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bluhammock music
Released: September 19, 2006 |
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Kristoffer Ragnstam
While high-profile pop bands from Sweden were busily grabbing press attention, their countryman Kristoffer Ragnstam was working under the radar screen, making music that refused to fit the Scandinavian stereotype.
His sound was different – too different to ignore. Musicians took note, not only in his country but in Germany and Japan. The media responded too, going overboard with effusions that, at the request of this somewhat self-effacing artist, we won’t repeat here.
It’s strange, when you think about it, because Kristoffer didn’t play that many gigs. In fact, he didn’t even play any instruments, other than drums, and yet managed to cut a solo demo that won him his first record deal. Soft-spoken, with a wry sense of humor, he thrived primarily in recording studios, where he apprenticed to staff engineers on sessions and then applied their lessons to his own projects, working after-hours until crashing on the nearest couch.
On his U.S. debut, Sweet Bills, Kristoffer bundles the results into one of the most idiosyncratic packages heard since the advent of Beck. Each track veers unpredictably to the next: The wall-of-sound pop of “Lonely Lane,” broadcast by roaring guitars and thundering drums, gives way to the simmering funk of “Doctor, Give the World a Smile.” Mellow horns and backward guitar samples on “Sweet Bills” explode into a complex groove that nudges surreal lyrics – “My girl wants to be an astronaut/My boss wants to be a talent scout” – through “Born as a Lion.”
You can also sense a chronology to Sweet Bills. Echoes of sixties garage rock permeate “Never Get Used to You,” an eighties electronic dance hook slices through “Man Overboard,” and on “Keila” the music is timeless and the message playfully twisted: “I’ve been waiting for you to call the last seven years,” Kristoffer intones. “You see, honey, we’ve got a problem …”
As Kristoffer sees it, this overlay of irony and multiple musical influences captures who he is, personally as well as artistically. “I’m honest with my music,” he explains. “No one pushed me. I got to where I am on my own.”
Unlike the material on his first album, the songs that would eventually be featured on Sweet Bills included other musicians: members of Kristoffer’s band Electric-4, saxophonist Andreas Gidlund, guitarist Per Stålberg from Division of Laura Lee, and, on one track, (International) Noise Conspiracy drummer Ludwig Dahlberg.
Kristoffer worked smoothly with co-writers Magic Joel and Pontus Winnberg on finessing the production. And so – why not? – he impulsively invited Chris Brown to polish it off with a final mix.
He’d met the respected engineer (Radiohead, Blur, Supergrass, the Beatles Anthology) during some sessions in Gothenburg. “We hung out, and I asked if I could send him some of my music. He said yeah, and after he’d heard my tapes he brought me to England for a mixing session. Everything worked between us, so we kept in contact until I could bring him to my studio in Sweden, where he mixed my whole album.”
Kristoffer and his band performed some of this material during their first trip to the States, in late 2005. Their sets at the Knitting Factory, the Living Room, and other venues stirred interest in New York, from audiences as well as label people. One of the latter brought him onboard at bluhammock music, without even having to trot anyone from Abba out as incentive.
Sweet Bills is, Kristoffer insists, a project he can introduce without hesitation into the unsuspecting American market. “It’s very intimate – naked, even. I’m not trying to be smart or anything. I’m just doing what comes naturally. Sweet Bills is one hundred percent me.”
One hundred percent Kristoffer: As the world will soon discover, music doesn’t get any hotter than that.
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