Sven Wunder

In 2019, Doğu Çiçekleri, Sven Wunder’s debut, catapulted him unexpectedly to global recognition. The first release on Piano Piano Records, it was recorded with a talented team of local musicians, as well as the aid of the Swedish Arts Council, and a limited edition vinyl run rapidly became a collector’s item, circulated through Stockholm’s Record Mania on word of mouth alone. Retitled Eastern Flowers, and initially distributed by Light In The Attic for the US market, it was swiftly repressed, then repressed again. As Pitchfork remarked, “it’s a testament to Wunder’s vision that he’s created something so self-contained out of such wild ingredients.”

Sven Wunder, though, wasn’t Sven Wunder. Instead, he came to be in 2018 when, having completed his latest soundtrack commission, Joel Danell – son of Swedish jazz drummer Nils Danell, and by then an accomplished jazz musician, music producer, and composer of film and TV scores – found himself too restless to take a planned holiday. Having fostered a fascination with Anatolian and Eastern European music since his teenage years, the trained double-bass player and rare groove aficionado preferred to catch a now irresistible wave of inspiration. After he’d settled down to work, however, he recognised his name was already occupied by his trade. If he was to inhabit this new universe while separating it from his day job, he’d ultimately require an alias. And thus, to give vent to his creativity, Sven Wunder was born. Piano Piano Records, formed with his old friend John Henriksson, followed briskly in its wake.

Despite selling thousands of albums worldwide, Sven Wunder’s true identity remained unknown when he released 2020’s Wabi Sabi. Respectfully extending his horizons to encompass Eastern and Southern Asian sounds, with a clear nod to Japanese jazz, this similarly cinematic follow-up encouraged The Times to admire how “this mysterious Swede... combines retro-futurist easy listening and groovy jazz with gongs, bamboo flutes and other nature-evoking instruments from the Land of the Rising Sun”. More prosaically, but just as impressively, Brighton’s venerated record label Mr Bongo reported that “We haven't had a record sell as fast as either of those two albums for a long time”. Indeed, they’ve supported Sven Wunder from the start via both a handful of 45s and their beloved Mr Bongo Record Club compilations.

A third LP, 2021’s romantic, panoramic Natura Morta, did Sven Wunder’s profile no harm either. The Quietus enthused about “a record drenched in colour and luxuriously rich in melody, beautifully played, arranged, and recorded”, and Aquarium Drunkard summed it up succinctly as “one of the best albums you will hear this year”. The New York Times, meanwhile, compared it to the work of Ennio Morricone and Piero Umiliani, citing it as an innovative homage that’s never derivative. “One of the closest modern equivalents to the Italian library oeuvre...” they continued, “it features the languid rhythmic pulse of those 1970s classics, topped with a 15-piece string section... Delicate, sweeping music”. Even American hip hop supergroup Czarface – formed by underground hip hop duo 7L & Esoteric and Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck – sampled Eastern Flowers’ ‘Lotus’ on ‘The Czarlaac Pit’, which featured actor Tom Hardy under the pseudonym Frankie Pulitzer, on their 2022 album, Czarmageddon.

2023’s Late Again confirmed Sven Wunder’s singular talents. A nocturnal, dim-the-lights fourth album, it fused jazz, soul and easy listening, and contained previously released 7” singles – ‘Snowdrops’, ‘Jazz at Night’ and ‘Asterism Waltz’ – as well as a good handful of new compositions. “A gorgeous blend of nocturnal jazz, spaghetti western soundtracks and library music,” testified Passion of the Weiss, while Spin reeled off a list of artists evoked by the record: “Quincy Jones, David Axelrod, Stan Getz, and even Trouble Man-era Marvin Gaye.” Nominated for a Swedish Grammy as Jazz Album of the Year, it was hailed globally by music connoisseurs and bona fide tastemakers alike, cementing the once inscrutable figure’s status as a gifted composer and musical force to be reckoned with.

The same year, Sven Wunder released ‘Harmonica And…’, a samba-oriented pop instrumental 7”, as well as another 7” single, ’Ultramarine’, in collaboration with Madlib Invazion Library Series. He also worked on Detroit rapper Danny Brown's introspective, confessional sixth studio album, Quaranta (Warp Records), with his production, ‘Hanami’, based on Wabi Sabi’s track of the same name. Furthermore, Tyler The Creator featured Late Again’s string-drenched ‘Take A Break’ in the campaign for his Men’s 2024 Capsule Collection for Louis Vuitton, with Pharrell Williams as Creative Director. 2024 sees not only a drum-heavy joint venture with San Diego-based collective Drumetrics, but also his stage debut with concerts at the Stockholm Jazz Festival, with more to follow. It’s not been long since his debut, and yet one can't help but hope that Sven Wunder will never cease.