Simon Steensland

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Simon Steensland is a Swedish composer and self-taught multi-instrumentalist, though he started as a drummer at the age of 17. He releases both solo albums as well as composing for theater. His first solo release was in 1993, The Simon Lonesome Combat Ensemble, which he then followed up on with more albums, each of which had several usual musicians playing: drummer Morgan Agren and keyboards/piano player Mats Oberg. The music was said to combine elements of jazz, neo-classical, rock and folk with a wide variety of instruments and to be influenced by Univers Zero, Art Zoyd, Present etc.

I got in touch with him and here is his story
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You started out 17 years old. What made you take 
up music ? How and where did you team up with your companions Morgan Agren and 
Mats Oberg ? Your first album was released when the computers was tiny and a 
fraction of what a mobile phone is today. How was it to record back then 
compared with to today ? 
I´ve always been very fascinated of music, but i 
never have any thoughts of playing myself. Not until many of my friends started 
to play. Then it was like-Hello guys, wait for me! I immediately by chance 
started to play in some symphonic rock bands. They weren´t any good of course, 
but it was a great way of learning and understanding more "complicated" music 
than regular pop/rock.
So i was playing seven and fives and other "odd" 
time signatures even from the start. So that´s very normal for me. (Even today i 
never have to "count" something i´m playing, unless it´s extremely complicated 
with many fast shifts in time-signature. When another musician asks me to 
explain a pattern I often has to stop and think for a while, since i myself 
never count.) I started out as a drummer and played in lots and lots of bands. 
Stupid as i am i never thought of the possibility to write my own songs. Maybe 
because all the bands i played with all ready had their own composers.
But when i was about 30 years old i bought myself 
an old, used synthesizer and said: let´s go! And i went. My first songs is 
probably the most pathetic, pretentious and crappiest music ever written... But 
i soon got better. All ready after a year or two i landed a deal with the french 
label Musea! Of course i had to pay for everything myself, but i did it in the 
cheapest way possible. I think it was about 1200€ for everything... It was only 
pressed in 500 copies.
Back then, we never knew that computers would come 
to rule the entire world, as well as the recording industry. At least i didn`t. 
Of course it was obviously not very high-tech the way i recorded my first album 
ping-ponging between two stereo DAT recorders, through a very cheap 
boss minimixer... That´s a very "real-time" oriented  way of recording. And 
frustrating as well. You can´t punch in anything, and there is no way to edit 
things afterwards. Everything has to be in one take, and you cant use a 
click-track or anything to make it easier to play certain 
passages. Cause everything you put in or out, would be on the next generation of 
overdubs... And therefore you have to use a lot of sequensers to hold the 
numbers of generations down. So the music is somewhat stiff without 
"musical-flow, and still there is a good number of wrong notes being 
played! On the good side you have A LOT of time to get the work done, since i 
don´t have to pay for any studio-time! Everything is recorded in my living room 
except the drums. And the string quintet.
Regarding Morgan, i met him (and Mats) by chance 
at a gig they were doing with a band called "zapstitoot" (not sure about the 
spelling) playing only Frank Zappa covers. I think he was about 18 at 
that time, and even back then he was a ridiculously good drummer! We talked for 
a while after the gig and i was amazed over how nice a person he was! And since 
then we lived happily ever after...      
This is an archive based interview also intended 
for the fans you get well after both you and I have passed away so let's go 
straight to your albums. Please give us your views/some words on your albums, 
starting with.......

The Simon Lonesome Combat Ensemble from 1993 
VERY low-tech. And in many ways a very naive album 
since i was an absolutely begginer as a composer. It´s also in a way much more 
pretentious than my newer stuff. But i´m very glad i did it because it opened a 
lot of doors for me. And it was a great learning experience!

The Zombie Hunter from 1995 
This is in many ways my favorite album. I got an 
eight-channel A-dat recorder which i thought was very high tech! Imagine whole 8 
channels! I llke the albums furiousity as well as its healthy amount of 
play-fulness. And it´s completely stuffed with themes and notes. 
I still wasn´t really sure what i was doing (i´m 
not sure even today) but some of the songs are really good, i think! It can be a very good 
thing to NOT know so much...

Under Oknar from 1997 
Obviously a collaboration with sten sandell. I 
have not listen to it for over 10 years, but i remember we had very fun while 
recording it. Some of the songs (mostly sten´s) i recall as very good, but the 
problem i think, was that we didn´t have a "direction" to follow. We just 
recorded a bunch of songs and pour them out on a bit of plastic... I remember 
during the time of making that album there was a lot talk of 
starting a "super-group" featuring sten and me, mats öberg, morgan ågren and the 
late lasse hollmer! Unfortunately that never happened (i´m not sure why because 
everybody involved were really up to it) probably for the lack of money/time as usual... I have had the 
privilege to play with lasse hollmer some years earlier, and he was absolutely 
brilliant both as a composer/musician as well as a person. He is sadly missed by 
all of us (and many, many more all over the world). 

Led Circus from 1999 
This is sort of my first "real" album. 
16-channels, thousands of overdubs, really long songs and packed with brutality. 
It took a great deal of time (and effort) making it. On Led (as in Zombie) the 
"goal" sort of was QUANTITY rather than good old fashioned quality! 
Even today i´m very fascinated of quantity. Yes, 
it can sometimes be a way to hide that your songs are nothing but crap... But to 
stuff a GOOD song with millions of small lines no one else ever notice or care 
about, never repeating a phrase exactly, to lead the themes to different 
places every time. Sort of striving towards a 
minimalistic maximum! It´s not that easy! And sometimes the songs are very GOOD, 
i think! Check out the last 4-5 minutes on "Dwarf Suite"! Rock & 
Roll...? 
Still i think the album is pretty pretentious and 
i´m not all too happy with it. And the sound-quality is rather poor. It didn´t 
even had a proper mastering... Unfortunately i´m not a very good sound-engineer. I really don´t 
understand why, since i have been working with this professionally for 20 years, 
one could think that one eventually will learn something... But not me. My 
hearing is perfect, I got good equipment these days and i really do like good 
sound. 
I just can´t achieve it, i think. Things have 
improved a little bit since i began working with computers, but it´s far from 
what i would like to hear. I sometimes think that i should let someone else mix 
my recordings, but who should pay for that? I have never made any money 
from none of my albums, and i probably never will. 
Making albums can´t be nothing but my hobby! I still feel very lucky that other 
people actually want to release my albums, without i have to give THEM money! 
And for all wonderful musicians i have used and abused over the years without 
paying them at all!  Without them there would be no simon steensland 
albums!

The Phantom of the Theatre from 2002 
This is sort of an album i regret! (Luckily almost 
no one has heard it...) Sure, some of the songs are really good i think, but the 
album is WAY too long, with WAY too many songs. I was a little carried away, and 
i was trying to "show the world" how very broad my repertoire was. 
Look, i can make thousands of totally different 
songs! Maybe if you took away about some 30 minutes of it, it might be 
justified. But probably not... But still, the song YES for example, is no walk 
in the park... And the pure quantity of "the Opera"...

Fat Again from 2009 
Finally, a computer in the house! I have to say 
this is my best album so far, even if i miss some of the raw power from Zombie 
or Led. It´s a bit of too "polished" i think. But it got some good songs on it. 
The sad thing with this album is that it took almost 6 years to finalize. I want the music to be fresh, 
not old and dusty. But i couldn´t find the time to make it any faster. Most of 
the songs are composed in 2002-3 so they don´t feel very fresh to my ears. Since 
the last 20 years or so i´ve been working full time as a composer mostly writing for theatre plays. 
And since it´s not very good payed you are forced to take many jobs in order to 
pay the bills. And when you´re working 12 hour days composing, it´s pretty hard 
to find the energy to compose on your free-time. 
I´m very lucky to actually getting paid for 
writing and playing music and nothing else. But "career wise" for my albums it´s 
almost a disaster... In a perfect world, somebody gives me money to make albums! 
But that ain´t going to happen... 
I´m not very good at promoting myself, i don´t 
make the right phone-calls to the right people, i don´t write letters trying to 
tell people how good i am... And even if i did, there´s no guarantee that things 
would be different. There just isn´t any money for music like mine. 
If i had a manager, maybe i could go out on some 
tours if i got the band together, but still i probably won´t make any money...   

Your live album Kamikaze United: Live Gang-Gang 
from 2004. How easy/difficult was it to get together a band for this gig ? 
It was pretty hard, but for that special event i 
was for the first time in my life able to actually pay the musicians! Not much, 
but anyway! We rehearsed for about 3 or maybe 4 days and then played two 
concerts. As you clearly can hear from the result, we weren´t really ready to play the songs as a group! But hey, - 
let´s go down swinging! And to be honest it´s not a very good album i think, but 
i thought that this might never happen again and some of the stuff are quite 
good. So l gave it a shot... 
The sound-quality really suffer from too many 
digital "converts". I think there was about 5 of them, due to computer and 
synchronization problems, and i think we even did the mistake to record it in 
48khz. So i remember that everybody who heard it before it was released was very dissapointed over the sound-quality when 
it finally was released. The only good on the album, the raw power, sort of 
disappeared somewhere on the road...My pre-master sounds way better! 
And actually, we did the same thing again the next 
year (rehearsing for 3-4 days and played two concerts) and with much better 
result! Some of the songs from that gig is featured on "fat again" (in studio 
versions). So in a "perfect world" THAT should have been the live album!
How is the availability of your albums ? 
I don´t really know, but not that good. The first 
and second and maybe third is deleted or out of print. Maybe there are some 
copies left of led circus. The phantom and live gang-gang i still have hundreds 
of copies left in my basement!No one distributes them. Wanna have some? Five for 
the price of one... [email protected]
For those of us unfamiliar with your music; how 
would you describe you music and which bands would you compare yourself with 
? 
My music is very good, thank´s for asking. I´m not 
very keen on comparing myself with others. It´s not fair against either me or 
"the others". 
Of course i´ve been listening to, and being 
inspired by much music over the years. It´s impossible not to mention "univers 
zero" and "magma". I also love albert marqceur, art bears, yes and king crimson. 
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and the Sparks. I growed up with the 
Beatles. 
I listened a lot to Frank Zappa. Mats & Morgan 
Band is both musical heroes and great friends. The swedish rock band Meshuggah 
is one of the best bands ever! And i´ve been listening very much to modern 
"classical"music. The still very young brittish composer thomas adés is frightening good i think. But my big hero has to 
be Charles Ives! He, just like me, was doing EVERYTHING in his own way, by his 
own terms and principles. He was very well educated in music but still followed 
his heart and composed music that nobody would like to hear or play. 
And much of this music is absolutely mind-blowing. 
So beautiful, complex and force-ful. So honest and sincere. On the other hand, 
i´m very different to him in the matter of education. I have no education what 
so ever, and that is something i´m very happy for! I love the "learning by doing" strategy! Still, that prevents 
me from being especially all round or a good session musician. I´m fine with 
that. The important thing for me is that i can play the songs i´m writing. And 
the songs i want to play. It´s very important for me to do my own mistakes. I don´t want to know about music theory. 
There are so many rules to follow, so many things 
you should know. I want to carve out my own jigsaw puzzle. I don´t want to play 
with the pre-carved pieces. I´m sort of a snob with this in a silly way. 
Obviously musical education can be something very good for many people. But it´s not just for me. There 
is no way in the world that i would have sounded the way i do, if i were 
"properly" trained and educated! And i get all my gigs for the way that i sound! 
I sound different from most other musicians, and that is my strength. 
All my quality (if i have one) lies in the fact 
that i do things my own way.     
There has been some long gaps between the albums. 
What have you been up do inbetween the album releases ? 
Haha, composing music for theatre plays that no 
one wants to see!
How is your creative processes from coming up with 
an idea to it's being recorded ? 
It´s almost never the same. But the longer you´ve 
been in "the game" the faster, or rather more effective you can work i think. 
It´s easier to hear which ideas are good and which is not... Unfortunately the 
passion you once had is more and more neglected when you work as much as i do. At least for me.... It´s much 
harder to burn when composing is ALL that you do. But still i can write good 
songs i think...
What is your current status and what is your plans 
for the rest of this year and next year ? 
For the moment i´m playing in a musical that i 
wrote the music for. Judas. 
Next big project is composing music for 14 pianos 
to be played exclusively by actors! It´s scheduled to have premiere in march 
2012. For some reasons i don´t really know of, i have lately been writing a lot 
of music for people who "can´t play". And almost every time it has been VERY gratifying! I wrote for 10 actors doing a 4 
hour mastodont-play at a big theatre here in stockholm. They had very limited, 
or no musical knowledge at all and they ended up becoming a monster of a band! 
Absolute terrifying (in a good way). The way i look at it you don´t have to be "able to play", to still play 
and perform fantastic music! It´s a big responsibility though for the composer 
to adopt to each individuals way of expressing them selfs in a language they 
really don´t know. So you have to sort of create a new language that works both for me, them and the PURPOSE! 
And i´m also working on my next album (A Farewell 
to Brains) which is supposed to be released on AltrOck in 2013. I´m not sure if 
i can keep that schedule, but i´m really trying to! About half of the material 
is ready to record... It´s my best stuff yet (i hope). Maybe it´s not going to be as dense as Led, i might be too 
old for that... But i promise: I´m still taking the hard way up the mountain! 

To wrap up this interview, is there anything you 
want to add to this interview ? 
Check out my cover on magma´s "malaria" on the 
album HUR! Hommage a la musique de Christian Vander! www.soleilzeuhl.com Good 
stuff! 
Thank you very much for showing interest in my 
works! 

Thank you to Simon for this interview
His PA profile is here & his homepage is here