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

One could guess from the band name that Yngling (Youngster) is a young band, a band name they explain with:

A youngster is someone you can both love and hate. And contrasts are what our music are made of. And then we like boats too.

I wouldn’t be able to guess that they were youngsters from listening to the music, though; it’s an instrumental thematic rock, with progressive vibes, ambience and like they say, contrasts where they build up the songs beautifully. And if they hadn’t written anything about it, I would have said something about the guitar layers too. But there aren’t any guitars at all. Good music in any case.

They recently released their debut album which you can listen to on Spotify or on Bandcamp. You can also find Yngling on Facebook.

Snowglobe

Support the artist: Buy “Yngling” – on iTunes – on Amazon

Today, two days after the horrible events in Norway, it’s hard to do anything without being reminded of what happened. And words are not enough, they don’t help. Maybe music can help us deal with it as a refuge for our thoughts and feelings. I, for one, like to listen to music without words in situations like this.

Here are a couple of tracks from “Ack du arma barn”, a new album with Släktträff.

Ack du arma barn
Sparka grus

Richard Janson lets us in to view some of his musical creativity. He’s a bass player who also produces music in varying genres. Often it’s about instrumental tracks, which sometimes makes me think about film music. Here below you’ll find a couple of songs and if you’d like to listen to more songs you can visit Richard on Myspace.

Schhhh
Memories

Fredrik Jonasson has activated his side project Silencio Stampa again and a couple of days ago he released “The Red Album”.

It’s about instrumental electronica and first of all I get retro vibes from the analogue synths and drum machines of the eighties and sometimes even from further back from  Vangelis and his friends during the seventies. Maybe then not so much from the bombastic varieties, but rather from the ambience building kind, with sweeping, beautiful melodies and figures that catch the listener.

A beautifully built album you can listen to by checking out Silencio Stampa’s site. Here’s the opener “The Red Pony”:

The Red Pony