Scandinavia 2024

Two weeks. One in Oslo. One in Stockholm.

My fiancée and I went to Scandinavia partly to travel together and partly to see whether this part of the world might be somewhere we could imagine living someday. I also wanted to know how it would feel to make music there.

I travelled with nothing but my computer and headphones. Between travelling, sightseeing and meals, I made music whenever I could. At the same time, I was filming, editing and publishing the demos while the trip was still happening, trying to document the experience from inside it rather than reconstructing it afterwards.

We flew from Porto to Stockholm, spent a couple of hours in the city center, then boarded a train to Oslo, where we would spend our first week. During that journey, moving through the darkness between Sweden and Norway, I started "Altered Levels". It grew out of the feeling of being in motion, travelling between countries before the trip had even properly begun.

Arriving in Oslo felt different. Whether that came from the place itself or from years of looking forward to Norway, I immediately wanted to explore, film, record sounds and make music. Most of what I created there leaned towards progressive house - bright, forward-moving and unusually effortless. The first demo I finished in Oslo was "Trafikklys", Norwegian for "traffic lights". It began with a recording of a pedestrian crossing signal, which became the rhythmic foundation of the track. It was one of the first moments when the city found its way into the music.

One morning, we took one of the local ferries through the Oslofjord, travelling between the nearby islands as part of the city's public transport system. We spent hours on the water, seeing Oslo from a different perspective and loved every minute of it. Later that day, we visited Deichman Library, which quickly became one of my favourite places from the trip. Seeing so many people quietly reading, studying and building their own projects made me want to work too. While Raquel read, I opened FL Studio and started "Deep Waters", still carrying the feeling of the fjords.

Oslo also became important to me for a more personal reason. On a small, empty beach in Tjuvholmen, in a completely unexpected moment, I proposed. I'd been thinking about it for some time, but not there and not like that. It just felt right.

After a week, we returned to Stockholm by train. This time we stayed in a suburb southwest of the city. It wasn't quite the countryside we'd imagined, but it was peaceful. It snowed almost every day. We wandered through the neighbourhood, spent time in a nearby park, fed ducks we probably weren't supposed to feed and occasionally took the metro into the city center. One place I had wanted to visit for years was the Avicii Experience. Avicii has been one of the biggest musical influences in my life.

On the final day, while waiting at Stockholm Arlanda Airport for our flight home, I opened my computer simply because I felt like making something. "Through Time" began without any particular idea. Halfway through, I found myself thinking about the Avicii Experience we'd visited a couple of days earlier and naturally started introducing details that reminded me of him. The track gradually became my own quiet way of thanking him for the influence his music had on me.

By the time we returned to Porto, I'd produced, filmed, edited and published four demos while travelling through Scandinavia.

I left knowing I loved it - the cities, the pace, the cold air and the way I felt while I was there.

That journey became inseparable from the music.