Cosmic disco king Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is master of all he surveys. Which, right now, is the idyllic Norwegian hamlet of Holmsbu with its snow-drenched vistas and chilly fjord. The perfect spot then for Ben Cardew to discover the secrets behind his pulsating, melancholic melodies. “It is really hard for me to make something that is really simple,” Lindstrøm explains…

Disco music typically conjures up images of warmth: of packed New York clubs, vast string orchestras playing shoulder to shoulder and sweat trickling down the back of bright satin shirts. The music of cosmic disco pioneer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, however, has always been different. 

The Norwegian producer’s work isn’t cold by any means. But it conjures up images of space – both in the cosmic and temporal sense – abstraction and elegance, a combination that makes a lot of sense when flying into Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport, the plane dipping its wings over vast swathes of empty space, covered enigmatically by the early onset of night.

In person, this sense of vague abstraction - of dance music once removed - makes sense too. Lindstrøm is tall, handsome and ever so slightly scruffy, his years only betrayed by a slight shock of white in his three-day beard. 

Despite spending two decades at the forefront of dance music - his breakthrough single ‘I Feel Space’ was released in 2005, after making his debut as Slow Supreme in 2000 – Hans-Peter is the kind of person you can imagine owning, rather than attending, Studio 54 back in its 70s heyday, a music fan too modest to push his way past the club’s typically serpentine queue. He gave up DJing 20 years ago and only occasionally plays live, avoiding night clubs in favour of hunkering down in the studio. 

We meet Lindstrøm in Oslo, where he has lived since 1999, on a bracing February day. The weather hovers somewhere around four degrees and there is a sharp wind gusting off the Oslofjord. “Are you feeling cold?” he asks, with a knowing grin, as we jump into his sleek and yet ecologically sound Volkswagen ID.4. “It’s not like this in the UK.”

Indeed, it is not. The winter has brought the most snow that the Norwegian capital has seen in years but by the time we arrive, heavy rain has largely seen it off, leaving treacherous swathes of ice. All the same, you can see people on the Oslo underground in full ski gear as they head off to the slopes on the outside of town.

Lindstrøm drives us to the small seaport village of Holmsbu, where he has recently installed his studio, a world away from the bustle of the Norwegian capital. He mentions that he is thinking of moving to Holmsbu permanently, from his current home in Oslo, now that his children are getting older. It would, he explains, be a perfect place to concentrate on his music.

In summer, the village (population 309, although it seems bigger) looks gorgeous – wooden buildings stretch along the waterfront, nestled among what look like Christmas trees, a vision of Norwegian solace. In winter, though, Holmsbu is even more beautiful. Lindstrøm shows us some photos he took a few weeks before, of the light radiating fuzzy wellness off snow-laden trees and the sun crashing dramatically into the fjord. It looks utterly idyllic; the kind of place a children’s author might invent to illustrate a tale of Santa’s teenage helpers.

It appears the apposite location for Lindstrøm to have his studio, two rooms artfully piled to the ceiling with vintage synths and drum machines. Everywhere you look there is electronic music history: a LinnDrum here; a Vocoder there, a Moog over there, all so beautifully dusted it feels almost sacrilegious to look at them. Here, in Holmsbu, we surely find the reflection of Lindstrøm’s heart-rending melodies, his gorgeous sonic architecture, his acute sense of space, of disco stretched out and unfolded? 

Like the true artist he is, Lindstrøm doesn’t necessarily agree, pointing out that he has made most of this music in Oslo, only producing one remix since moving his studio to Holmsbu.

“When I made some of those long tracks that I have been recognised for, like the half-hour track ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ (which opens his classic 2008 debut album of the same name) I was still in the city, in a small apartment,” he says, with a shy-sounding laugh. “Then again, I grew up in an apartment that is very similar to here (near Stavanger, Norway’s third largest city), with a house by the sea, with lots of space. When we were kids, we were running around, there were no fences, nobody said we couldn’t go there.

“I guess one of the reasons that I did this [move to Holmsbu] is to find out if the environment affects the music in a good or a bad way,” he adds. “I really enjoy being here, this view is very different from the city. I believe that if I am happy then maybe the music is changed by that. If I am happy here, maybe the music will be better or the sound will be better.”

If the environment doesn’t necessarily influence his sound, what about the idea that there is something very Norwegian about his music? Can it really be a coincidence that so many of the greatest cosmic disco producers of the last two decades – from Prins Thomas to Todd Terje to Bjørn Torske – call Norway home?

“That’s hard for me to judge,” he replies, after a thoughtful pause. “Some people say the [Norwegian] sound is melancholic and it’s cold, synths and stuff. You can find that in other countries. But I am sure the weather and climate and everything does affect our music.”

Fans of that delicious Lindstrøm melancholy will find a lot to love in his most recent album, 2023’s ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’. The name, sadly, means nothing, its enigmatic title basically a placeholder. The new record has been described as a call back to Lindstrøm’s earlier work, notably his debut album, thanks to its elongated space disco grooves, coming after the largely beat-free, elliptical hardware jams of 2019’s ‘On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever’, an album birthed in an Art Centre commission that felt like it was birthed in an Art Centre commission. And that’s not a slight.

But is ‘Everyone Else…’ merely a return to type? The album might restore the dancefloor friendly uplift of his earlier work – ‘Syreen’ and ‘The Rind’ have a particular raw disco energy, while the imperial key changes on ‘Nightswim’ could send a club crowd nuts – but the tone is slightly different, more chaotic and improvised, more human than cosmic.

Lindstrøm agrees. “It’s really important for me to challenge myself and to do something different every time. With my new album, of last year, it’s kind of like a return to some of the sounds that I was doing previously. But, with ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’, it was new for me to make that kind of music again. It felt right to do it like that. It’s the same in a way but it’s different. I couldn’t possibly make the music that I made in 2005 and 2006 now, because I am thinking differently. And I know that I couldn’t have made ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’ in 2005. If there are similarities in the music, maybe that’s the Lindstrøm factor.”

He’s right, of course. Lindstrøm’s music, always feels perfectly Lindstrøm (Lindstrømian, maybe? Lindstrømish?), whether he is composing sturdily melancholic dancefloor bombs, like ‘I Feel Space’, forging bombastic monuments to prog (2012’s ‘Six Cups of Rebel’, an album he once compared to Lou Reed’s legendarily abstruse ‘Metal Machine Music’) or penning perfect Motown pop music with Christabelle (on the 2010 album ‘No One Is Cool’).

Key to this Lindstrøm factor is his focus on chords and melody. ‘I Feel Space’, for example, is marked by a delicious central riff – a big fucking Alpine sweep of a melody, like skiing on heart break – and ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger” has a couple of melodious gems, from the serpentine melancholy of ‘Nightswim’ to the title track’s classical trembling, like disco for funerals.

It turns out that Lindstrøm’s affection for melody runs deep, reflecting a youth spent in choirs, folk, country and heavy metal groups in his native Stavanger, rather than gallivanting around Oslo’s night clubs.

“I started in this gospel choir when I was 12, maybe, playing piano. And it is all about chords and chord changes and not about reading sheet music,” he explains. “When I started getting into electronic music, trying to understand what it was all about, it was in the late-90s, kind of late, actually. I was 26, 27 and I didn’t understand why it was so focused on the bass and often just one note. Everything was very monotone, all about repetition and build ups and stuff.” 

He thumps the chair’s arm for emphasis as he talks. “It was so different to the music I had been exposed to,” he continues, “pop music from the 80s and the music I played in my band, the rock music. And I decided to try to bring in some of the chords and the melodies. After a while I discovered that in the early disco days there were a lot of chords, a lot of orchestrated [parts].”

Lindstrøm is no dance snob or disco purist – he says he has a great deal of respect for people who make music with little to no formal instruction – but the simple loop and rhythm-based approach of much dance music was never for him. “A lot of the DJs trying to make music didn’t come from a musical background, at least in Oslo,” he says. “They didn’t use chords or melodies like I wanted to do.”

“I still think like that!” he adds. The chair is getting quite a thumping now, as he warms to his theme. “It is really hard for me to make something that is really simple, to make a song with just one chord progression.” 

Indeed, the title track of “Everyone Else Is a Stranger”, which closes the album in a dramatic, elegiac fashion, sounds like it could belong in the gospel choir where a teenage Lindstrøm honed his skills. He seems pleased with the comparison. “I am pretty sure there has been a lot of church music in the back of my head, since I grew up in that kind of environment,” he says. 

“Many of the Norwegian psalms are based on Norwegian folk music,” he continues. “Church music has a focus on chords because it is played on the church organ. And what it can do is change chords and build up. And that is, in a way, what I am doing on that track. The chords are building and building then starting over again. It is a Shepard tone (an auditory illusion of a tone that appears to continually ascend in pitch). I wanted to have the feeling of building and building, without it stopping.”

For all that God is – allegedly – a DJ, Norwegian psalms are far from the typical influences of a successful electronic music producer. While driving to Holmsbu, Lindstrøm, now 51, noted that he rarely goes out these days although he’s starting to get the itch again. How about kitchen dancing? Does he like to cut loose at home when no one is around?

He laughs. “Sometimes when I get excited when I am making music, I do some dancing,” he says, a glint in his eye. “And also, sometimes I close the door and go into the next room and imagine there is a club in there and I am outside and listening. Does it sound good?”

Does he worry though, that he is missing out on something by not hearing electronic music in the clubs, by being one step removed from the DJs and dancing. He thinks about it for a while before replying. 

“If I were a DJ, I would probably have more of the tools to make music that would work perfectly in a club,” he says. “If you are a DJ, you have to listen to a lot of music and pick music that is not your own. You get exposed to it by playing it in different clubs. ‘This sounds good. This is a good build up or this is a good kick drum.’ Or whatever. But it is maybe a good thing that I am not exposed to that DJ culture… Maybe I am freer to do all kinds of stuff.”

“With this album,” he adds, referring to ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’, “I was trying to make music that hopefully some of the more experimental DJs or eclectic DJs will play in clubs. But I got feedback from a friend who is a DJ, who told me that: ‘I really love your new album. But it is impossible to play it out!” And he laughs heartily.

That’s their loss of course – but ours too. Lindstrøm’s music may not be made for clubs; but the day there is no room on our dancefloors for the escalating key-change rush of ‘Syreen’, the woozy opening melody of ‘Nightswim’ or the celestial build of ‘Everyone Else Is a Stranger’ is the day clubbing gets boxed in and boring.

As we leave Holmsbu the sun is setting over the fjord, sending a fiery reflection over Lindstrøm’s front room like a cosmic disco ball in the sky. Whatever DJs might think about the elegant quirks of his new album, it looks like the gods of disco are smiling on Lindstrøm. As long as humans have ears and hearts have emotions, you know he is going to be just fine. 

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This article first appeared in issue 5 of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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