Swede Dreams

It’s midnight and the Uppsala nu-disco crew are taking Mixmag on a pub crawl. The scene’s leading figures, Oliver Nelson and Tobtok, have blagged the decks in a cavernous pool hall called Interpool. It’s rather different from the kind of places they usually play: the sunken dancefloor of Audio Discotech in San Francisco, or the hedonistic mayhem of Perfect Havoc’s secret London parties. Instead, Interpool most resembles a giant youth club, featuring pool, skittles, slot machines and the addictive Scandinavian bar game of Shuffleboard. It’s typical of Uppsala, 80km north of Stockholm, Sweden’s fourth city and biggest student centre.

Nelson, a few beers merry, jigs about happily and Tobtok drops his bubbly remix of John Newman’s ‘Come And Get It’. It’s an impromptu session courtesy of the local EDM DJ, who watches dubiously from the sidelines as the pair’s DJ-producer mates, Ghassemi, Osmo and Skogsrå, giggle and jiggle on the dancefloor. A few locals join in but, for the most part, Uppsala has not yet embraced its own native sound. The rest of the world, however…

There’s something in the Uppsala water. A wave of high profile remixes has poured out of the city, initially from 25-year-old Oliver Nelson who bridges the worlds of disco and pop with a sound that lends itself perfectly to those wildly successful YouTube channels that illustrate their videos with images of the tanned limbs and distant glance of some anonymous pretty girl.

Remixes for Ella Henderson (‘Ghost’, 6.3 million SoundCloud plays), Justin Timberlake (‘Suit & Tie’, 13.5 million YouTube hits) and Tove Lo (‘Habits’, 4 million SoundCloud plays) have been the most high-profile, but there are many more, from Whitney Houston to Bon Iver to Route 94. He’s notched up 38.5 million cumulative SoundCloud plays, including 1.26 million for his blissed-out, sunshine-laden solo debut ‘Found Your Love’, featuring Skogsrå on vocals (under the pseudonym Heir), and he’s working on new material with Kaleem Taylor (who sang on the Tchami hit ‘Promesses’). His protégé Tobias ‘Tobtok’ Karlsson, 23, meanwhile, has over 10 million cumulative SoundCloud plays and has also been no slouch in the remix department. His lush rerub of Years & Years’ ‘Real’ drew attention (858,000 YouTube hits), as well as remixes for Wretch 32, Icona Pop, Blonde and others. The tropically-inclined single ‘Savanna’ caused a stir, and his new tune ‘Fast Car’ (featuring River) was the most-played track on SoundCloud in December 2015. Big gigs inevitably followed – Ushuaïa, Tomorrowland, Creamfields – and their ongoing association with the emblematic Parisian imprint Kitsuné has led to parties in China and Japan.

It’s 5.30 PM and Oliver Nelson and Tobtok sit beside each other at Hambergs Fisk, Uppsala’s premier seafood restaurant. Nelson tinkers with the remains of a crème brûlée and Tobtok sits back, digesting the half-lobster he’s just eaten. At Mixmag's insistence we’re all sipping the Swedish national drink, a herbal-infused schnapps called Aquavit, although neither of them are keen. “I am not taking a sip for ten minutes,” says Nelson warily.

He is the shorter of the pair, easy going, with blue eyes behind rimmed glasses, floppy blond hair shaved at the sides and clad in simple black and white. Tobtok is more intense, tall at around 6’5”, brown-eyed, brown-haired, lightly stubbled, wearing a black jumper, a big watch and skinny jeans rolled up to reveal sockless ankles. Nelson is recalling how it all started.

“It was 2005 and I was 15 years old,” he starts. “My best friend Jacob made basic tracks on computers. I was into hard rock but I started getting more into the electronic side; I was at his place five times a week, watching him. In 2007 we were listening to the Justice album ‘Cross’. It was a huge influence, that hardcore electro. I said to Jacob, ‘We have to do this – it will take us a month to make something this good.’ But it took four years to make anything I felt proud of.”

While Jacob dropped off the radar, Nelson had family support for his music career. He credits his father’s love of Toto and Steely Dan with giving him a taste for “fresh, clean sounds”. His brother, a drummer, had inspired him to take up drums when he was eight. Later, he bought an electronic drum kit so he could practice in his shared apartment. “I started laying down beats and it felt right,” he recalls, “All these melodies came up in my head while I was drumming.”

He started to attract attention when he entered remix competitions on the Indaba Music website (a couple of which were later picked up by Ultra Music), but what really ramped things up was his remix of ‘Déjà Vu’ for Swedish band Urban Cone in 2012. French producer Madeon liked it on SoundCloud and, overnight, Nelson’s followers grew from 300 to 3,000. One of those who discovered it was Tobias Karlsson, aka Tobtok.

“Mine’s a similar story,” says Tobtok. “I played in a thrash metal band when I was about 12, writing gibberish tunes that sounded like Slayer and Metallica. I went over slowly to disco after discovering ‘Everybody Dance’ by Chic on a CD of my dad’s favourite music of the 70s. Through that I discovered Daft Punk and Justice, and went on a course to learn about electronic music. I’d discovered a whole new world…”

What he doesn’t mention until later is that he also fought a vicious battle with cancer from which he only begin to recover at the end of 2014. He tells us that it motivates him, driving him to seize the moment. But it was a friend playing him Oliver Nelson’s Urban Cone remix at a party that unexpectedly led to his future opening up.

“I checked out Oliver on SoundCloud,” Tobtok recalls. “This guy’s from the same country as me doing something I didn’t know existed. We talked on Facebook and SoundCloud but I didn’t know he lived in the same city. It took us four months to actually meet, and when we did it was by coincidence in a pub. It was kind of weird and awkward – I wouldn’t say love at first sight – but now we’re in same place, we bounce off each other, we work perfectly together.”

Both of them signed to Adam Griffin’s Perfect Havoc management company, Nelson first, then Tobtok at his suggestion. “Oliver’s the senior guy,” explains Tobtok. “He’s been a huge influence. We do stuff together, learn from each other, we have similar backgrounds and I think that’s led to the chemistry we have today.”

“In the beginning I thought I didn’t need anyone’s help with my music,” adds Nelson, “but we really understand each other and that’s going to lead to a duo when we’re ready…”

In the meantime, though, they introduce us to some of Uppsala’s other talent. It’s 7.00 PM in American-style sports bar O’Leary’s, with screens everywhere and a decent line-up of beers. Sitting around a table with Oliver and Tobtok are DJ-producers Skogsrå (aka Charlie England, 23, in cap, knackered glasses and an eye-watering orange and blue jumper), Ghassemi (Danial Ghassemi, 23, bigger in frame, darker of complexion, with a quiet intensity to match Tobtok’s) and Osmo (Oscar Modig, 25, with archetypically Swedish blond, bright blue-eyed looks and a surname that translates as ‘brave’). Alongside them is manager Adam Griffin who’s busy showing Mixmag a text from Bill Gates’ office – yes, that Bill Gates – looking to hook up with Oliver for a project. Gates, apparently, thinks Nelson’s remix of The Wombats’ ‘Greek Tragedy’ “has an inner beauty”.

The table is raucous. Ghassemi, whose new single ‘Saturate’ is out soon, is describing how he did his remix of Icona Pop’s ‘Emergency’ – “I took five boxes of Snus and gallons of coffee into the studio – I couldn’t sleep for a week but it got the job done.” Snus are the small, extremely strong pouches of tobacco that Scandinavians place in their mouths. Osmo lives with Tobtok and describes how they have to take turns in having their monitors turned on. His best-known track is probably the remix (with Ghassemi) of We Are Legends’ soul-pop number ‘In Too Deep’, but watch out for his ‘Leparc’ single and a forth-coming remix of Carl Louis’ ‘Telescope’. Skogsrå, meanwhile, boasts a pre-eminent musicality. He briefly renamed himself Heir and sings on Nelson’s ‘Found Your Love’. His music has the most in common with older Scandi-disco artists such as Todd Terje with tunes such as ‘Now You See Me’ and his outrageous remix of Vulfpeck’s ‘Funky Duck’.

None of the group, however, see themselves as especially indebted to previous generations of Scandinavian dance talent. Oliver says the first Todd Terje tune he heard was ‘Inspector Norse’ (2012) while Tobtok adds, when asked about Adam Beyer, Swedish House Mafia and uber-pop producer Max Martin, “I wasn’t interested in them; I never realised until very recently that Sweden’s played an important role in electronic music.”

Apart from Justice and Chic, the only music Nelson and Tobtok credit with having direct influence on their sound is Scottish producer Grum’s 2010 debut album ‘Heartbeats’. “That opened the door to the electronic world for me,” says Nelson. “Grum has a very special sound, proper nu-disco.”

The other thing that drives them all, of course, is Uppsala itself, whose mainstream, student-led nightlife forces them to explore their own resources. “I’ve held parties in Uppsala where we tried to do more our style of music but it hasn’t gone down that well,” says Tobtok.

“You get stuck at home producing music instead,” laughs Osmo. It’s 1.45 AM at Palermo, a packed bar-cum-pizza place which is where young Uppsalans finish their nights. Everyone’s showing signs of boozy wear and tear, but in an affable way. The talk ranges from death metal to movies (Nelson repeatedly refers to a film called ‘Apocalyptic Now’) then turns to the way the Uppsala sound has a pop edge, giving it crossover potential.

“We’ve always done our thing but we’re lucky in that the music we do is becoming more popular,” says Tobtok. “I don’t mind pop at all,” Oliver Nelson continues, beer in hand, a smile on his face. “I don’t want to be labelled as mainstream but my goal in music is to lean towards a different sound than anyone else’s. When I’m doing new tracks I’m inspired by everything from sixties music to mainstream EDM. That’s the key to making something special, just taking elements. If you can pull that off, it’s the key to success.”

He has a glint in his eye. It may be the beer. It may be the lights. But it may be the twinkle of future promise. The Uppsala crew have 2016 in their sights.

Oliver Nelson feat Heir 'Found Your Love' is out March 7