Members: Cordelia Moreau, Elin Ramstedt, Felix Sjöström
Nationality: Swedish
Current release: Spunsugar's sophomore album A Hole Forever is out via Adrian.
Recommendations:
C: Everyone should watch the movie Neon Demon and play the video game Ghost of Tsushima.
F: I really like the paintings of Hiroshi Nagai. They evoke a sense of nostalgia of a place/time you’ve never experienced or even never existed. I have a painting of him that pictures a car on a parking lot next to a beach with this blue sky that’s so blue in a way that makes me wanna cry. I wanna live in that painting and the fact that I can’t even makes me a little bit sad.

If you enjoyed this Spunsugar interview and would like to keep up to date with the band and their music, visit the group on  Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

C: It depends on the song and the moments. Sometimes if I listen to music it's hard to control my body and not start to sing when I'm in public, like it gets physically hard. So I prefer podcasts when out walking.

F: I like when the music is so loud that my pants flop.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

E: Maybe the feeling of being invincible.

F: The pants flopping is a big thing I’m drawn to. I know that it sounds like I’m taking the piss but it’s true. Standing on stage when everything sounds right and the vibrations from the sounds make your pants fly, that’s a feeling that would make me a millionaire if I could sell it in a bottle.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience?

F: I had a wooden cut-out of a guitar. I would use it alone in my room pretending to be playing a concert in front of 100.000 people, often to the sound of Swedish power metal band Hammerfall.

I must have been like 9 years old at the time. This is the energy I try to enforce on stage today too.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

E: We all come from kind of broken families in different ways so music meant a lot for coping with that. Now I listen to music for multiple reasons.

F: Even if I still listen to a lot of music and play in a band, I think music was a bigger part of life during that age. It was my whole identity. I still is in many ways but I don’t think about music all the time.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument, tools or equipment?

E: I’ve been singing since I was a child, it’s just something that I need to do. I have always been surrounded by music since my mother and her parents have been playing a lot of Swedish folk music. I also play some guitar and I mean I need to have something to sing to and I like to play with the sound, using pedals.

F: I hate gear. It’s not fun or interesting to me. They are just tools as you describe necessary for the creation of sound.

If I could have one pedal for all my sounds, I would. It’s incredibly boring.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

F: I don’t know, you have to do something.

In a bigger cultural context I guess it gives me a sense of belonging. It’s part of the human experience. It’s like taking a rollercoaster ride or doing a bungee-jump, it’s fun to do things and some things you wanna do more than others.

E: It can be that I’m listening to music, or hear a sound when I am outside, and get an idea of the structure of a song or just like a melody and then I usually go from there.

Personal relationships, dreams and pop culture play an important role for the inspiration for the lyrics.

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

F: It’s hard to describe exactly what the feelings are. I’m not a werewolf you know. But I do feel that being on stage gives me a platform where I could be very out there without feeling shame. When I do that in my private life I can sometimes feel a bit of shame afterwards. You know ‘Why did I say that’ or ‘Why was I so intense?’’. Which I think is very normal.

On stage or after the show I never feel that. It’s like what happens on stage is another person, a persona that’s disconnected from me. It’s great.

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

E: You can communicate whatever you like with the lyrics and the vibe but I don’t necessarily think that in the listener, they need to evoke the same feelings as in the one that wrote the song.

As long as it evokes something, it's good.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?  

F: You always struggle with that. We have been playing now for a while and the feeling is you unconsciously tend to do things the way you always have. I still haven’t found the way to get away from that.

C: Personally I'm grateful I listen to a lot of different types of music because it keeps me inspired and I "steal" little bits here and there: play styles, techniques, ways of thinking about melodies and lyrics, software plug-ins and guitar tones etc.

There's a never ending source of these things and it keeps on growing.

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? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

F: When I was a baby in kindergarten we used to listen to whale noises and water splashing etc and then we would paint the feeling we got. We also gave each other massages at the same time. It was wild.

It was really nice but I wouldn’t call it music. It doesn’t mean that it can’t give you a feeling that’s close to the ones you get from music, sometimes it’s better even, but it’s not music.

With that said, if someone would call it music I would not protest. It’s not an important viewpoint for me. The group exercise was called ‘Charlie’ btw. Try it, it's a very spiritual experience.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

C: Those feelings that aren't typical feelings, but more like a taste or a smell.

When you think back of a memory or hear a certain song you almost get a feeling in your gut. You can't translate that in to ones and zeros.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

F: I don’t really view music in that way. Music is rock and rock is nice.

We make rock music in the classic sense, in the way the a band like Kiss would make music I guess. Or I guess they were more money oriented, not a lot of money for us hey.

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?

C: Personally I'm afraid of silence because my head is always screaming.

E: When it’s too quiet, I only hear my tinnitus.

F. I don’t like silence. I usually put the dishwasher on right before bed, always on the 4 hour setting. It reminds me of my grandmother vacuuming early on Saturdays while I was snoozing. It makes me feel like a safe baby.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

F: I think it’s the very opposite of making coffee and that’s why we do it. We live ordinary lives with work/school etc and playing rock music is a way to put some exotic flavor on the normality of life.

So it’s not so much expressing things as it’s experiencing things. The band is very much for us.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

C: I'm excited for longer trends. Trends nowadays are so short, I want to look back at the present and feel that you could see trends that we didn't notice.

F: In Sweden I would like to see more venues in smaller cities. We recently played in Germany and the feeling was that they had way more venues in smaller cities with organizers that care a lot. We don’t have a lot of that in Sweden in the smaller cities so it’s very hard for a band our size to do like a ten-date tour which is a shame.

Smaller country sure, but one can wish.