My first job in a recording studio was a good 30 years ago. I had gotten to know a guy who had a studio and after he realised I was pretty good at arranging music, he one day pulled out his wallet, old school music biz stylee, and offered me £35 to hang around for 10 hours and chip in where I could. 

“You mean I get paid too?” I thought grinning from ear to ear as I shook his hand. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Fast forward a few years, I was gaining experience and becoming a pro. We had worked on a few major label albums but I slowly grew dissatisfied with the job. The rent still needed paying but I figured I was destined for greater things although exactly what those great things were I wasn’t entirely sure.

As it was, destiny took care of that little matter for me in a rather undignified and abrupt manner when I got fired, except ‘they forgot to tell me’ but I figured that out very slowly when the phone stopped ringing.

Now I was faced with another problem, ‘how to pay the afore-mentioned bills’ and one day, while thoroughly depressed, I dragged myself down to the bank to see what the situation looked like and to my surprise someone had generously deposited some funds for some music I had written. 

Those funds were simply referred to as ‘royalties’, something I had heard of but never actually seen before. Imagine: someone out there in the big wide world had somehow found my track and said ‘yeah we’ll have some of that’. Funny how quickly misery can lift in the presence of good news.

I’ve since worked with Universal Music, BMG plus a few underrated indies. Some tracks have been used in tv series like Pretty Little Liars, Blue Bloods, BBC, ITV, MTV, CBS, NBC etc. But the most successful ones have often been those that go almost undetected while they quietly and consistently over time gather momentum.

But I hear you say ‘money isn’t everything’ and you’re right, but at least I now knew I could write music. I still had this dream of writing real music from the depths of my battered soul, something which wasn’t about the business or to fulfil some sort of need in the marketplace and so gradually I started putting ideas down. 

Some tracks were terrible, almost amateurish, partly because I was indignant and refused to use anything other than real instruments/synths and I reasoned that with my years of experience surely crafting tracks should be a walk in the park. It wasn’t and I had to contend with the fact that I was once again a complete beginner which I’ve now come to view as ‘the most interesting state of being’. 

With persistence I ended up with 5 tracks that hit all my aural sweet spots blending my Scandinavian roots with electronic elements. Have a listen here:

https://peterlarsen.bandcamp.com/album/polychrome-ep