Today we publish an
interview with the Swedish music composer and data scientist Linn Friberg, who
curates the INTENT series on Kalamine Records
https://soundcloud.com/linnfriberg
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/linn-friberg
https://github.com/linfri
https://www.linnfriberg.com
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Welcome to this written interview for the Cian Orbe blog!
Hi Sรกbila, and thanks a lot for inviting me here!
First, I would like to share something that would hopefully alleviate
some tension within those who are reading this interview… about “the case of
mistaken identity”, which I found quite hilarious until losing some newly made
contacts, very likely due to this issue.
During the 2010s I was working with a musician currently located in
Norway, who was living before in the same metropolitan area I am “from”, or
which I consider “home”, one of… (I will explain it in a moment) – Greater
Stockholm. Her full name is Trine Maria Linnea Friberg Nielsen, also known as
Riversky. My name is Linn Ruth Friberg, and we are not related. It is something
quite common in Scandinavia; for instance, there was a Swedish ambient music
project Bocksholm, consisting of two guys named Peter Andersson, from the same
town, Boxholm, with population of roughly 3000 people and famous for its cheese,
mostly. The population of Stockholm County is roughly 2.3 million people. And,
my name, Linn, is not a diminutive from Elin, Malin, Linda, or Linnea, it is a
separate name, originating from Norway and mostly in use starting from Gen X
and millennials. By the way, I am not revealing anything she, or anyone else I
am going to mention, would not approve of.
So, I was not active as a recording artist during the most of the 2010s
due to other life priorities back then and was looking into possibilities to
start producing music again in 2019. The easiest way in was following the steps
of Trine, who was publishing through netlabels, this is exactly how I
discovered Cian Orbe, Completely Gone, Argali records, etcetera.
And Trine wanted to
separate her artistic activities and her personal life during that time, so she
was going by Maria, Linnea, and other names artistically. So, in 2019, Trine
finally released some of the albums by Tuatha, our old band, via Cian Orbe, and
I felt like “okay, I am going in!”. Invested into equipment (NI Kore 2, dated but powerful), came up with a project name
(Nimbostrata), recorded some tracks and sent the tracks to diverse
compilations. Felt very welcome, someone even donated a small amount of money
for my samples, which was very flattering, and then I started to receive
strange questions and realized that I was being mistaken for Trine, who had her
son not long before that and severed links with the music community. After
that, the interest in my music from these people waned at once. Fortunately, I
was able to find other netlabels and establish connections and friendships by
myself later, with those who never had any contact with Trine. But still, even
if – being brutally honest here – Trine is much more talented than I am, and
burying this talent was an utter disgrace, especially given her training at The
Grieg Academy – still, it did hurt to witness people turn away like they did.
Everything did turn out well in the end; I am in touch with some of the
finest talents in experimental music the world has to offer, and I know exactly
what I want out of my “career” as a music producer. Even if Trine is focused on
her family and is unlikely to produce anything new in both near and far future,
she found time to “make amends” for her decisions by putting together music
produced by her, her friends, and others, and launching a very special podcast
on Audius, MedMera. For the sake of creating a sense of mystery and other
reasons of her own, she stripped all the labels from the music and flushed it
all into numbered episodes, with all due credit to collaborators where it was
impossible not to credit the artists. All the albums by Tuatha we could not
publish otherwise, the whole archive of the modern incarnation of Nova Beat
Estate run by me and, nominally, Trine, and a lot of other stuff is packed into
these 214 episodes. The series existed in different forms since the 2000s;
earlier projects by Trine and other producers became seamlessly integrated with
MedMera, stretching the final incarnation of the series over almost 15 years. Given
the Tier 3 status on Audius and its blockchain architecture, and the “fair use”
law for podcasts, it is guaranteed that this music will be stored forever.
Feel
free to check it out here: https://audius.co/medmera – or
tune into Dots Unlimited Radio, the channel DIY Mix. The producers who were
credited for taking part in creation of the series were Trine, I, and two other
artists I met during the late 2000s: Chris DeBry from Texas, and Fabian van den
Eijnden, a Dutch music producer living in Egypt.
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What is the meaning of your artist/project name?
Right now, I do not use any artist or project name for my own stuff,
just my personal name. What exactly was behind Dawnbreaker or RAINE, or even
Nova Beat Estate/LCD Soundhouse, in terms of initial ideas, I do not even
remember right now, it was 15 years ago. Nimbostrata was associated strongly
with my stormy mood during 2019, plus it was a link to RAINE, an attempt to
process the residual emotions associated with… how things ended between me and
Rahner long time ago. Tuatha was not started by me, but I think Trine told the
story behind the name somewhere. Images Without Resemblance was an inside joke
between Trine and me and, as any joke, it was very short-lived. Ann Or Lunda is
a Swedish word “annorlunda”, meaning “different”. Oriondrive does not have any
particular meaning, but it feels like a generated word, and this is a generative
music project, after all. The Itinerant is a stillborn audio drama, and the
concept behind Telepathic Ensemble could be explained best by the artist who
started it.
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What is the concept behind your music project, how do you categorize your own
music?
The best way of understanding my music, and who I really am, would be if
you look at it all through the paradigm of being a third culture kid (TCK). You
see, I cannot really answer to the question “where are you from”, even if I am
rooted in Greater Stockholm and nearly everything that I have in my life is
located there, including my apartment, friends, and family. When you are a TCK,
you are influenced by many cultures, but embraced by none. I was born at the
rift between nations, worlds, cultures, in a sort of no man’s land, a child of
an aerospace engineer and a physician. Followed along to different places,
boosting up my ability to speak different languages from the childhood, but
always being treated differently than the others. After graduation from high
school in yet another place I completed certain vocational training within IT,
packed my bags and left that place in the 2000s, never coming back. Being a TCK
implies that your home is not within cultures, places, or countries, but with
people you have in your life, which creates the constant feeling of
impermanency. For some time, I considered Cyprus my home, because someone once
important to me was living there. Then, once the link to Cyprus was severed, I
came to Uppsala, and my father just slammed the door in my face. We did not have
any contact since then. Fortunately, my mom was living in Stockholm since she
married someone else, so I was able to stay there. Autumn 2013, staying in a
tiny room in northwest Stockholm, in the apartment owned by two guys from
Turkey... I am quite proud of these humble origins, since in a timespan of just
seven years I managed to root myself in Stockholm from scratch. But, even if
Stockholm absorbs nearly everything and I cannot call myself in legal terms
anything else than Swedish due to being a Swedish national, in certain ways I
still feel quite alien, and the pandemic does not make things easier. I am
extremely meticulous in my work, but I am yet to find home in anything else
beyond work.
So, how does it all relate to arts? I am not consistent in my music
genre-wise, having played and produced experimental and ambient music,
metal/post-metal, trance, IDM, Berlin school, industrial, vaporwave, New Age,
even indie pop, but I never felt that my music could be a purebred example of
any particular genre. But then, music is supposed to be as impure and as
impermanent as anything else in nature, so this fact by itself brings on a lot
of healing, and I just follow along with wherever ideas and intentions take me.
Also, as a junior data scientist, receiving rigorous
training in statistics, mathematics, and programming right now, I started to
think in terms of data when it comes to music and arts. My greatest fear was
always about doing things wrong, messing up, failing, and having the doors slammed
in my face; this is the reason why statistics and data science suit me better
than pure mathematics otherwise, since it leaves a lot of room for (random!) error.
Trying different approaches, quantifying the results, making decisions based on
data… it all resonates with the approach taken within experimental music
production, and a lot of fears are being alleviated within all these processes.
By the way, I am going to publish analysis of the podcast on my personal
website soon, dealing with intermittent demand and appropriate forecasting
methods.
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Do you release music only under your main project? Do you have other active or
past music projects or monikers? When did you start making music? What was your
first band/project?
Let us start from the beginning. I am active music-wise since 2005
officially, before that I was just dabbling in music making. My first artistic
alias was Dawnbreaker, founded initially for the sake of releasing a soundtrack
I produced for the school video game project, and my first bands were RAINE,
with Alex Rahner, and Tuatha, with Max S. (legal name Malachai Shachaf, before
his Aliyah to Israel known as Maxim Solodovnikov).
I was running my own record
label as well, Nova Beat Estate, with Rahner. During that time, I was working
as an IT technician and, as said before, was having a certain connection with
Cyprus; the idea of creating a label was born when I was administering a
certain server hosting music and podcasts, and I wanted to "release"
some of my music via that server. The alias LCD Soundhouse was used for sound
design and mastering within the label. Artists on the label, among our own
projects, were Joonas “Hubris” Hahto, Shifty K, SMC Sound System, and others,
long inactive and completely forgotten by now. But, through the label
activities, I met Trine, Chris DeBry, and Fabian van den Eijnden; Nova Beat
Estate managed to release albums by Chris and Fabian before it ceased to exist
for almost a decade. Dawnbreaker and RAINE ceased to exist along with the label
in the beginning of the 2010s, and Tuatha went into comatose due to problems
Max was experiencing in Israel. Then I
was, as said, inactive music-wise for a long time. Trine joined and eventually
took over Tuatha during the 2010s.
Highlights: https://hearthis.at/cian-orbe-collection/06-back-to-the-self
(it is mostly Trine though, my input for the final version of the album was
minuscule)
Then, I started making music again as Nimbostrata. I think that the
essential piece by this project is this one: https://kalaminerecords.bandcamp.com/track/rage, but the
most successful track was this one: https://kalaminerecords.bandcamp.com/track/s-r-ta.
I would like to mention this track as well, highlighting diversity of the
project: https://hvedrungrsmil.bandcamp.com/track/halo-early-mix-by-the-kinetic-collective
Nova Beat Estate was resurrected for a short time as a production alias
in 2019-2020, releasing albums by Nimbostrata, Images Without Resemblance
(Trine and I), The Itinerant, and the first batch of INTENT compilations, I
will get to it in a moment. Almost everything could be listened to via the
website of Kalamine Records.
Ann Or Lunda (The Order of Scythe & Vine and I), Oriondrive (Thomas
Park and I), and Telepathic Ensemble (Artificial Memory Trace and other
artists, sometimes I am in the mix, sometimes not) are quite special projects,
significant steppingstones in my “career”. First, I was invited by The Order to
perform vocals. I am a very bad singer, so, in the end… we have not been in
touch for a long time. But then, I became interested in generative music; The
Order program hardware synthesizers to perform according to sophisticated
algorithms. Thomas Park a.k.a. Mystified invited me to collaborate as
Oriondrive, and this project is based on algorithms even more; all the music is
generated using Python code, all the lyrics are generated with neural networks
and read through the speech synthesizer, and even cover artwork is generated.
The only human involvement here is mixing and effects. I also participated in
beta testing of the GenerIter SDK, which made the process Thomas is using in
his music production available to everyone. And Telepathic Ensemble is even
more unique; all the music is performed/produced live across time zones during
a specific and very narrow time window, and the generative approach is mixed
with “organic” in a much more spontaneous and intuitive way. Instead of
generating words using an algorithm I write down words almost unconsciously
during the time window, and these words are read then through the speech
synthesizer.
Highlights: https://archive.org/download/Ann_Or_Lunda/05-Beundringar.mp3
(Ann Or Lunda), https://emerge.bandcamp.com/track/the-mission
(Oriondrive), https://alfa00.bandcamp.com/track/tband-2405-pt1
(Telepathic Ensemble).
And, of course, the INTENT compilation series. A bit of backstory behind
this one: during 2017-2019 I had a strong interest in alternative therapies,
since I had a lot of unresolved emotions to deal with back then and was willing
to try almost anything, especially after receiving my first Reiki treatment
from Trine in 2017. I stumbled upon a book, “Biocentrism” by Robert Lanza, which
proposed the idea that biological consciousness creates reality, rather than
the other way round. Then, months later, after a long walk I went to one of the
shopping malls in Stockholm and stumbled upon an installation inspired by Yoko
Ono's Wish Tree; I made a thorough research of ideas behind this project. And
then, in the end of 2019, I went to a workshop by Aleksandra Chaladus in
Stockholm, dedicated to “intention setting”; the workshop was structured in a
certain way so all the attendees would get inspired for running their own
projects. This is how the idea for the series was born. So far, two iterations
of the project were produced: INTENT 2020 and INTENT 2021.
The goal of the project was and is setting intentions at the end of each
year for the coming year. I never expected any results and let the project
“grow” by itself, which resulted in a lot of submitted audio material. I never
rejected any submission, adapting the structure of the compilations to the
material and attempting to create continuous flow on all the volumes. The
compilations are meant to be listened to in their entirety, and everything is
mixed and mastered very carefully, so the result always sounds better than the
sources. I also create cover artwork and produce short write-ups for the
contributors based on the information I find about them online. My own goals
for 2020 “manifested” successfully regardless of the pandemic, and I asked some
participants about their progress in the end of 2020 and received a lot of
positive feedback. The artists known as Zumaia and Deborah Fialkiewicz have
been essential within production of the series; the former hosts the series on
Kalamine Records, and the latter promoted the series heavily.
The links to the compilations: https://kalaminerecords.bandcamp.com/album/intent-2020-solid-state,
https://kalaminerecords.bandcamp.com/album/intent-2020-liquid-state,
https://kalaminerecords.bandcamp.com/album/intent-2020-vapor-state, and https://kalaminerecords.com/intent-2021. Everything here is
worth of a listen.
The INTENT series are released annually, so, during the year I attempt
to solidify the intentions through another series, PARADIGM. Basically, these
series consist of short EPs featuring me and my friends/collaborators, released
irregularly during the year via the same Kalamine Records. So far only two EPs
were released, and two more will be released in 2021. The series could be found
here: http://kalaminerecords.com/paradigm
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Favorite music genres?
I always appreciated metal music in different forms. Right now, I find
that music by the Swedish treasure Meshuggah alleviates a lot of bottled-up negative
emotions, especially before and after the exams. During the last summer I tried
to listen to the whole discography of Tangerine Dream. I enjoy diverse music:
Morcheeba, Mel Tormรฉ, Solar Fields, Aes Dana, Front Line Assembly, Biosphere,
Godflesh, Dรคlek, VNV Nation, Gridlock, Juno Reactor, Delerium, a lot of modern
“progressive house” during the workout in the gym… I do not think it is about
genre, it is about the vibe I resonate with at the moment.
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Which kind of inspiration do you have from the place where you live? Is there
any inspiration from your country in your music?
I really do not know whether Stockholm or my current city, Norrkรถping,
actually influenced me in any way music-wise. I could say that some people
influenced certain recordings tied to certain geographical locations, but I
prefer to focus on the positive and squeeze the “juice” out of other things in
order to keep going.
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Who is your favorite visual/plastic artists who inspire your work?
These artists are mostly quite obscure. Kosmoplovci, Seire Productions,
Farbrausch… a lot of stuff associated with demo scene. The work by Vincent
Villuis influenced me as well.
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How do you see the current Underground music scene of the music genre that you
are involved?
I do not really think I am “involved” into anything. As a female
composer I am not supposed to exist, I should be doing anything else with my
life than creating music, especially this kind of music, so, in the end, I am quite
invisible. The benefit of being an outsider, though, is absence of any
expectations, the perpetual state of tabula rasa in everything I do, and this
is something I am very comfortable with. And, given that many aspects of music
production generate data for further analysis, I am more than comfortable with
a role of a “spider” hiding behind the wall, gathering data once in a while. This
is exactly what I want out of my “career” in music: data. I value friendships
though, so almost all collaborations I enter and dedicate my time to imply some
form of personal contact, even long-distance penpalships. Without it I would
not bother to continue, to be honest, since this kind of music does not hold any
monetary value.
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Favorite popular & underground composers/music projects?
I enjoy music by State Azure and other artists who create modular
ambient music. Just recently I discovered a YouTube channel called SpaceWave –
Cosmic Relaxation; the composer behind this channel grew up in Fruรคngen, one of
the suburbs in Stockholm where I lived for quite some time during the 2010s and
listened almost exclusively to Solar Fields, Biosphere, and other ambient electronica,
and now I wonder whether quiet and ordinary residential areas like Fruรคngen
inspire creativity on a subconscious level, ha-ha…
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Do you perform live? If you do, can you describe the experience to us?
I used to, purely for the sake of documentation and connecting with
others, but not anymore. I cannot deliver necessary “impact” when performing
live; even if music could be very intricate, people tend to become bored during
performances. Therefore, I confined myself to playing improvisational music at
the events in various small venues and yoga centers in Stockholm: Noden, Studio
Hanami, Shine, Yogansa, and others. I do not have performance anxiety, but, in
the end, I lost interest in playing live completely, and I do not plan to go to
these venues anymore, due to living in another city and – being brutally honest
here again – my failure to form long-lasting connections within the local wellness
community during the late 2010s. Sometimes it just does not work at all.
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What is your favorite song, composition, or album created by yourself?
I mentioned some highlights, pieces carrying the essence, or most
successful pieces already, it does not mean that I like these pieces per se.
One of my favorite pieces is this one: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/linn-friberg/paradigm-fiat-lux/the-arrival
- because it gives away positive vibes and hope.
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Tell us about the concept & the creation process pertaining to your EPs/albums.
As said before, I just follow along with wherever ideas and intentions
take me. Nearly all tracks by Riversky featuring Nimbostrata were produced by
me using the samples by Trine, due to the obvious reasons explained above. I
still have some samples which were not utilized in any track yet, so if
Riversky ever pops up again in collaboration with me, you know who is
responsible for the result. Nearly all the collaborators send me WAV files to
work with, but one of them offered MIDI files, which I appreciate a lot. I feel
that I can fuse myself with the ideas by other artists much better if I work
with MIDI files instead of samples. By the way, my current setup includes
Reaper DAW and Spire VSTi.
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Tell us about the underground music scene in your city.
I never had any substantial contact with anyone within the local scene
except Trine; I suspect that most of the producers worth mentioning are just
like me, outsiders locally but becoming known internationally. And, due to
local politics, I doubt that “the scene” would survive beyond the pandemic;
many venues have closed during the past ten years due to noise complaints or
incredibly high rent. But the city and the society are continuing to undergo
rapid changes, so no one knows how it is going to look like in a couple of
years.
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Any news for the second half of 2021, or for 2022 music-wise?
Recently I produced two official remixes for Zoviet France, both could
be listened to via SoundCloud. Also, Treetrunk Records have released an EP
featuring remixes for Zumaia I produced with the latest version of GenerIter
SDK. The EP could be listened to and downloaded here:
https://archive.org/details/OdditySpiraleRemixes
PARADIGM-wise, I am planning to release two EPs in 2021: “The Arrival”,
stemming from the track I mentioned above, and yet untitled collaboration with
Brainquake. Obviously, I will produce INTENT 2022 in due time. Soon I will
create my own music archive on Audius, using the same concept as MedMera but
using my own separate account; even if technically I can maintain MedMera too,
the account belongs to Trine. My main focus though, except school, will be
analysis of MedMera and INTENT so far, as said above – the latter will be
mostly descriptive due to absence of monthly data – and a lot of coding. Before
announcing INTENT 2022 I have to create an app for track submission and,
possibly, playback, so I could get data out of it and perform analysis.
Everything, including some of my schoolwork, will be available via my website
and the GitHub repository.
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Any other thing that you want to say to your listeners?
In the end, this interview could serve as the most comprehensive
introduction to me, my music, and my goals. I really do not like dwelling on
the past, and there are so many things to experience on the brighter side of
the life spectrum, so my intentions are clear – out with the old, in with the
new, and fast forward into the future!
