When I begin my video conversation with Mats Erlandsson, a week ahead of his performance at the Groningen-based Hybrid festival, he has just finished what has been an intense week-long recording session together with Maria W. Horn. “After this, we are going to go into the mountains to get, I don’t know, a new perspective on life.” The two are currently enjoying a three-month residency at La Becque, an artist residency space located at the shores of Lake Geneva. “We are here until the end of March. It’s quite a luxury to be able to dedicate so much time and attention to our work, and to get away from our day-to-day preoccupations for a while”.
During the residency, Erlandsson and Horn have continued working on some of their past endeavors, like their research project The Spectral Organ, as well as furthering their collaborative performance practice as a compositional technique. They also perform daily vocal exercises to explore sonic duration and the process of embodying tuning. In the past week, Erlandsson and Horn have been recording at nighttime. “In the daytime, the area is quite noisy, with helicopters flying over every now and then. You don’t want that infiltrating the recording when you are trying to capture a quiet instrument like the zither.”
This meticulous attention to sound recording and music production gets to the core of Mats Erlandsson’s work. In what is now a decade-spanning career, he has been releasing haunting compositions that blur the boundaries between electronic and acoustic music. Throughout his various releases, site-specific recording processes turn an assembly of analog instruments and digital synthesis into loose sonic textures that have been colored by their surroundings. From the “dislocated ‘folk’ music” to a fictitious chamber, Erlandssons music feels like a space, one that insists on being explored through attentive listening. It’s work that defies definition, constructing real yet imaginary spaces filled with ever-unfolding sound, constantly in flux.
Erlandsson has studied electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He is part of a vibrant electronic music community that dates back to the 60s and 70s, when local legends like Catherine Christer Hennix and Folke Rabe took stage in Fylkingen, Stockholm, alongside renowned genre-shaping artists like La Monte Young, Iannis Xenakis, and Ravi Shankar. That period has been fundamental to the Stockholm-based drone community of today – think Kali Malone, Ellen Arkbro, Maria W. Horn and Erlandsson himself, to name a few – releasing a lot of their work on their own label XKatedral. Currently, Erlandsson works as a studio assistant at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), a state-funded studio space that opens its doors to basically anyone who takes an interest in electroacoustic composition.
Erlandsson’s interest in electronic music can be traced back to his first steps into music making.“I started playing guitar when I was 10, after I saw this Swedish imitation show on TV, “Sikta Mot Stjärnorna”, which translates to “Aim for the Stars”. Someone did an imitation of Gene Simmons, from KISS, with all the make-up on and everything, and it completely blew my mind. Something switched in me immediately, and I knew that this was what I needed to do.”
He lucked out with a relatively young music teacher in school, who would introduce him to guitar players like Jimi Hendrix, and offered him guitar lessons. “For me, my interest in intonation and electronic music all boils down to this early experience of hearing, playing and tuning the electric guitar. Just because of basic design of the guitar, you cannot ever get it in tune in relation to the overtones – especially when you’re drawn to working with distortion, where you’re bringing out these overtones. So there’s your problem. At an early age, I found it incredibly hard to tune this instrument.”
This early attentiveness to issues around intonation, amplification and audio signal processing allowed for a continuation of his early music experience into his later practice. “I never felt as if I made a clear-cut transition into electronic music as a new thing. Even with a string-based instrument like a guitar, you have these pedals and amplifiers, so an electronic approach already seemed the normal practice for me.”
Electronic music, then, is for Erlandsson more of an approach than a tradition, genre or instrumentation. “The issue with this name is that it describes an instrumentation, but also a style. We talk about ‘electronic drone music’, whereas ‘acoustic music’ doesn’t mean anything.” He uses the analogy of working as a visual artist: “in this case, you’re making use of different materials and media, but in the end, you’re constructing your work in the studio. For me it’s the same. Whether I’m recording digital synthesis or a string instrument, both with their own specific cultural connotations: it’s all just different types of material to use inside the studio space.”
This approach is far from ‘history-less’, a description that was often attached to electronic music in its early conception. Erlandsson’s work absorbs places, rooms, and narratives, mainly through the process of re-amplifying pre-recorded tracks, adding additional textures to the sound: “I don’t know how to do that in any other way than to physically interact with a room. You can have a good reverb inside the computer, probably, but there’s a certain type of ambience that’s tied to specific rooms. I find that I just need to play sound inside a room, and record the room itself.”
On one of his records, 4-Track Guitar Music (2018), the re-amping took place in a deserted iron mine called Ställbergs Gruva. The album invokes the history of post-war economic development, the eventual demise of the Swedish industrial society, but also a personal narrative, with Erlandsson’s maternal grandfather’s brother having worked inside the mines. “This is a whole complex of themes that comes with this space. The next record, Minnesmärke (2019), has the same type of re-amplification, in the same room, which carries the same ghosts from the past.
“Anytime you interact with anything, you get an imprint of that, like an echo from history.”
4-Track Guitar Music, was a break from a period mainly composing generative music. Inspired by the collaborative works Brian Eno & Robert Fripp and Keith Fullerton Whitman, Erlandsson imposed a set of new rules upon himself, where a guitar, a 4-track tape deck and a computer functioned as the basic material for the music that was played back into the mine. “At that time, I was looking for a possibility for other types of ‘tradition’. In popular music, you talk a lot about influence, but not tradition necessarily. Still, you could call the rock band a ‘traditional ensemble setup’. In the same way, that’s how I conceptualized the style on this record, as a new musical tradition, sort of like writing for the string quartet or four-part vocal harmony.”
The result is perhaps best heard on “Phase Calendar”, a piece that would fit well on a Tim Hecker record, and functions as the centerpiece on 4-Track Guitar Music. In its 16 minutes, a cycle of layered, glacial guitar feedback is constantly accompanied by sonic spectres, sounds that seem organic, yet evasive, always just beyond the grasp of our ears. One might call them field-recordings, but Erlandsson’s approach to sound requires a more refined vocabulary. “Using these sounds that have clear environmental and acoustic qualities, stemming from objects you can never pinpoint, is a way for me to give music this otherworldly quality,” he says. This music is an ecstatic gateway into a space that no longer exists, never existed in the first place, yet feels more alive than anything.
Besides his own projects, Erlandsson has released records with a myriad of collaborators. Glory Fades, released last month, saw Erlandsson reinstating a collaboration with Yair Elatzar Glotman that has been running for nearly 10 years. They met through Maria W. Horn, Erlandsson’s partner, who was studying at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. “He was working in the cafeteria! Maria and Yair struck up conversation, and we eventually met in Stockholm.” Erlandsson and Glotman started recording music together and grew into being close friends.
“Playing together with Yair was beneficial to me, especially when we first started out. I was working a lot with generative music, and we both wanted to get out of this electronic music production bubble temporarily and just play. Yair constantly comes with new approaches to working together. I enjoy the results, but I love the process of working together even more.” Whereas on their first release Negative Chambers (2017) was the result of working remotely, they could record in together in the studio this time around. “That meant a lot to me, socially but also musically. You can react to another person playing. You could never have this interplay if you weren’t in the same room together.”
Even more so than 4-Track Guitar Music, Glory Fades sounds explicitly as a string-based record. Instruments like the zither, double bass, acoustic guitar and violin create soundscapes that have been compared to American Primitivism and vaguely carry resemblances of what one might call ‘folk music’. “We kind of set ourselves a trap here. We would write the pieces depending on what they needed musically. But performing them in the right spirit would require probably a month of intense practice on these fragile instruments. Still, for me it was really calming, and brought me some additional influences, like the Nick Drake records. The ephemeral qualities of that music kind of seeped into the record.”
At Hybrid, Erlandsson will do a solo performance in the monumental Akerk, one of the oldest and most iconic churches in Groningen. This religious space of the church, now oftentimes devoid of its former purpose, is also the main site of a collaborative project of him and Maria W. Horn (see Ytterlännäs Gamla Kyrka (2024)) in which they do four-handed organ performances in churches in the region of Västernorrland. They explore how site-specific recordings and attentive listening practices can unlock emotions, memories or ghosts that over time have been absorbed in the walls, floors and interiors of historic sites. “Here, we’re interacting with the traditional church space a lot. When you are playing the organ, you’re performing on, literally, the building itself. You’re dealing with the symbolic nature of religious music.”
When asked if the XKatedral community shares a common interest in (for lack of better words) religion, spirituality, esotericism or even ‘folk culture’, that expresses itself musically or visually, Erlandsson is hesitant. “The identity of the label was shaped by a certain time and place and the people that were active ten years ago, when the label took shape, and it’s constantly in change. There was this interjunction between the conservatory environment, people who worked with classical forms – the organ as a prime example – and cultures of drone, noise and underground electronic music. That music inherited a lot of its visual expression from, I would say, extreme metal, or punk: it’s a mix of different things, definitely.”
Still, this idea of music and tradition reaching for ‘something beyond’ strikes a chord. “I don’t want this sounding too cheesy, but for me there has been a general fascination with the inherent darkness in whatever material I’ve been working with. It’s similar for me to look for that in the aesthetics of a medieval church as in certain types of music. For instance, a lot of music that’s made in just intonation is usually framed very positively: it’s harmonic, symmetric, the true music of the spheres, and mathematically correct. But soundwise, that’s not what I hear.”
He references the music of Catherine Christer Hennix, one of the prime figures of the 1970s drone community in Stockholm, that strongly influenced him. “This music shares the same technical description of just intonation, but I always heard this inherent darkness in it. As if there’s something ‘in there’. I can find that in just intonation, which gives the music a certain kind of color, but also in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, just as much as Black Sabbath. I have no clear answer to what this is: like there’s something slightly beyond the ‘veil’ of music, text or imagery, calling people.” He laughs: “that sounds very esoteric!”
As a performance space, Erlandsson frequently encounters churches too. “Acoustically, performing electronic music in there is a good situation for me. And if you look away from the obvious religious connotations of the place, it is in general a good environment for attentive listening. It’s very suitable for the music that I do.” At the Akerk in Groningen, Erlandsson will perform a live adaptation of Gyttjans Topografi (2023), a record that takes the setting of a fictitious chamber orchestra in an unstable imaginary room as its premise. The album lends itself for a live adaptation that combines live instrumentation (usually the zither nowadays) and generative computer-based music.
Mixing up such meticulously constructed recordings as Erlandsson’s might be seen as defeating the purpose. “It’s a tricky balancing act between how much is fixed and how much you want change on the fly. And why would you want to even do that?” Nevertheless, his approach to playing live is just as dynamic as his way of recording records and, above anything, true to the site-specific spirit of the sonic material. “I think I figured out a system that works pretty well for playing a live show. When it works, it’s a heightened version of the group of pieces on the record, but still different.” Like a one-time echo in a reverb room, that resonates beyond.
Catch Mats Erlandsson live on March 1st during Hybrid Festival at Akerk [21:45]