Mats Wikström is 56 years old and from Luleå, who is an artist in several ways. Carl Olsson helped recording some songs two years ago. They’re a bit like hearing an older, more heterosexual and much more rural Stephin Merritt. It’s distinctly honest and heartfelt. Austere but still rather elegant tunes about the wish to somehow belong and how to go about if you’re stuck in town out of money for a bus ticket home. When in New York, Mats recorded a few more songs with videos for them, that you can hear and see here. For Cosy Den 2011, he's put a live band together: Carl Olsson (The Bear Quartet, Paddington DC, Paper, Fireside), Peter Nuottaniemi (The Bear Quartet, Container of Love), Christian Ramirez (Park Hotell, Mattias Alkberg & Nerverna) - and Mats himself, obviously. It's very likely to be special, I'd say.
FRIDAY BRIDGE
One could suggest that the utterly brilliant electronica duo Friday Bridge are slowly but surely becoming a bit of a house band at Cosy Den. In the spring of 2008, they helped bringing Fosca to Landet, and opened for them together with Little Big Adventure - and at the first festival two years ago, Ylva and Niklas played a very elegant and partly acoustic set at Lasse i Parken. Their debut, Intricacy, was named "the best pop album made in Sweden for more than twenty years" by Digfi and enormously acclaimed by nearly everyone. On the following Bite my tounge, Sonic Magazine said "it's been a long time since I heard such stunning sounds in an album". Friday Bridge's response when I asked if they wanted to play the festival again this year included hints that the band is currently moving in a more filmic and dreamy direction. Sounds exciting to me - especially as this is looking to be the first Friday Bridge gig for quite a while!
(Click the sleeve below to hear the latest released song: Just lies, from last summer.)
