Postiljonen was formed by the two Swedes Joel Nyström Holm and Daniel Sjörs and the Norwegian Mia Bøe. They found each other as late as in August this year, which is quite remarkable as they have already created a style and a feeling in the music that sounds characteristic.

When I asked them about the band name (Postiljonen: the postillion, the mail-coach driver) they told me:

A feeling came over all of us when we were backpacking in the nordic mountains. Freedom, skies, Winter, Spring, fairy-tales, thunder, vast mountains, hazard games, humanity, love, memories, dreams, happiness, sorrow and escape.
We want to be messengers.

And I can clearly imagine that the music was inspired by this tour up in the northern wide landscapes. The music feels grand, dreamy, warm and a little like laying in the grass studying the clouds passing by slowly up in the sky, in a pause from the hectic daily life. Just close your eyes and let yourself be enshrouded by the soft blankets of sound and beautiful interwoven melodies and I’m sure you’ll find your own associations.

You can listen to more songs on their Soundcloud page and you can find the band on their blog or on Facebook.

På väg tillsammans

http://vimeo.com/31265643

I’ll continue today with more instrumental music, but of a different character, with Broken Boys’ new album “Heat and White”. Here it’s about dub, electronica, samples and a rather dark, urban atmosphere.

The album gives an impression of being carefully crafted and feels like an art collage of music interwoven into a whole. A strong debut from the Malmö band where Olof Persson tells us about the band name that he once saw it sprayed over a wall in Mocambique and felt that it went well with their music as being tough and sad at the same time.

Broken Boys have made the album available on their Bandcamp page, where you can listen and download it for free. You’ can also find the band on Spotify and on Facebook.

A C# (E F#)

Support the artist: Buy “Heat and White” on iTunes

Conny Olivetti is a productive artist. In April we could listen to the album “Strategems”, which I wrote about, and now in November he released his next thematic album, “Edgeland”.

As before it’s about instrumental electronica, ambient but yet containing melodic parts that make me think of Jarré and Vangelis. He brings us to “Edgeland”, which for me becomes a journey into the future and away to a city on the edge of the civilization. Like science fiction in other words, and like all good SF, it also hints at the world we’re living in.

So the music seemlessly takes me through this somewhat cold and hard city, a city full of details, voices and activities. And at the same time a glimpse of eternity.

Conny Olivetti is an alter ego for Leif Franzén, and since I was curious about the origins of the artist name, I asked him about it:

Conny Olivetti was born in 1980 when I, at fRa-film, started to create music for our own film productions. And in order to make the movie credits not too monotone we invented Conny Olivetti as responsible for the music production. Conny is my second name, and our scripts were written on an Olivetti typewriter.

The only incident with the name happened around 1989 when I, during a film editing break at the local Medieverkstan in Västerås, went to buy some food at the pizzeria nearby. The weeks before there had been some kind of nightlife article in the local newspaper, where I had said my name was Conny Olivetti. The pizza baker recognized me from the article and started to ask disturbing questions about my family and so on.

He’s been around since then and it seems he will continue with that

As with all his album releases, “Edgeland” is available for free download and streaming on his Bandcamp page. You can find Conny on his site or on Facebook. He’s already working with his next album, which has the working title “Connections”.

Insights From the Past

Antonia Vai is a singer/songwriter from Stockholm who’s working now on her first full length album. But there are a bunch of  songs to listen to already now; songs recorded mainly by herself and which she publish on her pages in a steady stream.

The influences seem to come from a number of sources, but the most obvious vibe is a dramatic feeling in many songs in the direction of Björk, without exactly sounding like Björk. Mix that with a lot of soul vibes, closer to Erykah Badu, as Antonia describes it herself. I also sense inspiration from folk music; from the latin world, from the US, and some song from the Swedish mellow folk tradition.

You can listen to the songs on her site or on her Facebook page. She also has a frequently updated Youtube channel. Here are two songs:

Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite
Russian Roulette

If the page here on Meadowmusic seems extra slow today, don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with your Internet connection or our web server, the reason is that I’m presenting a song by Nomy today.

The last time we did that all our band width limits were more or less crushed after a while and in the end I had to remove the mp3 file. The song was  “Cocaine”, a song that exploded over the net, not because of our post, that was just a drop in the oceans, but because of Nomy himself.

Nomy, or Patrick Marquardt which is his real name, is something of a net phenomenon among DIY-artists. I have followed him since 2007 when he participated in a music community called Allears.se, a site created by Sony where people could listen to and review music. It was also populated by a few A&R people from major labels who also reviewed songs in the hunt for the next hit artist. While many listeners celebrated Nomy’s songs he got mostly negative reviews from these “pro’s” and was more or less neglected by them.

It’s a mystery to me how they could miss this penalty shot in front of a wide open goal, but for Nomy it didn’t matter in the end, as he was fully capable of making it on his own. He had a big following already then, and this following grew stronger and stronger, I’d say explosively. To give you an idea about this we can look at what happened after he released his songs on Spotify in the autumn in 2009: In October the same year he had 100 000 plays reported and less than half a year later 8 million plays had been registered and he was on the top ten list of the worlds most popular artists on Spotify.

That’s not too bad from an artist that records his songs in his home studio and where the traditional media like TV, radio and newspapers haven’t been involved at all in the process, well not even music blogs. Most of it happened by word of mouth, of course emphasized by the Internet.

It’s a mistake to believe that this just happened by itself, like some rare strike of luck; behind this success of spreading his music is 15 years of hard work, a big productivity, an ability to satisfy the fans in the right way by giving away music, communicating, showing what he’s working with, being himself, and of course fantastic music.

You can recognize his special style of furious Nomy-rock on his albums, his musical trademark, but still he dares to do whatever he wants to do, whatever he is inspired to do at the moment and he refuses to fall into the predictability-trap; he can produce songs in Swedish, he can do country inspired songs, electronica or whatever he feels like.

Well, this became more of a tribute post about Nomy, which I think he definitely deserves, but of course, there’s a song also, “A Dream For the Weaker”, which was released in September. In the beginning of the year the energized “By the Edge of God” album was released and more are on it’s way pretty soon. You can keep track of this on Nomy’s site and on Facebook. Listen on Spotify and other streaming services.

Right, I mustn’t forget to comment on the artist name, where it comes from. Nomy explains:

Mix Moby and Bono and you get something that’s like a bitter after-taste J Nomy.

A Dream For the Weaker

Support the artist: Buy Nomy’s music – on iTunes – on Amazon