I grew up in Sweden in the 80s in a fairly quiet suburb, exposed to music from a young age. My first influences was 80s pop and my dad’s jazz collection, but soon got exposed to J.M.Jarre, The Prodigy, Goldie and then the world of electronic music opened up the further into the 90s I got. From around 2000 I started producing drum’n’bass and had a decent career DJing and releasing as Materia, before I started diversifying – which eventually got one of my tracks to be featured by Carl Cox on his 10 Years of Space Ibiza album and culminated in a cross-genre album called Atlas in 2013. After that I took a long break with kids and only really got back into music production about two years ago.

I am lucky in that my day job is working with software development, so it was very easy to adjust to working from home. When it comes to music production, as I have all I need to make music in my MacBook Pro, it doesn’t really matter where I am.

In the summer last year I was working on a lot of more progressive material and ended up going into a deeper and heavier direction with this track. After a few months I got in touch with Jamie Jamal via BBC Introducing and he was really into the idea of adding his vocals to the track.

Better! I usually start with a fairly basic idea and let the music develop from there, but I never knew it would have a vocal aspect when I started working on it.

How to balance vocal production with the electronic music production to make sure that the vocal sits in the mix, yet doesn’t just become another layer – I wanted Jamie’s vocals to really shine, but without sounding out of place.

Given that I started making music around 1988 on an Amiga 500, it has evolved a lot! Going from trackers to very early generation DAWs to what is possible these days, using a variety of outboard gear or not, and producing in fairly different genres, I think it’s fair to say my sound is diverse but some might say they can still see a similar strand of style in all the music I have made over the years. 🙂

Since I grew up in a town in Sweden, I wasn’t able to go clubbing in proper clubs for a long time, so I associate music a lot with listening – when travelling, walking, music as a soundtrack to a journey. But of course, towards the late 90s I started going clubbing and eventually became a DJ myself playing in many countries and I now want to give people a soundtrack that would also make them want to move – some tracks are more in the dance direction and some more in the listening direction but even in the hardest tracks, like the next release on Self Control (006) there are still melodic elements to hold on to whilst the drums are pounding. There was once a t-shirt I saw someone wear at a house club in Stockholm maybe 10 years ago, it said «we dance to the melody» and I always thought that was apt. Sure, we all dance to the bass and the beat with our bodies, but our minds cling on to the melodies as well and if you get both right, it becomes a proper immersion.

PLAY!

At the moment I am doing a lot of work as Future Self, but I am also getting back to drum’n’bass and I am currently working on a track with an MC who I know from many years back. Early feedback has been incredible, and I can’t wait to finish it, but we are taking our time.