Born 1959 – Left CD Channel – MFA in Music



I grew up as the only child in Broby, a small countryside village in Skåne—the most southern province of Sweden. My family has working class roots, and I doubt nobody before me had even imagined one could work as a pro musician. My parents divorced when I was 11, and living alone with my mother soon made me very independent—immediately after the exam from the nine-year compulsory school , I took a job as a factory worker and moved to my own flat in the “big city” Kristianstad nearby. I was 16 years old, and have lived independently ever since.
    At 17 I quit my factory job and entered senior high-school in Kristianstad, but dropped out again in my second year. Perhaps more due to financial problems than to intellectual ones—the school system was simply not adjusted to independent teenagers with no income… I bet it still isn’t. :-)
    In the school system the society regarded me a child, but once I had dropped out I was regarded an adult(!) As such, I was an unemplyed factory worker and could get financial aid to help me back to an employment. One way was to attend a folk high-school, and well—that’s how it all started (se the education page)…
    Nowadays I live in downtown Malmö together with my beautiful Italian wife Daniela and our great kids Amanda and August. And a cat named Pikzel… Malmö is situated in the very south of Sweden, very close to Copenhagen, Denmark, and its international airport.
    My interests are reading, (red) wine, my wife’s gourmet cooking, a long poker night with the lads and a lot of beer, computers (Mac, what else..?), typography and graphical design. I even do commercial gigs designing book covers etc. when the time (read: Progetto Avanti) allows. Which isn’t too often—I have i.e. designed this web site, which was launched almost 2 years after our plan… (The graphical and structural design, that is. Technical stuff like.html, BBS forums etc. is Håkan’s department.)
    Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a pretty rough countryside environment (where the main interests were booze, boobs and fighting, and the only way to prove you were a “man” was to go for it all…) even though I keep telling myself it’s because of the mental and philosophical qualities, but I have always had a fascination for Budo—Japanese Martial Arts. In my teens, I studied Shotokan Karate to the level of entering the Swedish Masterships a couple of times, and my dreams of the future was to go to Japan and become a professional “Karateka”. But a guitar came in between, and believe me—classical guitar playing and Karate are not compatible…
    But in the beginning of 2000 I took my kids to a ?dojo? which had a presentation of different Budo branches. The visit made my son start with Judo. It also made myslef start with both Aikido (you know where they use black ?skirts?) and Iaido (the art of pulling the Japanese Samurai Sword, kill your opponent*, shake of the blood and put the sword back in its sheath again. All in one smooth, rhythmical movement?)! I have now become pretty devoted to Aikido, and even though I still am at the level of trying to figure out what it’s all really about, I find its philosophy very applicable and improving on my guitar playing and performing. There is a certain risk of damaging your nails/fingers, though, but it's quite small if you are careful. (There is a certain risk of damaging your fingers every time you open and close a car door as well, no?) But what the heck—we only live once, and if I should spend all my days protecting my precious finger nails at every cost I would go nuts…

If you are interested in Aikido, here are a few personal Aikido links.

*Well, you don’t actually kill anybody. It's all a very formalized kind of “shadow-boxing”. It's performed with live blades, so you do it without opponents—anything else would be pretty bad for your health…