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Sweden

A wartime crash, then sound poetry

Åke Hodell

Åke Hodell trained as a Swedish fighter pilot and crashed on a training flight in 1941. The wreck kept him in hospital for years and turned him against the military for good. In hospital he became close with the poet Gunnar Ekelöf, and by the early 1960s Hodell was a central figure at Fylkingen, Stockholm's home for new and intermedia art. There he made "text-sound" pieces out of stretched, repeated and looped language, military drill commands among them, drawn out until they called up rows of war-cemetery headstones. He kept making antimilitarist sound art until his death in 2000.

Stockholm — forgotten, then found

Thirteen Moons

Thirteen Moons were a Stockholm trio: singer Göran Klintberg, guitarist Anders Holm and saxophonist Mats Gunnarsson. In the mid-1980s they released two albums on the small UK label Wire Records, Little Dreaming Boy in 1986 and Origins the year after. Both were built from strings, cello and saxophone, and sounded more like English pastoral chamber-pop than anything else coming out of Stockholm at the time. They toured supporting Billy Bragg and then all but vanished from the record. Sweden's national broadcaster only rediscovered them in 2019, with a radio documentary bluntly titled "the forgotten orchestra." Genuinely lost Swedish records rarely find their way back like that.

Stockholm, a Grammis every album

Anna Ternheim

Anna Ternheim started playing guitar at ten, formed a band during a year living in Atlanta, and released her debut, Somebody Outside, in 2004. It won her Sweden's Grammis for Best Newcomer. The follow-up, Separation Road, went to number one on the Swedish charts in 2006, and Leaving on a Mayday, produced in part by Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John, won her Album of the Year in 2009. She later moved to Manhattan, recorded a more country-leaning album in Nashville, and has kept putting out records since, including a Swedish-language album in 2025. Her songs have turned up in Grey's Anatomy and Wallander, and in the video games Alan Wake and Silent Hill: Downpour.

The Collection