Artist description Pension Hill consists of Alfred Skogberg, Tommy Ericssonand friends. We mix computers with musicians in thespirit of Miles Davis with the sound of modern dance, pop and rock.

Music Style Pop & Rock mixed with other genres

Musical Influences Massive Attack, Tricky, Miles Davis, Madonna, LPC

Similar Artists Massive Attack, Tricky

Artist History Started in early 1999 as Alfred and Tommy met at the Swedish radio where they both studied. They recieved immediate contact and completed each other like a handin the glove.

Group Members Alfred Skogberg and Tommy Ericsson

Instruments Guitar, Percussion, Vocals

Press Reviews Interview with Alfred Skogberg from Pension HillWho are the members of Pension Hill?The foundation of Pension Hill is Tommy Ericsson and yours truly, Alfred Skogberg. But then we work with lots of different musicians, sort of like a collective.What does Pension Hill mean?Pension Hill is a hill on Gärdet in Stockholm, Sweden, where both Tommy and I live, 200 meters away from each other. There used to be lots of old people living here therefore the word pension. Many of them have passed away now and more and more young people are moving in to the area. How did it start?We were both practising sound engineering on the Swedish radio in January 1999 and we had the same sound engineer as our guru. We immediately started to talk about music and I played a tune I had produced with some great musicians living in Sweden. Then we met up and tried to produce some music when we realised we needed someone to rap. Tommy then told me to start writing a few lines and do the rapping, and I said it wasn´t really my thing. But he insisted so I wrote some lines and Tommy was surprisingly optimistic. From there it took a while before I found my voice but when I did I realized that in fact it sounded quite personal and fitted our music. I have always enjoyed writing texts, so from there we started to become serious.Who does what?I write the texts and Tommy does more than 90% of the music. In the beginning I thought I had to be more involved in the music creation but I understood that Tommy had great talent, so all I do is comment on details. If Tommy just sits down a couple of hours he usually gets up with ideas that almost always are worth working with. So from there we discuss possible musicians, create a draft of the tune, I write the lyrics and add them and then we contact the musicians we want to work with.Where do you work with your music?We mostly sit at Tommy´s place. He rents a room and has all the equipment there so it is quite full but it works somehow, especially now that we invested in new equipment. We also brought the gear to an island called Koster on the Swedish West Coast where my mother has her country house next to the sea. We spent 2 weeks there and did 4 tunes we are very content with.What equipment do you use?We recently invested in a lot of new equipment such as a Korg Triton synth, a Behringer 48-channel mixing board, a compressor and a mic amplifier. We also have a drum-, and bass station from Novation, Cubase 3.7 and a PIII 500 mHz with 68-ram, Audiowerk 8 sound card and a condenser microphone.What musicains have you worked with?Our main man is David Tallroth, an outstanding guitarist who presently lives in Paris but otherwise studies at the Royal music academy here in Stockholm. I saw him gigging with some friends downtown Stockholm years ago and I just thought he was the best I had ever heard. You know there are many musicians with great skill, but you need to have the groove in your heart and soul and David just has it in every atom of his body. So it is really easy to work with him, but difficult to edit his guitar takes because they all sound so dope. Anyhow, later I worked at a cafe called Piccolino, where David came by and we started to talk about music. A while later I arranged a concert with him and his friends on the roof on this downtown cafe where I worked. Only the Beatles and U2 had done it before! Without David it would be much harder to get the sound we are after. Of course, we also work with another excellent guitarist, Joel Klein, who foremost plays reggae music these days, but he is an all round guitarist with a brilliant musical mind. David and Joel have many things in common and we want to work with both of them, not least on the road.Otherwise we recently worked with an old class friend of mine called Anna-Clara Blixt. She is, among other things, a brilliant singer who as far as I remember from early school days, has sung giving you chills all over.Another friend of mine, Tira Skamby-Madsen plays the percussion on One night stand. We met in Havana, Cuba where we studied percussion with the same maestro, Jose Eladio. Unfortunately Tira lives in Copenhagen so I don´t see her that much but hopefully she will play on more of our coming tunes.Fatima Varhos is the girl with the horny voice on One night stand. She is normally quite shy and she was laughing consistently when we wanted her to sound horny. It was a great laugh recording her and eventually it went great!The last person we have been working with is Andreas Cars, who is an old school friend of mine. Andreas is a sound engineer and also economist with an open mind. Andy might be more involved in the mixing process and maybe in other fields due to his multi talent knowledges.How far have you come in your music prodution?We have mixed 4 tunes that we are content with and we have at least 8 more to finish. This actually means that we have enough material for an entire album.What are your goals?We have many goals working simultaneousely. One is to do videos with 3D animators and others with myself as a director. I used to work at the documentary section of the Swedish Television and I am very fond of documentaries. When I watch MTV I get surprised of how many shitty videos are being produced all the time. It is all about the surface and stereotypes and it is utterly boring to watch. When was the last time you saw a music video with humor? I want to start doing documentary music videos. Not only will they be cheap to make but also recognisable for everybody due to the themes and messages they will bring forward and they will also be amusing to watch more than once. Content is the king, not the surface!How would you define your music?In a way it is hard to define the music we make. We use many different styles such as rock, ambient, techno, reggae, pop, latin, R&B and other styles. What brings the music together is our musical sound and my voice, which both are quite recognisable. We are thinking about naming our first album Mad Gunnar, translated after a Swedish warehouse called Galne Gunnar. His concept was to have something for everyone and though our music contains many different styles we also have something for everyone. And it is s a dope name, Mad Gunnar.What do you do when you are not making music?I mostly work with many aspects of digital video such as editing, teaching, writing in a magazine, photographing and some post-production. I also work as a sexual informer at a website called www.barnen.com Me and a women friend answer questions from kids between 8-15 years old on sex, sexuality, living together and such.How did you start working on this website?I was educated by RFSU which is a Swedish organisation working for sexual information. I knew that sex for many still is taboo and many people are suffering because of this, so I wanted to educate myself and try to understand sex and sexuality from different angels. Therefore I took this course RFSU had and I went out in schools talking to male kids, around 14-17 years old. Then this job as a sexual informer on the net came up and my female friend who got it wanted a male person to take care of questions regarding men´s sex related issues. And so far it has been great interesting.Do you think your coming album will sell?I think there is a huge demand for a different kind of quality/commercial music. To me there has been little music of interest the last couple of years. The best ones, I think, have been Fatboy Slim, Madonna and a Swedish group called Lucky People Center who introduced me to the great possibilities techno music has in combination with other musical forms. So yes I definitively think people are ready for our kind of music and that the album will sell.What are the reactions so far?The reactions have been great considering the fact that the sound quality on our demos has been quite low and you have not been able to hear much of my voice. We have just re-mixed the tunes so now they are definitively listenable. Funny enough, everyone seems to have at least one favourite tune which means that we can attract the interest of such different music lovers like hardcore and rock ´n roll freaks to pop and reggae fans.What is going to happen in 2001?In 2001 we will get a decent website with mp3 files and video clips. We will give concerts and finish our album. When a tune is listenable we put it on the net. If we want to be as independent as possible or on a record label we haven´t really decided yet. We will start hearing about different possibilities with different people.Michael Fahraeus

Location Stockholm - Sweden

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