I am a singer-songwriter residing in Stockholm. My music is super melodic and structurally playful, immersed in the sounds of the 60’s and 70’s, drawing from everything that inspires me from back then to the present.
Growing up I was exposed to a variety of musical styles from excursions through my father’s record collection. As musically bewildered as encouraged I made my first demo at fifteen together with a friend. Honing guitar-skills, I was making small daily notes on hours of practice whilst my sister developed social skills next-door. At twenty-one I took a couple of singing lessons from a charismatic old lady in Gothenburg. Memories linger of a high-ceiling room with old-fashioned furniture, sweet flowery water and her life-partner the medium making occasional and somewhat bewildering appearances. I spent most of my twenties figuring out production, writing songs, learning fundamental studio-skills and fingering on new instruments from time to time. (Still) lacking the skill to read music, the greater part of my musical education was provided in a printer park listening to hundreds and hundreds of albums surrounded by the pulsating sound of machines. Along came hip hop, maybe thriving a little extra in those surroundings. Stuck in a far from positive life-situation, having tried some years too many to make creative ends meet while working full-time at the printing company, I moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm in 2009 to study (eventually social anthropology) and make music (eventually recording with a band). By 2011 I started playing gigs with a trio, testing songs in front of a live audience whilst carving out new songs in the tiny, odd-smelling cottage I inhabited in a slumbering village North of Stockholm. In 2014, whilst getting a degree in Social Anthropology, I released my first full-length album Strange Light Music on my own label bearing the same name. From two pleasant trips to the countryside, a steaming hot summer week of recording myself in Stockholm and some additional recording in my studio appartment followed the 2016 release of The Creek and the Carving. From there on, an in other respects successful move to Malmö greatly delayed the process of making Cross-Word Tears. The album was released in 2022. My experiences of recording music with other people had thus far built up a substantial lump of frustration regarding the enormous amount of time spent on waiting for engagements that often amounted to absolutely nothing or, at best, to something or other six months later. My way of saying “fuck you if you don’t want to join”, to channel those lovely and magnanimous feelings, was to simply play everything on the next record myself. After all, that’s what I’d done with The Creek and Cross-Word Tears, with the exception of some brass, percussion, strings.. and drums! That was a big one. The gargantuan task of learning to play drums moderately well for a record. I dedicated some two hours of practicing to demos, once a week for about three years. At least I got a new musical perspective, I was the only one delaying the process and I DID get a record out of it. The album Sun Pie was released on Mara Sounds on April 11.
Kristofer Axén 