Stefan Larsson is the musician, composer and academic technology researcher who is constantly looking for new expressions for his inquisitive exploration. 18 years after the first release with A Westside Fabrication, then as a member of the shoegaze band Minxy Soul Models, they resume the collaboration, now with four carefully chiseled compositions under his own name.
Raised on the Swedish west coast, with a global research career in social science technology research, he composes and releases music from time to time in various constellations. In 2022, he released the single Take me Back to Reykjavik. The latest full-length under his own name is The Machinist, which was released in 2016 when Stefan was working as a researcher in Honolulu.
With that said, Stefan Larsson is now releasing four new songs with A West Side Fabrication, two in Swedish and two in English. They are recorded in Studio Folkhemmet in Unnaryd, in the Swedish countryside. All embedded in producer Petter Eriksson’s soundscapes, where musical foundations and singer-songwriter arrangements are coloured by guitars, marimba, bass and piano in a vocal interplay between Stefan and Lisa Lotta Carlsson.
First up was the mildly pulsating “Se dig aldrig om” [Never look back], which with infectious guitar loops tells about change and being able to move on. Each song is visually supported by M Hofverberg’s tungsten-glowing photographs of Berlin’s subway system, except for The Silence in the Lake’s black-feathered rook, which is carefully drawn by artist Fredrik Norén. Thematically, the lyrics are reminders of anything form the power of categories in relation to individuals, how silence can be aggressive, and the reckoning everyone faces as they grow up, both held, uplifted and enveloped by their origins.
