There is nothing about Kristoffer Ragnstam’s musical path that could be considered the least bit pedestrian. If Lemony Snickett wrote his biography, it would be called A Series of Unusual Events, and with good reason.
Growing up near Gothenburg, Sweden, Ragnstam switched from soccer to music as a teenager in order to attract girls (okay, so that part is fairly rock and roll boilerplate), choosing drums after listening to Eric Clapton’s Money and Cigarettes, which he calls boring outside of the drum sound. He promised his mother he would take a year’s sabbatical from eating candy in exchange for his first kit.
Dissatisfied with his kit’s construction, he modified it and began making his own drum set, an enterprise that grew into a cottage industry from his mother’s basement. Although Ragnstam had a ready market in the jazz community, where his drums were particularly prized, he abandoned the craft when it took up too much of his time.
Ragnstam’s first band, Blind, was comprised of five members, none of whom could play their instruments. As he learned, he picked up session gigs as a drummer in Gothenburg, where he also began hanging out in studios and picking up stray bits of technical knowledge. Eventually, he assembled a working studio in his home and began making strangely appealing demos with instruments he couldn’t play and sending the results off to a variety of Swedish labels. “I wrote this song for the band on a guitar but they didn’t like it but I liked the song so I tried to do it on my own,” says Ragnstam. “I played a one-string acoustic guitar and put together melodies with a Dictaphone.”
Ragnstam’s demos sparked a bidding war, which he halted by signing with Anderson Records, whose A&R rep was the daughter of Abba’s Benny Andersson. Upon signing, he pleaded with the label to buy him a proper guitar so he could learn to play.
In 2003, Ragnstam wrote, recorded and performed his first album, Panic Ride, which garnered him good reviews and a fair amount of attention for its unusual production techniques. Ragnstam’s fortunes really rose with his production reputation, which earned him studio gigs in Germany and Japan and led to his soundtrack composition work for underground movies, making him a popular entity in those countries.
“They’re big countries, and they have a history of music lovers who are very into music,” notes Ragnstam. “They spend a lot of money for CDs and go to venues and see shows. There are still bands in Germany who sell millions of records. It was a good experience.”
By 2005, Ragnstam had accrued a batch of new songs - much of the new material was showcased at his U.S. debut at New York’s Knitting Factory later in the year - and he called on friends to help him record (Division of Laura Lee’s Per Stalberg, International Noise Conspiracy’s Ludwig Dahlberg and engineer Chris Brown among them). The sessions became Ragnstam’s sophomore album, Sweet Bills, a charming mix of folk, indie pop and hip hop/soul rhythms that sounds like the second coming of Beck via the Beatles.
“This time I had a vision from the first song how it should sound, the whole album,” says Ragnstam. “It was a much more fun process making this album, because I already had a name and it was easier. I grew into my way of being an artist and it took me awhile to be the front and write songs and to be the person that I am right now.”
The range of styles represented on Sweet Bills is broad but certainly not in a way that seems calculated to draw in disparate audiences. Ragnstam reflects his influences rather than regurgitating them. “It felt very organic,” says Ragnstam. “There was no specific ‘Now I should do a funk song or a rock song.’ I wrote songs and sometimes we produced them in some direction, but there were no guiding lines how this album should sound, so it was like a free-your-mind album, actually.”
~ Brian Baker
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KRISTOFFER RAGNSTAM's Sweet Bills is out now on Bluhammock Music.
http://www.bluhammock.com
http://www.myspace.com/ragnstam
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