There is a particular kind of music that happens when two people stop trying to make something fit.
Edith Electro began, in a way, with a mistake. I had asked a producer in Finland to write a string arrangement for a song called "Irrande Moln." What came back had trumpets, electronic beats, and an energy that was completely wrong for the album it was meant for. It had become folk-disco. It didn't belong anywhere.
Except, it turned out, here.
Anna Lidell took that misfit track to her studio in Frederiksberg, added her cool sound surfaces and beats, and suddenly it had found its place. Around it, she built a world: four songs from my catalogue stripped back and re-dressed in something angular, experimental, and quietly modern. The result is an EP that shouldn't work and yet lands with a strange, inevitable grace.
The words are by Edith Södergran, the Finland-Swedish poet who died in 1923 at thirty-one, and who spent her short life writing about nature, desire, and the things that exist just beyond language. I have been setting Södergran's texts to music since theatre school, drawn to her ability to describe the wordless, what stands between the lines. I have so many notes I want to express, and very few words. The simplicity in the composition was the focus. It was a feeling of not getting in the way.
Anna's production honours that instinct. Nothing here is overworked. The edges are left a little rough, the surprises left in. "Irrande Moln" shifts tempo when it feels like it. "Kärlek" carries a warmth that the electronics never quite cool down. And I move through all of it with the ease of someone who has been living inside these melodies for years, because I have.
Edith Electro is a record about translation. Swedish poetry into Danish production. Old music into new clothes. The wordless into sound. Something that didn't fit anywhere, finding exactly where it belongs.