“I have often been asked about where I feel my music belongs,” Henrik Lindstrand says recently over Zoom, speaking from his studio, “and I'm sure a lot of artists have the same idea, that they are unique and that there is nothing like their (own) genre. And that is not what I would like to say,” he adds with a smile. Lindstrand, a Swedish musician and composer, has a broad portfolio that touches on multiple genres of music: he’s a veteran of the popular Danish band Kashmir, has written a number of soundtracks, and has released several of his own albums. Through this, he has one constant idea.

“What I think it is,” he explains, “is storytelling, trying to communicate without words… emotions in one way or another, and I never think where it belongs.” Lindstrand’s latest communication is the album Klangland, out March 10 on the One Little Independent label. The album is a set of miniature mood-pieces, softly etched statements capturing the emotion of both internal and external landscapes. Lindstrand is featured prominently at the piano, but in a departure from his recent trilogy of solo piano records—Leken (Lime Tree Beach Recordings), Nattresan, and Nordhem (both on One Little Independent)—the new album pairs the composer with strings conducted by Robert Ames.

The Sounds of Klangland

On Klangland, the strings often support the piano, adding a creamy and dreamy sonic bed and deep, sustaining tones. But they are also often the main voice. The album fades in with some sonic crackling and the gentle, limpid strings introduce the contemplative melody of “Jord”— it’s halfway through before Lindstrand responds with his own plaintive voicing, the piano soft and mellow against the richness of the strings. The piece introduces the mood and sound of the album (“Klang” means “sound”), the former a kind of cinematic stillness in which complex feelings expand, the latter a specific and expressive palette of sounds and timbres.

These moods and sounds are intertwined, the one shaping the other and vice versa. This is Lindstrand’s design, and the result of exploration and experimentation. “I tried all sorts of stuff,” he says, “church organ and synthesizers and woodwinds and percussive details, but somehow the strings, together with piano, I ended up just falling in love with that and seeing that as the concept for the album.

“I made a lot of different experiments on previous three albums,” he adds, “how to prepare the piano with different fabrics and other materials… there are some examples that are a bit more extreme.” But for Klangland, Lindstrand wanted to “take a step back, try to create something that was a little bit cleaner. To me, it was creating [an] intimate and personal sound.” That is the sound that connects to mood and expression, which touches on music’s uncanny power to bring together seemingly conflicting feelings, like an aching solace, a comforting desolation. Lindstrand captures this on pieces like “Tuvstarr,” one that he singles out in particular. It concentrates the album’s concepts and means, strings and piano in dialogue, a plaintive cello line carrying out into space, Lindstrand’s piano restating the music in the simplest way.

That piece also was atypical to the way Lindstrand composed the music. He thinks of it as “one of the more abstract pieces, where I started out building a soundscape around it and then improvised of lot to find this theme.” Still, it fits organically into the rest of Klangland, which is not just a collection of short pieces, but an album in the true, old-fashioned sense, a self-contained collection of tracks that belong to the same world.

Klangland, The Album

In the age of digital music and streaming, it can be a challenge to put out a recording that makes sense as an album. Asked about his view of what defines an album, Lindstrand responds, “I think it's a good question. I actually made what I thought was a complete album, and when I returned to it after some vacation it just didn’t feel right, so I scrapped all of it and started over again. It was quite discouraging!” It was the right decision, though, as it produced Klangland, which satisfied Lindstrand’s idea of an album; “I love the album format and whenever I begin, even though I compose one piece at a time, I think of it as a work in a whole (larger) piece. When I have all the material, I love sitting trying to sequence out which songs will fit together. I can't say that I had the whole picture of the entire album when I started, you go brick by brick, note by note building what you hope will be complete somehow.”

With the care and thought Lindstrand took with basic sound, and his desire to communicate and narrate experiences, the results are complete. Details in the sonic touches and the themes in pieces like “Leva” and “CPH-ARN” recall memories of Ennio Morricone, while “Millimeter” could be an overture or a coda, setting the stage and following a denouement. This narrative sense, refracted through his vision of colors and timbres and how an album fits together, is perhaps Lindstrand’s personal, essential genre and style.

He goes back to the music that has brought him to this point. “I have always embraced so many genres,” he says. “I played classical piano until I was 12, I started to play in a rock band when I was 14, and then in my late teenage years I was obsessed with jazz. I think music is music,” he goes on, and suggests that Klangland will remind some listeners “of something from the classical repertoire, others will think more of folk music, perhaps Scandinavian folk music, or it might have some notes of jazz here and there and, and pop melodies as well. But I try not to intellectualize it too much,” he adds, “and just try to find out what I have to say.”

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