Back and seemingly in full bloom, Olof Dreijer is quietly building a second chapter to his acclaimed success as one half of cult Swedish synth-pop duo The Knife.
After years spent producing for others - including sibling Karin's solo project Fever Ray - as well as delivering remixes for Björk & Rosalia, Model/Actriz and Röyksopp & Robyn, a return to the spotlight was far from guaranteed.
Thankfully, curiosity got the better of him. The 2023 EP Rosa Rugosa flicked the ignition while successive releases forged anticipation for something bigger.
That something is his debut LP Loud Bloom, featuring vocal collaborations from Sudan, South Africa and Colombia. Typically unconventional, the album sees Dreijer balance his taste for angular techno with a selection of ambient-leaning tracks.
We caught up with Dreijer to discuss the making of Loud Bloom and how those softer sounds mark a shift from his work with The Knife.
After The Knife wrapped in 2014, you began collaborating more with other artists, including remix work for the likes of Björk. What did you take from those early projects?
“After The Knife, I started focusing on production and collaborating with other artists, but I’d already started that process in 2011 after playing in Tunisian composer Houwaida Hedfi’s band. We started touring in 2015 and I really enjoyed that.
“The great thing about the Björk & Rosalía remix is that it allowed me to leave my own mind, go into another mode and try something different. The vocal melody in that song was very musical and almost a bit cheesy, which is not so common in techno, but it created a nice contrast from what I’d done before and pushed me forward in a nice way.”
At what point did you feel it was time to start making music under your own name as a solo artist?
“I’d been focusing on producing other artists, but also doing some teaching and coaching. I started running my own music school for migrants in Berlin and did that for almost 10 years - I don't know why, but I started to miss making music more and more. I thought, ‘Let’s just give it a go,’ and after a while I guess I became more comfortable with focusing on my own thing again.
“I hadn't planned to make an album, but started releasing tracks on other labels and that slowly brought my focus back. Eventually, I thought it would be nice to compile some of them and also make some new tracks to give more feeling to this next chapter of my life.”
Did you repurpose some of the singles you’d already released to fit the new songs you were writing?
“I made a new version of Plastic Camellia because I was in the process of creating live versions for a show and felt this track could give some new life to the album. The newer tracks I added also hinted at a slightly different direction. Now, when I focus on my live shows, it feels like I'm taking another step towards coming back to techno while bringing all of this melodic material with me.”
There's obviously a certain freedom that comes with working on your own. Is that negated by the uncertainty of not having someone there to bounce ideas off, like you had with Karin Dreijer?
“When I work with somebody else I try to find a common ground with that person. On my own, it's really just about finding out what’s going on in my head, which is totally different, but I'm surprised at how much I enjoy working on my own these days. I have lots of ideas and I'm in a good flow at the moment.
”I’m very grateful for the space I’ve been able to create whereby I'm basically able to do whatever I want. I've always had that freedom, but with the help of collaborators like Diva Cruz or Toya Delazy, I’m able to move in an even more exciting direction and extend into all different paths.”
How has your solo career changed your approach to the technologies you use or how you might originate a track?
“When I work with other artists they will often have an idea that I try to fulfil or fully realise, but the technical process is fairly similar. When I started coming back to making my own music, I was in a happy place and everything felt quite celebratory, so I was capturing that state of mind and trying to squeeze more fun, colour and drama into dance music that can often sound a little bit grey.”
As mentioned, your solo LP, Loud Bloom, comes across as being a more joyful experience. Is it less based on the political ideologies that you and Karin shared as The Knife?
“There are a lot of reasons behind that. The Knife was often perceived as being a bit mysterious and dark when we were actually just trying to be creative. I later understood that for some people that sense of mystery might often feel a bit exclusionary, but that was never really our intention. These days, even though the music is techno and electronic, I’m trying to create a warmer and more inviting vibe that will appeal to more kinds of people.”
Do you have a home studio?
“I have a studio just outside of my home and the main change is that when we started The Knife it was important that the gear was very cheap and accessible. In 1999, we used software like Reason and Fruity Loops, then after a few years we bought a Roland SH-101, but that was it, basically. We did have a Novation DrumStation, which is like a cheap rack unit, and I still use that if I want those types of sounds.”
When did you start dabbling in modular?
“I got some Eurorack stuff when I started my Oni Ayhun project in 2007, but when I started to make my own music again around 2020 I got more into buying expensive polyphonic analogue synthesisers. I was a bit late getting into those technologies, but whereas I used to think the sounds they created were a bit boring, I learned later how to make them exciting.”
Is technology a creative driving force for pre-existing ideas or just a tool?
“Usually, the ideas are already there. I don't use all of these popular generative devices, I play everything with my hands or drumsticks and the ideas usually appear in my head at night-time - so I often have a lot of weird voice memos waiting for me when I wake up in the morning. When I come to the studio, it’s like ‘How the fuck do I interpret these?’ They don't make any sense and many times those ideas are too crazy to work for functional dance music.
“I don’t usually have ideas about arrangements or concepts, I find it more interesting to just play instruments and create different types of grooves where the human aspect meets electronic sounds in a way that creates a contrast. What I do is very much focused on details like melody and groove, and then the arrangement comes to life when I perform live in the studio using Ableton Live.”
What role did your collaboration with Suelem de Oliveira de Silva play in shaping the aesthetic identity of the LP?
“That came at the end, after I’d finished the music, and has become a bigger part of what I do these days. I’m so grateful for that because I’ve never really felt that somebody could take my music or who I am as a person and bring it to another level. I do the artwork for the album using my own paintings and she does press photos, styling, the concept and all the music videos.”
You mentioned Ableton. Have you been using that since the early 2000s?
“I started using Ableton around 2005. Karin and I made Silent Shout towards 2006 and then I moved to Berlin and started making solo music, but I couldn't do what I do without Ableton because if you have 100 ideas you can use all of them. Obviously, not all of them will make it onto a track, but you don't have to think about a concept or the arrangement, you can just display everything in Clip View and play and perform the clips yourself live.”
You once said that you found sequencers to be boring and inhuman, and that you prefer to create sounds from scratch. Presumably, your modular setup allows you to do just that?
“Modular allows me to do whatever I want, so it's very freeing and that enables me to do things that are more unpredictable and organic. I like to use a few older synthesisers from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with the help of modular gear I can bring some modern life to the way they behave in a very exciting way.
“I'm very particular about envelopes because they’re usually what create the groove or dictate how a sound is performed. For example, I love the oscillator in the Korg Mono/Poly, but I don’t find the filter and envelopes to be very exciting, so maybe I’ll use the Oberheim SEM module as the filter or the envelopes will come from a more modern but common Eurorack module like Make Noise MATHS. It's tedious work, but it’s also fun.”
You brought three vocalists into the project and they have very different ethnicities. To what extent were those choices about giving an opportunity to underrepresented voices, as opposed to trying to infuse different sonic identities?
“I really didn’t plan it; it was just because I love their vocals. I’d been playing mash-ups of Toya Delazy’s stuff in my DJ sets for a while, and she wrote to me two months before the album deadline asking if we could do something. At first, I really didn't think I’d have the time, but she’s an amazing performer: I love her work and so I thought it would be a great opportunity.
“I went to London and we did the vocal take in a day. She has a great Zulu rap language with so many sounds that I'm not used to and her lyrical content about regaining power over how you're perceived in society is really strong. The Diva Cruz project also came about in a similar way – she’d been working as a timbalist all of her life and wanted help making beats for her first time singing or rapping.”
Did you create those tracks with their performance style in mind?
“It was kind of tricky because I wanted their vocals to have enough space for expression, but at the same time I wanted the music to have its own character without overtaking their contributions. With the MaMan track, Echoed Dafnino, I realised later that the bass line has a lot to do with the reggae I grew up listening to. A melodic bass line really helps the vocal and I always have the vocal on when I play whatever instruments are around it, so there was some adaptation for sure.”
Towards the end of the LP, there are a collection of ambient-sounding instrumentals. We understand they came about when you were looking for ways to combine synthetic and natural sounds?
“It was more about trying to make new sounds that are perceived as being between what is considered natural and electronic. For example, the track Lantanda is actually a wavetable synthesiser made to sound like a string instrument.
“People often say that I use steel drum sounds, but they’re often synthesisers trying to sound like steel drums or if I record my percussion I’ll usually put it through an electronic device so that it doesn't really sound acoustic anymore.
“The ambient stuff on the album was based on early improvisations I did at the beginning of making these tracks. Those improvisations also led to a lot of the melodic material that you hear on the club tracks, many of which are based on little microtonal explorations.
“It’s funny because during the 10-15 years that I wasn't making my own music, I was always fiddling around with making my own microtonal scales. With Loud Bloom, I just tried to come back to standard equal temperament, but there was still some microtonal stuff left over from those homemade scales.”
You mentioned how you established a music school in Berlin for refugees. Is that ongoing?
“I started that around 2011 after going to a camp. It was a special event where for a few years they’d been setting up circus tents in a big public square in Berlin. Many of the musicians were activists from West Africa and that did something positive for the whole city.”
“I went there to see if they needed any help, thinking that they might like me to cook or do something quite simple and practical, but they actually said, ‘What's your skill? We need a band to communicate our message’, so with the help of friends and professional music teachers we coordinated a space for people to rehearse and take lessons in various instruments.”
Do you still play a day-to-day role in that project?
“It ran for many years and I was teaching at the beginning, but then I became more of a sound technician when we started doing gigs. Later on, I moved to Sweden and worked at another music school that was set up to teach music production and classes for migrants. I loved doing that too.”
Do you feel you’ve made peace with letting politics live outside of your music now, and where does a more contemporary debate like AI fit into your thinking?
“The main difference is that, these days, I do the political or activist work in my private life and don't feel the need to push it into the music as much as I used to. What I do now is not as politically driven and the choices I make are more intuitive and organic; I'm much more relaxed with everything.
“I can't say that I know enough about subjects like AI, but I think the main problem is the people who are programming it. I myself use AI-based acapella extractors in my DJ sets, and it's amazing to be able to extract old or rough tracks and use them to create a vibe, but in my general music-making, I don't really use any AI tools.
“I'm not too worried about AI taking over music, because there's already so much boring music around that the difference wouldn’t be that big, but it's very difficult to discuss because we’re still very early in the technology.”
Olof Dreijer’s debut solo LP, Loud Bloom, is out now via dh2.
