Weird and Wonderful: Inside the Mind of El Huervo
What goes on in his mind is a strange pleasure to behold. Chasing nightmares, swinging swords and coming to terms with his past lives through his art, Niklas Åkerblad (aka El Huervo) lives in a vivid internal universe of his seemingly nonstop creations. Vivid, in his case, is equal parts beautiful and horrifying, split between his Technicolor paintings and drawings of violent creatures and ghouls on one hand, and his contemplative, moody soundscapes on the other.
The prolific Swedish artist got his start in the gaming business, hand-painting graphics and penning soundtracks. From the beginning, his unique approach to just about everything gained him praise and led to large-scale, highly successful collaborations such as the retro-fantastic Hotline Miami and the single from its soundtrack, “Daisuke.” Åkerblad recently wrapped up Else Heart Break—described as “a game about friendship, love and technology in a place where bits have replaced atoms”—and a new album called Vandereer.
Heavily influenced by Åkerblad’s gaming savvy, the almost meditative, beat-driven Vandereer evokes rainy days and lazy clouds as easily as it pulls your mind through an introspective, glitched journey that is as joyful (as felt throughout “Carried”) as it is edgy and gently ominous (through “Irreversible”).
Åkerblad’s natural polarity works wonders for his creative current, as he almost effortlessly seems able to pull many opposites under one creative roof. With his first pressing of Vandereer already sold out in clear vinyl on Swedish Columbia, we managed to keep Åkerblad still for just long enough to discuss his art and music before he left to hole himself up for three weeks to paint in the Swiss Alps. Read on and learn how one young Swedish tracker nerd managed to fight his internal demons and create some of the world’s most bizarrely wonderful art.
What was your start with music?
I made music for an iPhone game, and Shelby [Cinca of Swedish Columbia] asked me if I wanted to release it. It was originally just a way to get it on Bandcamp and Spotify. That was in 2010. My real start, though, was in 1997, with tracker music. I was a young teenager. It was a scene on the internet back then, like MOD tracker and DOS-based sequencers. Most of these people came together at a site called Trax in Space. The neat thing was that if you downloaded a track, you would instantly get all instruments in it. Now, people are doing that anyhow, as it’s the same with Ableton Live and FruityLoops (FL Studio). Sweden was really pro-internet for the times, and we had many cheap solutions available to us to get online. My dad is a huge gadget addict, so he was an early adopter of brining the internet home.
How did you find your place at Swedish Columbia?
Shelby [Cinca] and I had friends in common. I just met him, and we had the same weird brain. It just clicked.
And what kind of weird brain is that?
A weird brain is subjective, I guess. But you walk around with this constant feeling that you’re weird, and you grow up and you think it will go away, and it just doesn’t. I started drawing in kindergarten. I was drawing these monsters, and they were all menacing and covered in blood. The teachers at the school were alarmed and asked my mother if we had problems at home. We didn’t. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that it takes away the pain in my stomach. Life is chaotic, and that’s okay, you know. If a kid is drawing something out, it probably means everything is okay. Perhaps I was an early adopter of emo, too!
There is a surprising difference between your art and music. The former is menacing and the latter somehow meditative. How are the two sides of expression reconciled inside you?
I have a lot of secret stuff online, and some of the music is menacing, too. I don’t think too much about the correlations between the art and music and just try and go with a meditative flow. I think the universe is medicine and that human beings are viruses with shoes. I read a lot of H. P. Lovecraft and am fascinated with the concept of cosmic terror. I believe there is a menacing oppression to life, but I also believe that there is much beauty to it, too. What I am trying to do is mash those two concepts together.
I hate this whole happy-happy thing going on in the mainstream culture. Life is full of dualities. Interesting and beautiful things come from contrast. It’s important to have both sides, and also important to not tip too much into one side and keep a balance.
Would you call yourself hyperactive?
My brain is also all over the place, and that can be an issue sometimes. For me, the pictures and the music are a way to remain calm. Without them, I would just do a lot of drugs and go totally crazy. Unfortunately for me, though, even when I do go crazy and do too many drugs, my mind never really manages to let go. It’s a little sad to have to look for that detachment and not be able to find it! So, I have my art and music and the games. I always had this allergy to authority; that sort of helps. If someone tries to tell me what to do, it only works in their favor if I feel it’s fair. I feel that the universe is vast and anything can happen. There are no rules at all; nothing really matters. You’re blessed with the consciousness and existence, and it’s your duty to make the best of it—and to not bomb anybody in the process.
Your music is clearly driven by your experience in gaming. How did you find success in that third leg of your creativity?
I started out with video games. All I wanted to do was draw, but my mom told me I had to get a job. I tried and failed and got fired all the time. I tried many times and kept failing, and then she said, okay, maybe I should go to art school. But I didn’t want that, either, because they wanted to teach you rules and constraint to art; so, I figured I could try video games. I always loved them and found a school that taught computer graphics in games. I applied and got in and spent three years in that school and became friends with other people who were quite serious about making games.
I ended up meeting Erik Svedäng there, with whom I would go on to work. From there, I knew I just wanted to make art and be free. Society wasn’t really working for me. It got to the point where I wanted to kill myself. It wasn’t a good scene. But I went back to Erik, and we made an iPhone game. It is called Kometen, which means “comment” in Swedish.
How did Kometen lead to huge gaming success, such as your collaborations with Hotline Miami?
I decided that I would make the graphics by hand, so I did watercolor and scanned it. It was a hit. Erik then applied for a grant with the Nordic Game Program to get the money to do the project. We thought it would take a year or two, but it took five, and the game was released this past September. All the while doing everything else, I was working full-time on another game called Else Heart Break.
With Hotline Miami, I made the music and the cover for it. It’s a huge deal in the gaming world. It really helped my career the most of all in one single push. There was a song called “Daisuke” for that game that became a hit and helped make people aware of my existence.
What is the inspiration behind, for lack of a better term, the almost Mexican-like bent to your paintings and drawings?
If you want to get weird, I think it just may be past lives haunting me, and I really used to be into Japanese culture. I’m getting back into that again, so I feel the so-called “Mexican era” is almost over. I’ve been getting into nightmares, too, so I’m painting portraits of these nightmare hunters, and I want to get to know them. I was just in Japan and bought tons of old and new Japanese art books, and I want to get back to that. I’ve been feeling that, too. I was just there. I’ve wanted to go there since I was eight years old.
What do you have coming up now that your album is out?
I’ve worked very hard for the past eight years, so I’m looking forward to just painting. I actually just rented a place in the Swiss Alps for three weeks, so I can just go there and paint and paint. I’m going to play a show in Berlin at a game festival called Amaze in April. I’ve been gearing up with Dennis Wedin, my accomplice, to make it something huge. He’s one of the Hotline Miami collaborators.
I’m also training with my katana (samurai) sword. You learn how to do the moves without cutting yourself, basically, so that’s the discipline. Body control and physical control are key with good painting. Playing an instrument is the same.
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