One of my first friends to move to NYC
more than ten years ago
was Alexi Delano, DJ and music producer.

We met up and had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant
in the neighborhood where he used to live
back in the days when the gangs and drug dealers
still ruled the streets of Manhattan.

He told me how he had been nervous at first
only to later find that the thugs looked after
and often protected those who lived on the block.
They even made sure his girlfriend wasn't bothered
when she came through the neighborhood late at night.

Nowadays all of NYC is pretty much cleaned up.
Some are still overcome with romantic nostalgia
and get a dreamy, far away stare
while thinking back on the days
when you could still get properly mugged on the street.



One of my dearest and most sincere supporters in NYC
is Jeffrey Capshew.
Jeff has been in book sales for over twenty years,
He's the VP at Macmillan, one of the major book publishers in the States,
and also happens to be an earnest, deeply passionate music lover.
Whenever I upload new songs on Myspace or videos on Youtube
Jeff is quick to notice, write a few lines and give me honest feedback.

Now we finally got to meet in person
and it felt like we've known eachother for years.
Which is true in some odd way, thanx to the internet.

We spent hours with Jeff's giant music collection
filling up a wall in a spacious and beautiful Manhattan flat.
And among his many hundreds of CD's I had my very own section.
There were everything from my experimental phase,
the Tupilaq's, Yeti's and the Solaroid
to the violently rapturous, hard rocking Enter the Hunt.
I even found a single with DIVE,
mine and Erik Holmberg's group from the nineties,
that I had never seen before.

I picked it up, touching and reading the cover.
Then I looked up at the many shelves of CD's before me.
And suddenly it occurred
that not only had my music managed to travel the distance,
reaching someone on the other side of the world
but it had also come to stand out
as one of his five most dear items
in a carefully assembled collection of amazing music.
It was a strange and humbling thought.



Jeffrey's stereo looked like something out of a Star Trek movie.
It costs as much as my Stockholm appartment.
Normally I wouldn't want to listen to my own stuff
but this time I had the chance to hear
what my productions would sound like
on a state of the art hifi equipment.
And it worked. Which is almost a bit of a surprise
when thinking that the equipment with which I crafted the works
isn't anywhere nearly as fancy.
I expected all the flaws and shortcomings to be revealed.
But it sounded good.

Later a somewhat embarrased Jeff admitted
to having at least two copies of everything I've released.
You gotta be kidding, I said.
- Nope.
His excuse was that he simply needed some good music
over at his office in midtown as well.

The world is strange and beautiful indeed.