Interview: Peter Bjärgö

Date: 18/10/2025

Place: Wuppertal, Germany

If there's such a thing as a household name in our scene, then Peter Bjärgö certainly fits the bill. Over the past thirty years and ever since the golden age of Cold Meat Industry, this charismatic Swedish musician has been instrumental (excuse the pun) to a range of well-known bands, from Arcana, over Sophia, to Karjalan Sissit, not to mention his various side projects and one-off collaborations. In addition to all this, however, he has also had a very successful solo project under the auspices of Cyclic Law, which combines many of his influences into a singular vision, one that is typically much more introspective and melancholic than his other musical output. Therefore, I was overjoyed when I heard that he would perform at Phobos 2025 under his own name (in fact, it's probably what made me pull the trigger and attend) and thought it an excellent opportunity to connect with the artist behind the music and explore his solo musical output in more detail, which we did in the lead-up to his performance later that evening.

I started the conversation by promising to keep it exclusively focused on the solo project, in the interest of both time and sanity, since covering all of Peter's musical endeavours would have most likely turned it into a full-day interview. And yet, the thing I wanted to know the most was precisely why he felt the need to start a solo project all the way back in 2009, at a time when his other, already well-established bands were at the peak of their popularity.

I think I felt a bit trapped within the sound of Arcana at the time; I started composing material with which I wanted to move in another direction, but it wasn't obvious to me at first that it would end up as a solo project in its own right. I didn't have a clear concept for it at the time, but it just felt right and it was great to stand on my own two feet and do something completely on my own. Of course, it's still my work and I've had a lot of people compare the solo material to Arcana over the years, even if I've changed my own sound quite significantly between the different releases I've done over the years under my own name. Take the last album, for instance - it's obvious that I could never have pulled off that kind of sound with Arcana. I guess it all boils down to the artistic need for freedom.

Having many musical projects running in parallel is no easy feat, and I always wonder whether musicians have compartments in their mind for each project, or if they compose on an ad-hoc basis and work out later how to classify the output. This was an even more interesting conundrum in Peter's case.

To this day, I try to keep my creative mind a blank canvas. Even when I set out to compose music for a specific project - which is a necessity due to the required preparations and tools I need to work with - the result can still end up unexpected even to me. At the end of the day, my compositional process has very simple bases, such as coming up with a melody in my mind and then humming it into my phone so that I can work on it and develop it further in the studio. Other times, I just sit in the studio trying out different sounds, combinations and melodies, sometimes completing it on the spot, sometimes putting in aside to ferment for half a year before I pick it up again. There is no set approach, no formula of any kind that I feel I need to stick to.

This can be true even within a specific project. For instance, Peter's solo work has changed quite a bit over the years in terms of both sound and scope.

This is indeed true, and if you take the material I'm playing live tonight, you'll see that it differs quite a lot from any of my previous work yet again; in fact, I'm not even sure its studio version is going to end up released under my own name. I guess I'm always trying to do things better, to see what needs to be kept and what needs to be changed. At one point, I was even considering turning the solo project into a full-blown band, with a drummer and all, to make it more airy, more ambient and just bigger in a way. Sadly, during COVID, everyone crept back into their own studios and started working on other things, so my big plans have taken a back seat for now.

One peculiarity of Peter's solo work is the initial choice of record label. Even though he had already been involved with Cold Meat Industry, Cyclic Law and so on through his other projects, he chose to release the debut on the relatively obscure German label Kalinkaland Records.

The thing is, after I quit Cold Meat Industry, there weren't so many options around to release albums. I didn't know the guy from Kalinkaland personally, but I got introduced to him via some US connections, and he was really interested in signing Arcana - we eventually released Raspail through the label. I also sent him the material for A Wave of Bitterness that I already had at the time, and after some back-and-forth (mostly on whether it should be marketed as Arcana or not), he agreed to release that one as well under my own name. Despite good intentions, things didn't really work out with that label, neither for Arcana nor for my own solo project. It's a small label, very DIY in approach, and while I'm not an extremely demanding person, I do have clear ideas on how I want my work to be presented in terms of the quality of print, paper etc. I want the physical properties of my releases to be worthy of people's money and attention. So I left shortly afterwards for the calmer waters of Cyclic Law.

We had already agreed that even Peter's solo work has differed quite a lot from album to album. For instance, on the debut A Wave of Bitterness, Eastern-type rhythms were a prominent element, only to disappear for a while before the last album The Translucency of Mind's Decay.

I think rhythm is an element that will always be present in some way in my work, because I love rhythm and playing around with it. It sets a certain mood in the music which always comes back in some way or form. Take an album like Arcana's Le Serpent Rouge, for instance - you can tell that my solo debut was greatly influenced by that type of sound. I'm not a purist and I don't feel the need to use the same elements over and over again on every release, but yeah, my need to make use of rhythm comes and goes.

Speaking of things that come and go, one of the most fascinating features of Peter's solo work is a specific concept that first came to the fore on my favourite solo album of his, The Architecture of Melancholy. The last track, named simply Sleep Dep. Loop #1 (Dep. standing for deprivation), is one of the simplest, yet most impactful and dreamlike tracks I've ever heard, and judging by the number of plays the track has had on Last.fm, most people seem to agree with me. Part #2 was featured on the follow-up album Animus Retinentia, but the concept was discontinued afterwards.

Sleep Dep. Loop definitely started out as a concept, but as I said before, I try not to be a purist, so I abandoned it after two albums. It felt right at the time, as the songs are an actual result of sleep deprivation - I still struggle with sleeping issues - so in order to combat my insomnia, I started working on these tracks late at night. I'm not sure what caused it, but there was a special feel to them, and I liked the concept of closing the album with something that's not just a track, but a psychological theme and an idea that you can tie to the layout and the track titles. Even though I stopped after the first two tracks, there may always be a third one.

Now that we had mentioned both albums by name, it's true that the period between The Architecture of Melancholy and Animus Retinentia was the longest Peter has had between two solo releases.

I think I worked quite a lot with other projects at the time, and I suppose I was working on myself even more. There are times when I simply don't feel the need to write much; it's not like a planned break from music or anything, it just happens on its own. For instance, it's been a while now since my last solo album as well. Speaking about that specific period, though, I was spending a lot of time working on other people's albums, and I was still active with Arcana back then as well, so the solo thing simply fell aside for a moment. It's also fair to say that I'm not the most productive of people music-wise either. I need to be in the right state of mind to compose, and then I'm also extremely selective about what I release - I must have at least 300 song ideas that no one has ever heard and that I've done nothing with so far - so I need to be in the aforementioned right state of mind to pick up the songs and continue working with them until they are ready for release. At the moment, I'm elsewhere, but I might come back to my solo stuff at any moment - who knows? Certainly not me.

Speaking of unpredictability, Peter even went so far as to release two albums that were named simply Bjärgö instead of Peter Bjärgö, back in 2017 and 2018. This was a very different concept compared to the rest of his solo work, with track titles in Swedish and no vocals whatsoever. Both albums were self-released at the time and remain so to this day.

Indeed, those two albums were done in quite a short period of time; what's more, it was a very turbulent time in my life when I decided to just cut off most external influences. No live performances, no specific concept in mind - I just sat in my studio writing music without a particular purpose. I had more-or-less already wrapped up everything related to Arcana, which gave me the impetus to play around with small toys in my studio and create something unlimited by any constraints whatsoever. It's difficult to explain, but I just felt this impulse to create music without any higher purpose in mind, with no vision to release big, respected albums or anything similar. I just wanted this material to be released as-is, in digital form, and it felt very liberating at the time; just music floating around on the internet. I might release more stuff in this vein in the future, in fact.

I had to point out the irony in the fact that Peter wanted to release music under his own name to escape expectations tied to his bands at the time, only for the same thing to happen to his solo project as well. That said, he seemed to transcend this limitation to a certain extent with his latest solo album, The Translucency of Mind's Decay, which feels like the most complex work he's done to date, with compositions and a songwriting process seeming quite different versus anything he's done so far.

I can't exactly point my finger at what was different about this album. It just seems to me like I thought about all the aspects and all the elements more than before. On previous albums, I was quicker to record, to mix and to sort of just get it out in the wild. This time around, I had a pool of maybe 20 songs that were candidates for the album, and I really worked on almost all of them, not knowing which would eventually end up on the album and which would not. Ultimately, some were left out because I didn't feel like they fit the concept. Funnily enough, I was working on this material at the time when I wanted to switch to a full-time band, so I attached a lot of importance to this album and finally ended up having to work on it all alone. I didn't mind, as I still felt that the material was too good to put on halt and/or ditch, so I kept working on it on my own until I felt satisfied with the outcome. That makes me extremely proud of this release in particular. At face value, it seems quite straightforward, but if you nerd around it for a little bit, you start to realise how much complexity there is to it, with all the rhythms and other layers that aren't apparent at first, but add immense complexity to the album at the end of the day.

Despite the effort put into it, Peter's solo work isn't his only recent activity; he has also actively participated in a side project with Nicolas van Meirhaeghe of Empusae, where one half of the project composes the core of the music, and the other provides the topping, so to speak, only for the roles to be reversed afterwards.

This is the perfect example of a project done without a long-term plan in mind, but that you can somehow never put entirely to sleep. It was Nicolas who initiated it, being very eager to get some sort of collaboration going. At the time, I had a lot of discarded song ideas that didn't really fit my solo project, so I felt maybe this was an opportunity to use this material in a different context. I took the leap of faith, sent this material to Nicolas, he shaped it in his own way, and after a lot of conversations and some back-and-forth, it turned out to be a full-fleshed album in its own right. When the next one came along, the roles were almost reversed - I was elsewhere in my mind and didn't really have any concrete material to contribute, but Nicolas did, so he submitted it to me, and I added vocals and other features to it to somehow complete it. Before I knew it, it turned into the second album, and so our almost sporadic creative project became a serious thing in its own right. In hindsight, it's fascinating how we completed each other's energies, with one half being more eager than the other at any given time, resulting in a perfect balance of creative flows.

Coming back to Peter's solo project, I had to admit I was a bit baffled by the fact that this usually prolific live musician hasn't had the opportunity to play live under his own name all that much.

I think the most honest answer to that is that I haven't received many offers thus far, partly due to the fact that I'm not actively looking out for offers to play, and partly because I don't have a booking manager or anything that would do this sort of thing for me. Nowadays I mostly play gigs where I know the organisers, trying not to turn it into another run-of-the-mill job. I like to keep things special in a way, and you can't do that when you start treating your music as a job and an active source of income.

At this point, I had to break the promise I had made at the start of the conversation - namely the one that I wouldn't ask any questions regarding Peter's other projects - because I was too curious about the status of Arcana. The project was officially put to sleep 13 years ago, and yet it has made an occasional live appearance here and there, so I needed to know if this may have rekindled the creative flame that fuelled the project for so long in the first place.

Active or not, Arcana is extremely dear to my heart, which is exactly why we have played certain one-off events since ending the band, first for CMI's 30-year-anniversary, and then for the 35-year-one. Therefore, I don't think I'll ever be able to let it go completely. So, to be fully transparent, I wouldn't say that the project is dead and buried as of now; in fact, it's likely that something will drop out of the blue, perhaps even in the short term. Just don't expect it to have the classic Arcana sound if and when it happens - we are not the same people we were 13 years ago, and neither should the band.