What kind of music do you play?
I often get this question: What kind of music do you play?
I’ve been doing this for a while - we started the band in 2002 - and over the years I must have been in that conversation hundreds of times. Someone asks what I do, I say I work with music, that I compose and play and manage my band the best I can. Oh, so what kind of music do you play?
And this is the point where I always pause a tiny bit too long before answering, my thoughts spinning like the CERN accelerator while my eyes drift slowly around the room until they settle back into “eternal” mode. Then I mumble something about it being a bit hard to describe, but sort of a little bit of this, that and the other, with some odd meters and a twist of lemon and start clapping a 7/8 in 260 bpm.
The longer I’ve done this, the more unhelpful the question feels. And the answers too. Making more and more albums that each go somewhere different from the previous one doesn’t exactly simplify the situation.
But the world loves categories. And as a musician you’re expected to have a clean one-liner ready. This becomes painfully obvious at conferences like WOMEX (although that one is specifically for “world music”, so if you’re there you’re probably not playing puristic black metal) and SXSW and such. And of course I understand the need: people want some words to point in the general direction of what the music sounds like. But music is a different animal than architecture or colour schemes or food. It doesn’t behave well inside language. And it’s not always easy to describe. That’s the point.
Bastard Etno & Fictional World Music
In the early days of Afenginn, we used phrases like Fandens til folkemusik and folkemusik med smæk i - roughly “devilish folk music” and “folk music with a punch.” And then there was Bastard Etno. In Danish “bastard” often means a mixed-breed dog, and etno was a catch-all phrase used quite a lot in Finland at the time for folk/world-inspired stuff.
The music was energetic, odd-metered, a bit chaotic, with various “ethnic” flavours - not so much because of any deep authenticity or heritage, but because we liked the colours and the rhythmic challenge, and it was a lot of fun to play. More fun than really boring, anyway.
Around the same time the Finnish band Alamaailman Vasarat called their music fictional world music, which I absolutely loved. If you haven’t heard them, please do - especially the albums Huuro Kolkko and Valta. (Their mastermind, Stakula, tragically died in 2020. Far too early.) That phrase, fictional world music, made far more sense to me than any traditional genre tag. It pointed more to the imagination behind the music rather than the ingredients.
Our early music often sounded like folk, Balkan, Nordic… that kind of palette. And that universe was also very present on my CD and mp3 player at the time. I think I was probably drawing equally on was the surf-meets-punk instrumental universe of bands like Laika and the Cosmonauts and Man or Astro-Man?, mixed with Piazzolla, Hedningarna, and the classical music I was studying. My starting point was much closer to punk energy than to traditional folk, I would say.
Lux turning point
In 2011 I stopped drinking. Before that there had been a lot of partying and late nights. It wasn’t sustainable with the kind of life I wanted, or with the ambitions I had (and still have) for my music. And with that decision, the music changed too.
I’ve sometimes used composition deliberately as a way to frame or redirect my life. Lux is a good example. After some rather hectic years, I wanted more calmness and clarity, and I wanted the music to support that shift. I moved to the woods in Sweden for a couple of years to be closer to that energy. So I set out to write calmer, more “lyrical” music. With the hope that spending time in that world would spill over into my personal life as well.
I also didn’t want to be the 01:30 late-night-slot band anymore. I wanted to make music that could work at 19:30 in a concert hall. I wanted to go to bed at a human hour and wake up with my brain intact.
So with the release of Lux the music grew calmer, more lyrical, almost classical in pacing. Suddenly “bastard etno” or “Balkan punk” didn’t make that much sense anymore. It was more: chamber folk, neo-Nordic classical, post-something-something…
Hyphen hell: balkan-punk-chamber-folk-bastard-classical-prog
Lux was our fifth album. We’re now on our eighth. And over the years more labels and hyphens have piled up. Especially since each album took its own direction.
OPUS was a multicoloured double album shaped like a classical symphony with a homemade language.
Klingra was a introspective, clockwork-like classical structure for two pianos, two drummers, and two string quartets, all turning in cycles with the number 7 embedded everywhere.
And now Movements, which again leans into long-form architecture, but written for flow and physical listening.
In cooking terms, listing ingredients rarely tells you what a dish tastes like. It might tell you what’s in it, but not how it lands on the tongue, how it nurtures you or what kind of emotions and memories it evokes in you.
For listeners who haven’t followed closely, this journey has probably been confusing. To be honest, sometimes it’s confusing for us too. But I haven’t wanted to let the fear of confusing people dictate what music to make. I don’t want to write towards any genre description or expectation. That feels narrowing the creativity. Through politeness, more than censorship.
Inside the band, none of these genre questions matter too much anyway. We never really talk about them. Over twenty years we’ve built a kind of musical vocabulary: a specific sense of time, push and pull, gestures, transitions, unspoken rules, odd-meter instincts, and long-form arcs that shape both the albums and the concerts. You notice this especially when teaching workshops. Recently Ulrik and I taught four Afenginn pieces to twelve talented music students. It all went very well, and also revealed how much implicit knowledge is baked into what we do.
What I mean is: the external genre labels say far less about the music than the internal language we’ve developed inside the band. For us.
What genre is good for - and what not
I’m not anti-genre for the sake of it. Genres exist because they solve problems. Chesterton’s fence and evolutionary cultural theory and all that makes good sense to me.
For listeners, press, and bookers:
Genre is a map, a rough approximation of where the music lives. It helps people decide whether to click or move on. Without any tag at all, many people will never hear your work.
For musicians:
Genre can become a box we start decorating from the inside. Something we unconsciously try to live up to. And that’s rarely why anyone started making music in the first place.
So to sum it up, it seems like:
Genre can be good for finding music.
Genre can be destructive for making it.
So what DO I say when someone asks?
I’m still trying to find a phrase that feels remotely accurate, but I’ve accepted how slippery it is. If I try to describe it honestly, it becomes ridiculous:
“Long-form multicoloured tonal rhythmically infused Nordic-flavoured instrumental music with shifting meters - somewhere between Radiohead and Ravel and Beethoven and the Beatles - with classical and prog-like structures, folk-like and cinematic tonal material, and with a ’70s academic punk in the ascendant.”
Completely unusable, but in its uselessness, maybe also truer than a tidy genre word.
In Denmark all this music currently gets filed under “roots music,” which also doesn’t really hit the spot for us. New Nordic? Not really.
Maybe in twenty years it’ll be obvious what Afenginn was. Right now we’re in the middle of it and much more interested in what Afenginn is still becoming. But it’s hard to sell when you can’t describe it.
This is the first part of a rant about what kind of music we make. In the second part, we go deeper into the weeds.