Christian Kjellvander // MUSIKZIMMER

In the organizer's words:

Following the acclaimed albums About Love and Loving Again and Hold Your Love Still, Christian Kjellvander returns with Ex Voto / The Silent Love - a quietly devastating and deeply intimate work that completes an unofficial trilogy exploring love in its most tender, conflicted and spiritual forms.

Originally conceived as an album of ten gentle, quiet country songs, Ex Voto gradually evolved into something more expansive. Yet the germ of that intention remains, pulsing gently beneath each track. The album begins with two stripped-down songs, evolves into a louder, more dynamic centerpiece and then drifts back into stillness, reflecting the emotional journey of its creation.

Like its predecessors, Ex Voto continues to explore themes of love, religion, the natural world and beauty, which Christian tackles with poetic precision and emotional depth. But this album goes deeper. It is more intimate, more raw. Christian was a different man when he began writing, and while the focus of his art remains constant, this personal transformation colors the entire album.

Recorded over a few days in an old summer house by the sea in the southernmost part of Sweden, the album captures the breath and silence of a room where no headphones were needed, where the vocals filtered into the room through a PA and every creak of the floorboards became part of the sound. The ghosts of every voice and every instrument pervade the multitracks like spirits lingering in a deep desert night. It's romantic and cinematic, a kind of small urban noir film transposed from the Texan hinterland to the Swedish coast.

At the heart of the album is Kjellvander's deep, expressive baritone voice and lyrical clarity, surrounded by a sparse but richly textured sonic palette: brush percussion, bass clarinet, plaintive cornet, rhodes, synthesizer and the haunting counterpoint of female vocals.