One day in 1989 or 1990 my friend Ulf said that he had written a song that he wanted to enter into some kind of competition for young music talents, and that he needed some help to record it. Thus, he, Christian and myself went to a church in central Gävle, borrowed some instruments and a tape recorder, and took the first steps of our careers. We did not receive any kind of response to our effort, but we were happy anyway. Recently I found the tape that I thought was lost forever, and now, maybe, the world is finally ready for our sound...

Ulf Lindström: Vocals, drums
Anders Tjulin: Keyboard
Christian Johnson: Bass

Demo

Ulf, Anders och Christian - Kung i stan

During my military service I started playing mahjong with a small group of people. We realised that one of the tiles, 5 Bamboo (Bambu Fem in Swedish), really sounded like a name of a rock band. Thus, after the service was over the Gävle-based people in the group (Anders, Mikael, Thomas) formed that band, while adding an additional performer (Johan). We decided that we should play music styles that we were not comfortable with, which meant that after some months we had composed a rather eclectic set of songs. We were lucky to find that anouther friend (Christian) needed to record a demo as an exam project in his sound engineering course. That is why recordings of Bambu Fem exists. "Här kommer Bambu 5" was meant to function as an overture for the band.

Mikael Andersson: Guitar
Thomas Ågren: Bass
Johan Alpmar: Drums
Anders Tjulin: Keyboard

Örebro

Bambu Fem - Här kommer Bambu Fem

I once asked myself what kind of music a lemming would create. Since lemmings are energetic but not very intellectual creatures, the main focus of the music would be on the beat, not on the melody, the harmonies or even the rhythm. Naturally, the lyrics would mostly be about living in the harsh conditions in the wilderness up north. This tune was my attempt to emulate the music of the lemmings.
I have now moved to the land of the lemmings, and now I know how wrong I was.

A Tjulin - Brysk tundra

As an ambitious physics student, I naturally got the idea to compose a song connected to each relevant example in the textbooks. The first of these songs was made to illustrate "The Astronauts' Tug-of-war" from the introductory course in mechanics. The chords in the song were of course mostly experimental because of the topic of the example, and the lyrics were initially taken straight from the textbook. However, the words soon had to be changed in order to fit the melody, and the theme of the text degenerated into something more pessimistic than two astronauts tied together by a rope in outer space: the complete disparity between the expectations and the realities of modern life. When the song, which was now a piano ballad, was finished after several weeks of hard work, the theme was no longer relevant and I decided to never make another physics textbook example song.

One year later I squeezed the song into my Amiga, and it turned into this simple pop tune.

A Tjulin - Garden of your mouth

Recursion is fascinating.
I had the idea to make a song that would also function as a computer program with which the song could be played, or alternatively make a computer program that would be able to transform its own zeros and ones into music. That project did not end with a satisfactory result, neither in terms of music nor programming.
I also had an idea to make electronic music, which in principle would sound the same when played at significantly different speeds. This would work in a similar way as those images which repeat themselves when zooming in on them. That project actually worked, but not very well artistically.
This song is an experiment of using the program that plays the song as an instrument in the song. Of course I had to cheat somewhat by cutting the program into pieces and stretching and compressing its waveform.
The song was created in connection to a brothel-themed party at my student residence. Hence the title.

A Tjulin - Bordelleri fallera

How much of the original song has to be retained when making a cover version?
When I made this tune in the mid 1990s, most of the Amiga-based covers were either horribly bland or simply horrible (including my own attempts). Hence I got the idea that a cover would be better as long as the elements from the original song were kept at an absolute minimum. Following this line of thought I started from four bars of "Somewhere over the rainbow" and composed this happy little song, which I believe proved my point.

A Tjulin - Lingonheads

One of the limitations when making musik on the Amiga was that there were only four channels with which to work. In order to fill out the sound, a dirty trick I thought of was to make sure that each sound sample was so short that the next could follow immediately without cutting off anything from the previous sound. This song was a test if that would work in practice.


A Tjulin - Spiken i plattan

In the middle of the 1990s music sampling was done everywhere, even in my student room.
Since  I, for some reason, had become a bit obsessed with the notion of  ‘heavy riffs’, I borrowed a sampler from a friend and connected it to my Amiga and to my stereo in order to fetch a riff from which I could make a loop. Logically, the riff to loop should be a riff by the band Loop that I had on CD, from the song “Arc-lite” to be precise.
It was more difficult than I had expected to use the available tools to work with the sample so that it could actually be used. In addition I realised that looping a riff from a riff-based song would essentially mean copying the song, which was not what I originally intended. Thus, I had to depart from the idea of perpetual looping. Since I was rather exhausted from the work on the first and only sample, I simply added some standard sounds to the mix, and turned my ambitious riff-based song into a simple standard nonsense tune.
This is still my only attempt in sampling and looping.

A Tjulin - One dodgy hospital

I have enjoyed folk music for a very long time but there have been some issues that have bothered me.
Since folk music often is defined as traditional music, I could never understand how it was ever possible to compose new folk songs since there is a time element needed inorder to develop a tradition. There also seems to be a requirement that a performer has to identify himself/herself with a certain folk, or to be identified as part of the relevant group of people, but I was never sure how to decide which group I should belong to, or if I would be allowed to play music from other traditions if I start in one.
I really wanted to create folk music, but the buit-in restrictions mentioned above for this kind of music forced me to define that the folk it was connected to would be just me. Furthermore, I had to play my song repeatedly every time I got access to a musical instrument so that it would become a tradition, at least in some sense. It took a year or so until I felt that I could claim my song to be a folk song.
Only after this long process, I squeezed the song into my Amiga and compressed it to become the little tune presented here.

A Tjulin - Boop-eh-doop

Interrailing is a great experience.
In the summer of 1996, me and a friend were exploring the central areas of Europe by railway. After a minor misunderstanding of the time-tables, and the location of the coach station, we found ourselves stuck in Brno in Moravia (Czech Republic) for a day. Our guide-book exclaimed "extend your stay" and "delve deeper", so that is what we had to do in Brno. In the centre of the city we found a poster that advertised a "strange party" containing a "global dancefloor". These two concepts inspired the creation of two interesting songs.
A "strange party" sounds like a party that you enjoy when arriving, but after some time you notice that something about the party is slightly off and you start feeling bad about it. I made a song trying to mimic that experience, but it ended up too horrible to be put on the internet.
A "global dancefloor" is a dance floor encompassing the whole planet, in contrast to the normal, local, variety. You cannot leave and wherever you go, the people around you continue to dance whether they like the music or not. This tune expresses an example of how I believe the non-local dance music should sound.

A Tjulin - Global dancefloor

Some time ago, I was able to recover some music I made with my Amiga 500 computer in the mid-nineties. I intend to post some of the songs here to make the world decide whether it wants to suffer from them or simply ignore them.

Some shorter time ago I also found some old demo-tapes. They may also appear here.

Juldans