Hägerstrand – Sjögräs Vol. 3

With Sjögräs Vol.3 Peter Hägerstrand continues his exploration of the beauty of simplicity, of emotional story telling and of atmospheric music. It’s very much a personal coming of age project in the sense that it’s a distillation of all that he has worked through over the years. It’s all about stripping away the fluff and getting back to the core of the music, the music itself, the musical language and the story. The inspiration comes from photographs in old family albums and the lyrics are essentially little stories which are full of the kind of dreamy imagery you’d expect from such a source. There’s something very special about the way he deals with the material, the way he can take something so personal, something from his own life and from the lives of so many of his family members, and somehow make it resonate with the listener.

Sjögräs Vol.3 over five tracks is a very intimate musical world indeed, with a very cinematic film score feel to the arrangements. There’s no doubt that the rock DNA is very much still there in the music. Peter Hägerstrand is on vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion and programming. Ella Grüssner Cromwell-Morgan is on vocals, Pia Manns on violin and viola and Sarah Devoyon on cello. The tracklist is Ensam, Att simma, Kvinna, Hår and Vatten vatten. A number of the pieces are some of the most personal that Peter has written and will be key pieces in the forthcoming multimedia performance Sjögräs which premieres 23 January 2027. The performance will be a very different experience to the music alone.

Peter Hägerstrand has spent a good chunk of his life working in all sorts of musical spheres as a performer and composer. He’s done a lot of touring and released records with Gycklarnas Afton, Good Evening Manchester and Jupiter Park. He’s also composed theatre music for a number of the major Nordic national stages and has done a number of film scores. His work on The Disciple (Finland’s Oscar entry in 2014) is a good example of the kind of music that can really work in tandem with a very strong visual narrative. He won the Sally Salminen Prize in 2017 and was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2021. He continues to develop his own voice as an artist and it’s a very distinct one. With Sjögräs Vol. 3 he provides a very considered piece of work which is full of memories, family history and the quiet contemplation of the everyday. It’s a case of the most potent music sometimes being in the most simple of arrangements.

It’s very personal actually but I think it’s in the most personal of things that you can touch the most people.