Peder Mannerfelt (Monographic)

The evolutionary progression of electronic music depends a lot on each genre, most of them have resulted in a multitude of subgenres that have enriched a healthy and abundant music scene, this is the best symptom of the musical plurality that exists today, but not all genres age equally well, it is in experimental styles where we find a more remarkable evolution.

Peder Mannerfelt is a contemporary artist who perfectly embodies the new era of avant-garde electronic music, during this last decade has been a great exponent in Swedish musical culture. The Subliminal Kid was his first alias, pseudonym under which he worked with great musicians and bands such as Massive Attack, Delta Funktionen or Gabriel Ananda.

The Subliminal Kid was a project with which Mannerfelt always maintained a connection with different artists, in his releases he used to have big names to version some of his songs or to create them together, as he did with his compatriot Arkus Enochson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=154&v=IAcxzF3w5vI

In 2010, Peder Mannerfelt ventures into another collaborative project, Roll The Dice is a duo he shares with Swedish producer Malcolm Pardon, a well-known Mannerfelt artist. With him published in 2007 Figurehead, however, the style of Roll The Dice has nothing to do with that of this EP, in this project the style drifts towards experimental electronic music and ambient.

Roll The Dice has released several albums and all of them very different. In 2010 they released their first album of the same name, which was very well received. This extensive work was published on the independent American label Digitalis Recordings. A year later they started working with the British label Leaf where they released a couple of albums in 2011 and 2014. In Dust was this first album released on Leaf, expectations for their audience were high, but it was not as shocking as the first album. The tracks were flatter and darker, with a different sound to the previous work.

After working with projects such as The Subliminal Kid and Roll The Dice, Peder Mannerfelt presented a new solo project under his first name. Between 2012 and 2013 he signs a couple of EPs on the London label We Can Elude Control, in 2014 he shares an EP with Pär Gindvik and also debuts with a first album. Lines Describing Circles is this first album released by Mannerfelt alone, this work not only meets the line of previous solo deliveries, in addition to working perfectly as independent pieces even works better as a larger block.

The album was released in vinyl format with 5 tracks per face and was warmly received by its audience and by some important media.

There are circumstances in life that mark our destiny, moments that change the course of your life simply because some person or some fact influences us positively and gives us enough strength to dare to create a new project. Peder Mannerfelt received that little push with Cicci Moon, a Stockholm dj who was a pioneer in this city and founder of DB, a club specializing in drum’n bass. At that time Peder had no interest in music production, he still did not know the great emotional impact that the musical composition could have for him.

In 2014 Mannerfelt founded Peder Mannerfelt Produktion, a record label created as a new medium for his new approach to production, but also as a platform where he can accommodate the work of other artists. That same year the label opens with a first issue of a trilogy: 1, 2 and 3, published between 2014 and 2015.

Peder Mannerfelt is an artist with a multitude of resources and with a great vocation to experiment with sound and get an enormous performance out of elements that for most go quite unnoticed. Archives interieur is a label founded in 2013 by Yves De Mey and Peter Van Hoesen explicitly created to house experimental projects. With this record label, Peder Mannerfelt published in 2015 a very peculiar extensive work called The Swedish Congo Record, this album with 24 tracks is a recreation of a record made by filmmaker Armand Denis recorded in the 30s called The Belgian Congo Records. This album captures sounds of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the tribal music of their tribes, Mannerfelt found a great complexity in the interpretation of this music and decided to recreate the album with current technology. The main idea was to use the original album as a source to capture samples, but this concept was replaced by the recreation of sounds with synthesizers.

A year later, in 2016, Mannerfelt signed a new album, this time on his label. Controlling Body is a really interesting work, in the release the North American singer Glasser collaborates as vocalist, voice that samples and uses interspersed with lines of analog synthesizer and abstract percussion.

In 2018 Peder Mannerfelt publishes in his record label Daily Routine, conceptual album inspired in the day to day in his person as an artist, with the contrast of work at home and away from home with the tours. The album’s 10 tracks range from productions created a decade earlier to new tracks, but the difference of years does not differ with the complex style and asymmetrical design that keeps all his followers fascinating.

In the same year the Berlin label Seilscheibenpfeiler was also born, this label has been modeling the style of its releases expanding its proposal in terms of genres. Techno, acid or tech-house are the styles that appear in the first releases, but with the eighth the thing changes with the Swedish Peder Mannerfelt and with his capacity to elaborate complex structures.

Life Without Friction is this eighth reference from the German label Seilscheibenpfeiler with which Peder Mannerfelt brings a more experimental concept to the project.

Peder Mannerfelt’s discography dates back more than a decade. He first began publishing as The Subliminal Kid, also forms Roll The Dice with Malcolm Pardon, among other things also helps produce two acclaimed albums by Swedish artists Fever Ray, and gained recognition under his first name with a very original and daring style.