Playing with different music in our headphones
Petter was in Norway and had injured his leg quite badly after slipping on a patch of ice high up in the mountains.
He's an avalanche expert and very experienced in high-altitude, cold environments. But this time, he'd had a serious accident and needed to be evacuated by helicopter.
You can get cold very quickly on a mountain when you're wearing running clothes.
Henry and I were playing at Petter's house without him, and we wanted to make something for him.
We also wanted to sound different from anything we'd played before.
So we came up with an experiment that we thought might suit Petter, who is adventurous, brave and always willing to try something new.
We both put on headphones, but instead of listening to each other, we listened to completely different music.
Henry was listening to some kind of twelve-bar blues.
I was listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations.
The idea was to make it difficult to hear what the other person was doing, while still trying to play together and with the music in our respective headphones.
We didn't rehearse or agree on what the result should sound like.
We simply started playing.
It felt like chaos in slow motion.
I was trying to respond to Bach, to Henry and to whatever my own hands were doing on the drums.
At some point, I couldn't cope with all the information coming into my head.
I threw off my headphones.
I remember that very clearly.
It was cold, dark and miserable outside when we recorded. A typical Swedish early winter.
The music has something of that atmosphere, too. It's quite dark, but above all it's a very peculiar piece of music.
I don't think we could ever play it again. We might be able to recreate the feeling of trying something similar, but not the actual music.
Experimental mountain rescue jazz
I made the video for Petter.
It uses general mountain-safety advice, which I turned into a kind of narrative poetry.
The video describes itself as:
A cautionary tale in the style of experimental mountain rescue jazz.
There are warnings about weather, mountains and injuries, mixed with images relating to mountain safety, including a helicopter rescue. I worked these into layers of old television static.
I liked taking practical safety advice and turning it into something rather different.
The funny thing was that several of Petter's colleagues seem to have seen the video.
And Petter liked the piece we made for him.
After a few listens, you begin to notice that there's a certain logic to the music.
A bit like a broken leg after a fall in the mountains.