What does one do when one can’t find answers themselves? You look for help. And so recently, one Coste Apetrea carved out some time out of his day to help yours truly try to get some semblance of history behind the late Björn Holm. For a long time I put aside writing about Björn, for lack of doing a disservice towards his work on Bortom Gränsernas Hav and Änglarna Ger Mej Ingen Ro two little-known Balearic masterpieces of the Swedish type. Sometimes there’s only so much you can discover. I did not want to be the one sharing misinformation when his work merited much more respect. However, with Coste’s info this is what was discovered.
Björn’s life began in the outskirts of southern Sweden in the small rural village of Västra Skrävlinge just outside of Malmö. Even for those that knew him, little of his personal life was openly shared with others. Coste related to me how mercurial and unmoored, Björn could be. Drawn to the music of singer-songwriters from the ‘70s, Björn translated a very brief turn as a folk performer into demos that he shopped around various record labels.
Coste, who would come to produce Björn’s debut, at first didn’t know how to handle the taciturn artist he was tasked with. Coste was the one with a prestige name in the situation. Either as a member of the hugely popular Swedish prog group Samla Mammas Manna, or working with Jukka Tolonen, Coste had a proven record of finding ways to make leftfield groups “pop”.
Somehow, this experimental musician had gotten various music instrument companies like Roland, Fairlight, and others to use his work to show off the extent of such technology, providing him with the latest instruments literally unheard anywhere else. As for Björn, he was this non-entity folkie who came in with music inspired by Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and other singer-songwriters that were no longer in vogue. Gifted in singing but not entirely fond of the star-making machinery, he struggled finding a sound to flesh out his music.
In the early ‘80s the chief of Sonet, the large Swedish record label, felt confident enough in Coste to afford him the ability to branch out as a pop producer. Coste was wise enough by then to have the capability to record everything in his own professional bedroom studio, separating himself out as much as possible from label hands, if need be.
When Coste began working in this realm of pop music it was more of an experiment to see how far he could take the technology he’d gather over time, in a realm that “appeared” unexplored in Sweden. Coste wanted to produce hits, in only the way he knew how. Björn wanted hits but seemed impervious to bending towards the more au courant sound Coste stressed for him to employ. Somehow, this loggerhead relationship bore fruits — as short lived as it was.
During the recording sessions Björn would come in with sketches of deeply emotive songs like “Invitation To The Blues” or “Anna” and Coste would work on his own wavelength to create huge beat-driven electronic arrangements that were neither here nor there. In Uppsala, for that spell where Coste tried to coax Björn from his cocoon, the studio desk was where Björn’s sad music took on life as this mercurial music that seemed made from no obvious influence.
Coste wouldn’t admit as much, but I think the actual music forming the bed of Björn’s album appears to come from Coste’s own dip into electronic pop music. An earlier Coste solo release “Jojja Ja Ja” proved a bit of a blueprint for this direction. Propelled by drum machines and showing obvious Latin and jazz influences, embryonic stages of Bortom Gränsernas Hav hovered in that little touched region of danceable, emotive, and hooky. Although Coste’s tastes might not have aligned with the direction Björn wanted to take, he did admire the lyricism and willingness Björn left open to use his original songs as a tabula rasa for something that could be more universal between them.
What we get to hear is an album that kicks off starting like a midtempo soulful thing, as “Du Som Söker” does, shift in mood to yearning quasi-ambient, quasi-jazz funk things that place songs like “Nu Gäller Livet” outside the realm of New Wave and AOR. They couldn’t figure out what the audience was. Why would they have? A song like “Tid Att Stå Stilla”, released a year before in 1983, proved that as much as Björn belabored over what Coste was doing to his music, it was exactly what others wanted to hear played in clubs and on the radio (something now foreign to most singer-songwriters of the early ‘80s).
When Bortom Gränsernas Hav (or Beyond The Limit, The Sea) was finished and released in 1984 Sonet didn’t quite know what to do with it. Björn didn’t know how to promote it or even if he wanted to. Coste was game to help him perform it but Björn seemed adverse to baring his heart all over synthesizers on stage. Coste, gamely, that part of his vision. Björn would perform a hard-nosed version of it, if ever he performed it live, losing half the audience who came to see him for this more sonically simpatico take (as heard on the radio).
Impossible to forget songs like “Se Mej” use bright cameos by Jukka Tolonen band saxophonist Christer Eklund to promote this forlorn, bluesy, synth pop that Coste latched onto for Björn’s ballads. “Stockholm En Vanlig Kväll” features driving adult contemporary that has a quiet swing to it. “Så Lite Man Vet” is a gorgeous piano torch song that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Neil Young record.
However, would Neil Young ever touch on something like the reworked “Tid Att Stå Stilla”? Joni did her best a year before, in 1983 and after (sandwiching her own electronic experiments), but unfortunately “wild critics run free”. Here Coste does the impossible and places Björn’s bittersweet, lilting voice in the atmosphere it was made for — in a time it wasn’t meant for. A disco song for discos that don’t exist, it distilled Björn’s pining to its bare essence placing it in music of a universal dance. “Anna” does the same, reimagining what was a spare piano ballad into a Baltic sonority of sweeping emotion. Sunlight peeks its head but vast swathes of gray-tinged blue skies — much like the album cover — paint a sadder picture behind the music.
Coste would remain in touch with Björn sporadically in the future. Outside of the hit single, Bortom Gränsernas Hav would remain this little known oddball labor of love that fit no scene, And a planned sophomore release almost didn’t come to be as Björn tried to shop elsewhere for someone more aligned towards his stripped down vision. We’ll pick up that story later, though.
However, here (perhaps), they stumbled into greatness. Perhaps greatness just needed to dot more I’s and cross more T’s, but for those who remember Bortom Gränsernas Hav it’s remembered fondly as a work of art done in spite of the insecurity of all of those involved. We heard it ourselves. In the end, in uncertain times (those never end, do they?) we need more music like this that is uncertain of what it is or what it did but does it, regardless. The question for us is: Do y’all get it now?