Ulf Ljusberg
I like the close acoustic feeling when I listen to Ulf Ljusberg. My thoughts wander of to a small jazz or blues club, where people in a relaxed way are sitting down, sipping their beer, with their attention on Ulf and his collegues performing on stage. It feels familiar in a way.
It’s hard to directly put Ulf in a single genre. I would say that the base is the blues that often marries folk music in the songs, but there is more than that. There is a nice jazzy playfulness, which surprises me and catches my attention, and an experimention with rhythms that I seldom hear with other artists. Maybe it’s this last thing what makes me sense the uniqueness in Ulf’s music. That he can take an apparently common style and make something new out of it, with a different accent.
Ulf has released a number of EP:s, some of them under the name “Something From a Forest”, but since 2005 in his own name. Read an interview with Ulf on It’s a Trap.
On Ulf’s Last.fm page you can listen more and download songs. You can also visit his Myspace page.
Here’s three songs to enjoy:
People have created fantastic film music throughout the years. I think it’s strange that there’s so few collaborations between musicians/artists and movie creators. A director I spoke with the other day explained to me that he always set aside a rather large sum of money for the music of the movie. But when the movie project takes longer time than expected and other events, unaccounted for, need to be taken care of, this sum of money is used, and compromises have to be done.
As a first project at DI we were assigned to write music for four short films. Every team has their own movie that is supposed to work both as a story that stands for itself and also in a context together with the other three movies. All four films are spun around the same central event which binds the movies together, but from the different perspectives of four people and their unique experience of the situation. It has been a very interesting and fun process to be a part of. My first meeting with the short film I was to compose to, was at a spotting session where I, together with the director, the producer and the others, watched a raw cut of the film where we started discussing how, when and what function the music should have in the movie. When should the music start/end? What’s the emotional style? What’s the musical style, and so on?
Here’s a band that I think is simply irresistable. Punk rock, Balkan music, and well yes, other kinds of folk music too, is it possible to mix that? Yes, obviously!
Here’s some music that hopefully puts you in a good mood. Don’t get fool by the name Heart-Sick Groans, because the ambience is just opposite of what could be expected. Fun.
Even though I’m an old farm boy, she took my country virginity and gave me…a pair of Durango boots!
