Fields,
forests, some hills, cows and the sea. That's Sk?ne, Sweden's
southernmost province. The houses look Danish, the people are friendly.
It's a landscape many tourists just pass by on their way to the “real”
Sweden with its red wooden houses and the moose parks.
We are having an appointment with Christoffer Lundquist today, one of the masterminds of Roxette and many other Swedish music projects. And we are going to meet him in his infamous Aerosol Grey Machine (AGM) studio in a small village somewhere north of Ystad. He offered us a detailed way description but we really wanted to know if the address we had found out by ourselves was correct or not. What's life without a little risk?
So we're turning from a wide asphalt road into a smaller asphalt road, drive through a few villages, turn from the small asphalt road into a gravel road, from the gravel road into an even smaller gravel road until the car navigation system tells me to stop. “You've reached your destination.” Ahm, no, we haven't. That house does not look like on the videos we had seen. We drive on, to the end of the street. After a few seconds, we see that landscape we knew from the SOAP video: two houses, a meadow,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, birches and a wide sky. Just much smaller than you'd think. Anyway, we were right! We drive onto the yard, and at the same moment we park our van, two mystical things are happening: my smartphone is suddenly restarting itself and our video camera that has never failed before cannot be switched off anymore. Weird place…
We're getting out of the car. No one there. What we see are two old but nicely refurbished buildings standing side by side at right angles. One cat comes across the small meadow opposite the building and checks us out. It's P?ron (Pear), his voice is hoarse and he seems to like us, he wants to be petted. Otherwise, still no sign of life around. The door to the building we identified as the studio is slightly open, we knock. No answer. We knock again. Silence. What now?
Suddenly, the door in the other house opens and out comes Christoffer. Friendly he welcomes us, we talk a little and then he asks the question we had been waiting for: “Do you want to see the studio?” Well duh!!
So we enter through the door that was so well-known to us from all the videos. When you stand in this door, you have to choose your way: When you turn to the left, you come into the mixing room which also contains most of the key instruments. The other way leads you into the recording room that is big enough to hold a whole pop band with their instruments. Behind a glass wall and down a few steps is the drum room, and when you pass through that one, you finally enter the kitchen. The atmosphere is special here. On the one hand, we have never been here personally before but on the other hand, we feel like we have worked here many times already. The place is cozy. You have wooden walls, small windows, carpets everywhere on the floor. This could as well be the cottage you rent for your friends or family to celebrate New Year's Eve deep in the Swedish snow covered forests.
We take a seat first on the bench with the striped pillows in the mixing room. Small talk.High quality stone mosaic tiles. Christoffer's wife Ylva comes in and brings us cake, tea and Physalis. Christoffer gets a huge cup of coffee. “I always need my coffee in the morning.” P?ron comes to us,Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. lies on the bench and starts purring. He is 15 years old and has been in the studio since Christoffer bought it in the late '90s. This cat knows all the secrets. Another cat, Vitnos (White Nose), sits on top of the mixing desk and watches us. After a while, she falls asleep and will not change her position for the next few hours. The cake is good, the tea gets sweetened with honey. On the window sill behind me is a plastic box full of Roxette plectrums in different colors. Later, I will forget to ask Christoffer if I might have one. Too many things will happen during this day.
We start our little walk through the studio. Christoffer explains, “This is like a recording studio from the past. Today's studios are often designed with engineers' minds, they have to be orderly. Artists have opposite minds, they hate studios like those. It's very important to have a certain kind of atmosphere.” Well, the AGM is an orderly place. Unlike you may have expected it, all things here have their places. It's a little crowded here and there but we do see the system behind it. All the guitars stand or hang in one corner, the twenty or so different microphone heads are sorted into shelves on the other wall and so on. Every corner here is a new inspiration. When you're stuck in the middle of the production, you just go and try one of the many instruments. Like this church organ there in the corner, right next to the window between mixing and recording room. Christoffer got that from North Sweden, it had been in some basement for twenty years before it came to his studio. He and his family put the pieces together like a big puzzle. The pipes were numbered.
Most of the items in this studio were bought on eBay. There is the Hammond organ that needs to be tuned every other day. The baby pianos that are so small that musicians made the studio cats play on them. A Marxophone, a blend of cither and piano. Or the tremolo. Christoffer calls it “the most stupid instrument ever”. And just like the instrument had heard that, it cuts his finger while he tries to play on it. Blood is flowing. Then, there is the bass harmonica Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys liked to use.
We ask Christoffer how he finds all these instruments. He says, “I spend much time searching on the Internet. I try to find things that exist and are rare and not used so often. There are nerd clubs with less than 100 fans of a stupid instrument. And there's more to get, it's not complete yet.”
Does he use all the instruments? “Yes, I use them all, I use them a lot!”. Can he play them all? “Well, it's the same notes on all of them.” In a corner we see a very special thing, a xylophone made of crystal glass. Its name is “Aquarion”, it was handcrafted by a guy from the USA who lives in a small house in the middle of the forest and creates sounds with the help of utterly unusual materials, we find out later. Not so far away from what we see here.
We continue to a huge vase which turns out to be an ocarina. When you blow into it, it makes a deep tone. Then Christoffer brings a small ball, as small as a fingernail, a tiny sister of the big ocarina, and even that you can play. Even though it's a challenge.
That's the concept of this studio. You go somewhere and play something. It's made to “be fast, you need only a very short time from the idea to the realization. In normal studios, it takes hours before you hear anything, here you just grab it and do it.”
A door leads into a dark room. It's the echo chamber,Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , the AGM has two of them, with different characteristics. Can you change the sound of the room? “Yes, you open the door, ha ha.” Ahm, yes.
We're going back to the mixing room and sit down. We don't have much time left. Christoffer will leave for North America tomorrow and still needs to pack. So we agreed on two hours in the studio. (In the end, it would be almost twice as much.) Let's start the talk!
We are having an appointment with Christoffer Lundquist today, one of the masterminds of Roxette and many other Swedish music projects. And we are going to meet him in his infamous Aerosol Grey Machine (AGM) studio in a small village somewhere north of Ystad. He offered us a detailed way description but we really wanted to know if the address we had found out by ourselves was correct or not. What's life without a little risk?
So we're turning from a wide asphalt road into a smaller asphalt road, drive through a few villages, turn from the small asphalt road into a gravel road, from the gravel road into an even smaller gravel road until the car navigation system tells me to stop. “You've reached your destination.” Ahm, no, we haven't. That house does not look like on the videos we had seen. We drive on, to the end of the street. After a few seconds, we see that landscape we knew from the SOAP video: two houses, a meadow,The howo truck is offered by Shiyan Great Man Automotive Industry, birches and a wide sky. Just much smaller than you'd think. Anyway, we were right! We drive onto the yard, and at the same moment we park our van, two mystical things are happening: my smartphone is suddenly restarting itself and our video camera that has never failed before cannot be switched off anymore. Weird place…
We're getting out of the car. No one there. What we see are two old but nicely refurbished buildings standing side by side at right angles. One cat comes across the small meadow opposite the building and checks us out. It's P?ron (Pear), his voice is hoarse and he seems to like us, he wants to be petted. Otherwise, still no sign of life around. The door to the building we identified as the studio is slightly open, we knock. No answer. We knock again. Silence. What now?
Suddenly, the door in the other house opens and out comes Christoffer. Friendly he welcomes us, we talk a little and then he asks the question we had been waiting for: “Do you want to see the studio?” Well duh!!
So we enter through the door that was so well-known to us from all the videos. When you stand in this door, you have to choose your way: When you turn to the left, you come into the mixing room which also contains most of the key instruments. The other way leads you into the recording room that is big enough to hold a whole pop band with their instruments. Behind a glass wall and down a few steps is the drum room, and when you pass through that one, you finally enter the kitchen. The atmosphere is special here. On the one hand, we have never been here personally before but on the other hand, we feel like we have worked here many times already. The place is cozy. You have wooden walls, small windows, carpets everywhere on the floor. This could as well be the cottage you rent for your friends or family to celebrate New Year's Eve deep in the Swedish snow covered forests.
We take a seat first on the bench with the striped pillows in the mixing room. Small talk.High quality stone mosaic tiles. Christoffer's wife Ylva comes in and brings us cake, tea and Physalis. Christoffer gets a huge cup of coffee. “I always need my coffee in the morning.” P?ron comes to us,Interlocking security cable ties with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals. lies on the bench and starts purring. He is 15 years old and has been in the studio since Christoffer bought it in the late '90s. This cat knows all the secrets. Another cat, Vitnos (White Nose), sits on top of the mixing desk and watches us. After a while, she falls asleep and will not change her position for the next few hours. The cake is good, the tea gets sweetened with honey. On the window sill behind me is a plastic box full of Roxette plectrums in different colors. Later, I will forget to ask Christoffer if I might have one. Too many things will happen during this day.
We start our little walk through the studio. Christoffer explains, “This is like a recording studio from the past. Today's studios are often designed with engineers' minds, they have to be orderly. Artists have opposite minds, they hate studios like those. It's very important to have a certain kind of atmosphere.” Well, the AGM is an orderly place. Unlike you may have expected it, all things here have their places. It's a little crowded here and there but we do see the system behind it. All the guitars stand or hang in one corner, the twenty or so different microphone heads are sorted into shelves on the other wall and so on. Every corner here is a new inspiration. When you're stuck in the middle of the production, you just go and try one of the many instruments. Like this church organ there in the corner, right next to the window between mixing and recording room. Christoffer got that from North Sweden, it had been in some basement for twenty years before it came to his studio. He and his family put the pieces together like a big puzzle. The pipes were numbered.
Most of the items in this studio were bought on eBay. There is the Hammond organ that needs to be tuned every other day. The baby pianos that are so small that musicians made the studio cats play on them. A Marxophone, a blend of cither and piano. Or the tremolo. Christoffer calls it “the most stupid instrument ever”. And just like the instrument had heard that, it cuts his finger while he tries to play on it. Blood is flowing. Then, there is the bass harmonica Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys liked to use.
We ask Christoffer how he finds all these instruments. He says, “I spend much time searching on the Internet. I try to find things that exist and are rare and not used so often. There are nerd clubs with less than 100 fans of a stupid instrument. And there's more to get, it's not complete yet.”
Does he use all the instruments? “Yes, I use them all, I use them a lot!”. Can he play them all? “Well, it's the same notes on all of them.” In a corner we see a very special thing, a xylophone made of crystal glass. Its name is “Aquarion”, it was handcrafted by a guy from the USA who lives in a small house in the middle of the forest and creates sounds with the help of utterly unusual materials, we find out later. Not so far away from what we see here.
We continue to a huge vase which turns out to be an ocarina. When you blow into it, it makes a deep tone. Then Christoffer brings a small ball, as small as a fingernail, a tiny sister of the big ocarina, and even that you can play. Even though it's a challenge.
That's the concept of this studio. You go somewhere and play something. It's made to “be fast, you need only a very short time from the idea to the realization. In normal studios, it takes hours before you hear anything, here you just grab it and do it.”
A door leads into a dark room. It's the echo chamber,Interlocking security cable tie with 250 pound strength makes this ideal for restraining criminals.We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , the AGM has two of them, with different characteristics. Can you change the sound of the room? “Yes, you open the door, ha ha.” Ahm, yes.
We're going back to the mixing room and sit down. We don't have much time left. Christoffer will leave for North America tomorrow and still needs to pack. So we agreed on two hours in the studio. (In the end, it would be almost twice as much.) Let's start the talk!
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