Name: Harald Björk
Nationality: Swedish
Occupation: Producer, label founder at Kranglan Broadcast
Recent release: Harald Björk's remix of Sven Väth's "Being in Love" is out August 18th 2023 via Cocoon.

If you enjoyed this interview with Harald Björk and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, twitter, and Soundcloud.



How do you see the relationship between your instruments and the music you make?
 
It’s a fully integrated relationship I would say. All 30+ instruments in my studio have a certain soundscape, timbre, and workflow that play an important role in fulfilling my musical visions and experiments … If an instrument doesn’t add a timbre or workflow to my palette I sell it, I’m not a collector.

I can walk into the studio with tons of technical ideas and try them out on the modulars and synthesisers … I can walk into the studio all emotional without a single technical idea and find a way to express it all in music and sort the feelings out … I can also walk into the studio completely blank and get creative out of the workflow and the sound of the instruments.

I think about music production 60% of my wake time and without being able to be in the studio I would have a hard time staying alive. Being in the studio is completely essential to me, like eating, sleeping and exercising. For a short period I wasn’t able to spend time in the studio and that didn’t work at all. Even my family told me to go back there … I did and went from dead to alive in a few hours.

Some see instruments and equipment as far less important than actual creativity, others feel they go hand in hand. What's your take on that?

If we define “actual creativity” as: creating something new and good in and for a specific field, I would say that the equipment that we use to write, play and produce music is necessary for the concept of creativity since these are essential parts of the field we work in. For me it’s hard to see a cultural field without an array of tools tightly connected to its tradition and development.

For me creativity emerges from the playful circling process when I sort out emotions and try out ideas experimenting on my musical equipment and vice versa. It’s about materialising feelings and ideas through a creative process.

It can start with a technical experiment as well, investigating what I can achieve with a tool which evokes feelings that gets me creative. There are a couple of factors essential to make a creative setting but the tools are certainly one.

Maybe it’s on us creators to be materialistic in our craftsmanship between soul and material, making the art as artefacts so the experience of it can be completely immaterial and on a spiritual level?
 
In the light of picking your tools, how would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

Booth! I don’t believe we can divide these in a polemic relationship. We are standing in a tradition of our surrounding culture, the tools of our culture, the environment we live in and our experience of life and learning so far … and we act from that very unique and personal experience and position.

I make music as a personal experiment of feelings and techniques on my tools but, both aware and unaware I follow traditions in my cultural field and my musical niche. To try to sound like someone else or trying to create the future can be great directions in a creative process. But maybe not as a goal to strive after in an artistic caréer?

What about when you reach these goals? Then your “future sound” is done and is no longer “the future”… or in the other bag, you end up sounding like someone else that probably had something unique when he / she did it years before …

I believe you shouldn’t overthink your cultural placement and the “end product” too much, it’s better to follow your creative ideas in the moment and then sort out where the works belong afterwards …