Hello!

I'm Paul. I'm a swedish artist living in Germany. I have been singing and playing keyboard since I was a kid but for some reason (lack of formal musical education) I went to art school and studied painting instead. I could never stop singing and writing though so about every five years some new music project popped up.

Right now I just finished an ambient album featuring nyckelharpa drones with the help of a Corona grant from the Culture Department of the government of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Nyckelharpa is this ancient viola with sympathetic resonance strings and wooden keys to hit the right notes that was not that uncommon in Europe in the middle ages, but only survived in my remote sylvanian region of Sweden. It's laden with some heavy traditional associations and it wasn't until I realized I could use it for more contemporary purposes that I finally started playing the instrument my grandpa among others fought to preserve.

In this project I have dived deep into the psalms, songs and popular dances that ordinary people would have recognized during the Thirty Years War, a time when the country of my origin invaded my country of residence. Being Swedish in the Catholic parts of Germany is to be blamed for the destruction of practically every village and castle you can lay your eyes on.

You can find the album Colossus on Bandcamp at https://paulsteenblake.bandcamp.com/album/colossus, and in a couple of weeks on iTunes and Spotify.