Neon Heart: An Interview With Magnus Nordén
Stockholm, Sweden’s experimental psych prog rockers Neon Heart have profoundly captured the very essence of musical and vocal creativity within me, demonstrating precisely how a band can speak directly to one’s heart, mind, and soul. Their unique sound evokes a rare sense of inner peace and joy, a profound connection that transcends mere sonic experience and truly makes one feel good inside. Each album opens out like a carefully crafted story, whispered rather than shouted, yet profoundly impactful. These four gentlemen pour their passion into every note, understanding the potential for each chord and rhythm.
I’ve been in touch with Magnus Nordén (the band’s drummer, who also meticulously organises sessions, handles recordings, and mixes their evocative sound) for quite a while now and I thought it was time to have an insightful conversation, a genuine exploration of their artistic process. This was also further enriched by the thoughtful contributions of singer-songwriter and bass player Johnny Karlsson Kern. Please read in praise of exploration and dissemination.
Hello, Magnus. For those who are new to Neon Heart’s music, please tell us how everything started and what your main goals were, both as a band and as musicians?
Hi Mimmo, and thanks for doing this interview with us. Neon Heart was started by me in 2006, so we are celebrating our 20th this year! I played in a couple of new wave bands in Uppsala in the 1980s and did some studio drumming, mostly for friends. Then, in 1986, I gave up music altogether, moved cities and dedicated my time to writing novels.
In the 1990s, when I was living in London, I started making songs on my computer. When we moved back to Stockholm in 1999, I hadn’t touched a drumstick for 13 years. But I accidentally bought a small drumkit from a stranger I met in a restaurant, and suddenly I was drumming with other musicians again. I played in a couple of bands, but it wasn’t much fun. I realised I wanted to play beat-based music without a traditional verse-refrain structure. In a band without star performers, where all members were equally important.
I have always been a huge fan of Miles Davis’s electric albums – the mix of acoustic (jazz) and electric (rock) instruments. So, I wanted the band to have at least one sax or trumpet player. Neon Heart has had various constellations over the years, but it started in late 2006, when I brought together a quintet with bass, saxophone, bass clarinet, keyboards, and me on drums. The keyboardist was Ben Kenward, who left the band just before we started recording but rejoined us about a year ago when Daniel left. It was Ben who came up with our band name, Neon Heart.
The band existed in this setting for almost ten years. We played live around Stockholm and met for rehearsals once a week. Around 2015, the bass player quit for health reasons, so I asked Johnny to join us. We had played together briefly in a provisional setting back in the early 2000s. But he had left before Neon Heart was formed. The musical vision was to make music without any preconceived songs, without playing the same song twice. Everything was to be completely improvised, with total musical freedom of expression.
Our original bassist was very good, but he wasn’t comfortable with improvising. With Johnny on bass, improvisation could suddenly be totally free. It was like everything opened up. This was fun and liberating, but also problematic. A precondition for our total improvisation was that everyone in the band listened, and no one hogged all the space. It took some reshuffling before we could work comfortably with each other in this way. The penultimate piece in the puzzle was Daniel, who replaced Anders Blomkvist on sax.
How did you guys meet? You knew each other from previous band’s experiences?
There’s this great network in Stockholm of improvising musicians called the Great Learning Orchestra (GLO). I was invited to it in 2014 and participated in their concerts and events for a while, culminating in a project led by JG Thirlwell (Foetus) in 2017. I obviously met a lot of musicians in GLO. When Neon Heart was in flux, I asked Petter, Daniel and Björn, who were all in GLO, if they would like to join Neon Heart. Björn was first. By then, I had already started recording our rehearsals. We made the album Trio since we were only three in the band at the time – Johnny, Björn and me. But we were aiming to be a quintet again.
whatever happens musically is influenced by everyone in the band…
What is the musical background of Neon Heart and how much of each member’s musical influences is brought inside the band?
Everyone in Neon Heart has some kind of background in new wave/post-punk/post-rock. Apart from Daniel, who is more rooted in jazz, freeform improv, and perhaps electronica. As we have no songs as such and always start from scratch, with a clean slate, whatever happens musically is influenced by everyone in the band. It is vital that everyone’s contribution should be welcomed, and that no one obstructs or tries to control anyone else.
Petter contributes a kind of trippy, electronica-ish vibe with his viola and FX-chain. At times, he steps forward in the music, claiming space, almost soloing. Those moments can be magic. Other times, he blends in, energising, driving things. He is a bass player originally, and as a drummer, I do love a good bassist. Until he joined, it had never occurred to me that a viola or violin could be so crucial. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of modern pop and rock and all its subgenres. This is actually true for Johnny and Ben, too.
Speaking of whom, I am amazed at how seamlessly Johnny’s bass gels with my drums. It has happened more than once – live of course – that we both turn a song around on a dime and veer off in a new direction. It’s uncanny. Is it telepathy? It feels like it. Johnny’s versatile bass spans from fast, light and furious, to slow, heavy and dubby. And his improvised singing. How he does it while improvising on bass is beyond me. When he starts singing, it’s like everyone in the band listens up. We all kind of get out of his way.
Björn is a wild guitarist. He was a founding member of the Swedish cult band Commando M Pigg so he is very firmly embedded in that tradition but also composes classical, orchestral music. He brings a kind of cerebral, intellectual sensibility to the band. He is also very emotional and often seems to immerse himself completely in the squealing, distorted guitar lines with shut eyes, intensely concentrating on whatever the band is doing. His playing ranges from very aggressive to waxing lyrical. He immediately convinced me that Neon Heart absolutely needs a guitarist like him.
Ben is the oldest and newest member of the band. He is extremely empathic and reacts to everything around him. He has a musical playfulness and a way of making everyone else sound better. He can also be way out, kind of freaky, on his keyboard, adding a fresh strangeness. Since he joined and Daniel left, our music has become a bit harder. The jazzy vibe is morphing into a ‘spacier’, more kraut territory of trance and beats. Ben is leading us down a new path. It’s going to be exciting to release our first album with him.
As for myself, my drumming is always improvised. I never come to a rehearsal thinking: today I will play this pattern, and then that. But I may set out to play at the absolute top of my tempo range or use strange time signatures. But I don’t have fixed patterns that I consciously pull out of my toolbox, everything depends on what everybody else is doing. The most beautiful feeling is when I can sit back and listen to what we are playing in the studio, as if I wasn’t actually a participant, but a listener. When this happens, it’s a powerful feeling of losing myself in the totality of what we are doing. It is an out-of-body experience. I also like to try and not always play exactly the same way, and to challenge myself to do stuff that I am not completely comfortable with. Getting out of my comfort zone. In short, everyone contributes, that is the basis of the whole thing for Neon Heart.
I believe each one of you has a day-to-day job and are family men too. When do you guys find the time to get together to play/rehearse?
Yes, we all have other jobs. Petter and Björn are architects. Johnny works at a museum. Daniel teaches sax and flute. Ben is a researcher and scholar. And I am an arts translator. We rehearse every Wednesday, but not everyone can participate every time, so we practise playing in various configurations, from all five down to only two. I am trying to get them to try rehearsing without me, but it hasn’t happened yet. About twice or three times a month, we manage all five of us meeting up.
When you go into the recording studio, do you have in mind which direction you want the session to go, or do you just improvise and play free form?
Everything we do is improvised. It happens that we deliberately try out various approaches during rehearsals, which are usually not recorded. Someone might suggest we try to end songs with silence, or that no more than four of us play at the same time. Things like that. But when we record, anything goes.
We never structure things when recording. We’ve discussed ideas, like using graphic notation or even rudimentary song structures. These suggestions have always been rejected, though we try to agree on everything, so if one of us is really against something, it probably won’t happen. Also, we don’t record in a studio. Our recordings are from our rehearsals, and we are open to whatever happens there.
For a while, it was just Johnny and me in the band. I had a small Zoom field recorder, which I used for documenting my gigs, then things spiralled. I got passionate about microphones and mixing and bought a lot of mics and equipment. I started recording all our rehearsals over periods of a year or so. As I remember, Daniel suggested we do this as a way of making the rehearsals more meaningful than mere jam sessions.
Everything we do is improvised…
Are all the albums recorded in the same way, or it changes according to the mood/atmosphere which is created as you go along playing?
Our basic approach is always the same as I just described. But moods and atmospheres obviously vary. Also, who participates in a particular session makes a big mark on it. For instance, when only four of us are present, the result can sound very different. When we are all five, the mood tends to be more crucial. Our improvisations often begin with the others making noises and playing around on their instruments. After a little while, I tend to start a tempo and a beat, stabilising the whole improvisation into a song. But I have also started to wait a bit longer to see if somebody else sets a tempo and a beat.
I put a lot of work into mixing and producing our albums, taking out or moving things around, whatever is needed to enhance what we recorded. It’s like an excavation: finding really great moments and bringing them to the surface. But I never add anything that is not already there. Everything you hear on our albums happened in one session, live, in the studio. I work every day on mixing, producing and honing. For Gå på tå I radically changed my mixing approach. I have an idea about how it should sound, and the others give me feedback too, and I take that on board.
With the music comes the voice of bass player Johnny Karlsson Kern, which brings out an element of hypnotic and transcendental atmosphere. You can feel the warmth in his voice, which is quasi-near to spoken words rather than normal singing. From what kind of situations do the songs come from? Does he actually bring in lyrics or just improvise them according to the music? Do they have important meanings? Are they a reflection of ‘Nordic Noir’?
Johnny Karlsson Kern: My singing is always improvised. I usually start singing when I get a feeling of something to say and find an opening in the music. Perhaps a word appears in my mind, which I can start from. Then the words start coming, sometimes it is almost like a story, sometimes there is only a smattering of words. Sometimes what I sing is connected to what I play on the bass and follows that. Sometimes it soars off, and my singing is completely independent from what I am playing on the bass, so I don’t have to think of whatever my fingers are doing. I try to challenge myself all the time, find new ways of singing. Mostly, I don’t remember whatever it was that I sang about, so you could say that it happens in a trancelike state.
On a separate conversation regarding the release of your new album Gå på tå (Walking On Tip Toe), you told me that 10 songs were chosen out of 75 recorded during various sessions. Who made the choice of the songs to be included on the album?
The exact process for Gå på tå (and the previous albums) was this: I recorded all rehearsals, regardless of participants, and then focused on rehearsals where all five of us participated. Going through the sessions, I selected the ones that seemed promising and mixed them, made them into songs and gave them names.
I then sent some 75 songs to the rest of the band for evaluation. Daniel opted out of this process for Gå på tå, since he had already left and was cool with leaving it to us. We rated each song and basically agreed on a pool of some 25 potential album tracks. Since I have so much influence over recording, mixing and producing etc, I took a step back. Björn and Petter curated the final selection, ran it past me and Johnny, and sequenced the tracks for the album.
What’s behind the title of the album? Are the lyrics connected? Is there a song that defines the whole of the album?
Our albums are mostly named after one of the songs. It’s not always easy to come to a unanimous decision. Naming the album after one of its song titles is an easy way out, it’s just a matter of finding the one that feels like it encapsulates all of the songs.
It feels like Gå på tå works for this release. It means ‘tiptoeing’, and that’s what we are doing musically, in a way, trying things out, experimenting, listening. The opposite of rushing ahead blindly.
Naming the album after one of its song titles is an easy way out, it’s just a matter of finding the one that feels like it encapsulates all of the songs…
I understand that, apart from drumming for the band, you take care of everything from recording to mixing, etc. Is it hard work?
I record, mix and produce our music. It is indeed a lot of more or less daily work. But it’s very fulfilling.
At the end of your last sessions, Daniel Borgegård Älgå (saxophone, flute, synths), for distance reasons had to leave the band. How will this move affect your future music? Will your new album be played using the same approach as your 2019 album Trio, or will you find a new saxophonist?
My original vision for Neon Heart included some kind of brass or woodwind instrument. And guitar, strings and vocals were not on the agenda. Today, I can’t imagine Neon Heart without them. I can see Neon Heart having a sax, flute or trumpet in the future. But it’s hard enough improvising with five players. Four is easier, and three is a cinch. But beyond five, it gets tricky. Hopefully, we’ll be releasing an album with the new setting around the end of the year. We already have a lot of recordings with the current lineup.
To conclude, I would like to ask about your artwork, which are designed by Alexandra Kern (Johnny’s wife). Does she design them as an expression delivered from the music, or is thereno connection?
Alexandra hasn’t created works specifically for our albums but generously lets us choose from existing pieces. For the Temporaria album, she provided the artwork and did the layout. Agnes Kern made bespoke cover art for our earliest albums. Starting with Livet/Ytan, the album design has been by the graphic designer Tomas Jönsson, based on Alexandra’s paintings. Tomas designed the logo and font for our last three albums. We are greatly indebted to Alexandra and Tomas for our graphic identity.
Label: Independent
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Interviewed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
