Biography
Swedish composer, accordionist, and keyboardist Lars Hollmer earned widespread admiration from fans worldwide even as mainstream audiences largely overlooked him throughout his life, connecting with listeners spanning Europe, Asia, and North America. Though his long association with the eccentric Samla Mammas Manna often led observers to slot him among progressive rock musicians, his work fit equally well within folk, avant-garde, world, or classical realms. Listeners quickly grasp how such categories lost relevance once his singular artistic voice fused disparate influences into something distinctly his own. Warmth, closeness, and a childlike innocence—sometimes shaded by melancholy—offer a clearer lens on his output than rigid genre definitions. Certain pieces veered into unhinged territory through unusual instrumentation and irregular meters, yet the results remained melodic, approachable, and frequently captivating in their simplicity.
Lars Hollmer produced most of his recordings inside the Chickenhouse, the home studio he maintained outside Uppsala, Sweden. There the original lineup of Samla Mammas Manna gathered between 1969 and 1970 to lay down the group’s self-titled debut, which appeared in 1971. Hollmer handled keyboards for that session—though his earliest childhood instrument had been a zither, later transformed into a prepared zither after his grandmother presented it as a gift—alongside bassist Lars Krantz, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and percussionist Bebben Öberg. Guitarist Coste Apetrea entered the fold in 1972, and the quartet of Hollmer, Bruniusson, Krantz, and Apetrea issued Måltid the next year. Throughout the 1970s Hollmer’s reputation rested primarily on his contributions within the Samlas orbit, encompassing Klossa Knapitatet (1974) and Snorungarnas Symfoni, a 1976 release actually composed by American Gregory Fitzpatrick yet performed by the band. He also participated in the folk- and world-music quintet Ramlösa Kvällar during the late 1970s; that ensemble featured Apetrea together with saxophonist Ulf Wallander, trumpeter Kalle Eriksson, and percussionist Bill Öhrström, and it released Nights Without Frames in 1978. Notably, Hollmer’s first sustained work on accordion occurred with Ramlösa Kvällar.
Within the various Samlas configurations Hollmer served as co-composer and fusion-minded electric keyboardist—bearing a faint Canterbury imprint—without functioning as formal leader. The band blended prog and jazz-rock foundations with unpredictable elements that ranged from playful nonsense vocals to open-ended free improvisation, a sufficiently daring mixture that, after a brief disbandment and reformation as Zamla Mammaz Manna (with guitarist Eino Haapala stepping in for the temporarily absent Apetrea), placed the group alongside Henry Cow, Univers Zero, and Etron Fou Leloublan in the Rock in Opposition collective. During this phase the newly renamed Zamlas issued the double album Schlagerns Mystik/För Äldre Nybegynnare (1978), pairing one disc of folk- and prog-oriented songs with another of improvisations that drew especially strong praise from Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler.
Because Samla/Zamla LPs on the Silence label reached American listeners chiefly through specialty mail-order sources such as Wayside Music—still a reliable outlet for Hollmer material—many stateside fans first encountered Hollmer and his Samla/Zamla colleagues via their contributions to Fred Frith’s Gravity, issued domestically on Ralph Records, half of which was captured at the Chickenhouse in August 1979. That album merged the Henry Cow guitarist’s idiosyncratic explorations with a pronounced European folk-dance sensibility to which Hollmer and company supplied vital support. From March through June 1980 the Zamlas tracked and released Familjesprickor (also known as Family Cracks), described in the liner notes as music created “during a period of transition” and therefore “not as optimistic and happy as it used to be.” The record proved to be the final Zamlas appearance until Kaka surfaced in 1998, following the band’s early-1990s reformation. In the early 1980s Hollmer redirected his energies toward solo projects that would extend across the subsequent two decades and beyond.
Once fractures within the Zamla family again dissolved the group, Hollmer and Haapala united with Denis Brely and Jan Garret—two members of eccentric French avant-popster Albert Marcoeur’s band—to launch the Von Zamla quartet, sustaining the thread of folk-tinged instrumental experimental and avant-prog rock while occasionally incorporating fusion and neo-classical touches. The first Von Zamla album, Zamlaranamma, appeared in 1982; the unit soon expanded into a sextet that no longer included Brely or Garret but added Univers Zero bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans and Munju bassist Wolfgang Salomon. This lineup toured Europe and recorded No Make Up! at the Chickenhouse during May and August 1983. As of the late 2000s the most widely circulated document of Von Zamla remains the live CD 1983, captured in Bremen and issued by Cuneiform in 1999. In the enthusiastic liner notes Hollmer recalled that the band traveled by bus and performed on an enormous array of instruments—keyboards, guitar, bass, accordion, melodica, drums, glockenspiel, bassoon, oboe, English horn, ring modulator, plus homemade plates, metal pin-filled cans, and bottles of varying kinds.
Although Hollmer wrote that Von Zamla “had TREMENDOUS FUN!!,” he was simultaneously establishing himself through independent solo work, beginning with XII Sibiriska Cyklar, which he recorded entirely alone at the Chickenhouse across June and October 1980 and March 1981. (Von Zamla disbanded in fall 1984, briefly reconvened with a changed lineup in 1985, then split permanently.) The album contains the two-and-a-half-minute “Boeves Psalm,” an homage to his late uncle Edvard that stands among Lars’s most celebrated and cherished pieces for its straightforward beauty and charm. Fellow accordionist, friend, and collaborator Guy Klucevsek called “Boeves Psalm” “one of the most beautiful melodies ever written,” while composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny observed that the “delightful song” employs a “deceptive cadence with a Mozart feel.”
XII Sibiriska Cyklar was succeeded in 1982 by Vill du Hora Mer, the inaugural release on Hollmer’s own KRAX imprint, followed by Från Natt Idag in 1983 and Tonöga in 1985. On these Chickenhouse-recorded albums Hollmer sang and performed nearly every instrument, moving between intimate folk-flavored songs and wild yet tuneful, focused instrumental pieces. Across his entire solo catalog he consistently featured himself on keyboards and accordion while exploring additional textures—glockenspiel, bells, eccentric percussion, glass bottles, the sound of boots crunching snow, and the voices of his own young children and, later, grandchildren on lullabies or celebrations of new life. Such sonic experiments always served the emotional core of each piece rather than existing as isolated sonic studies detached from human context.
The year 1985 proved pivotal when Hollmer formed his first band as leader, the Looping Home Orchestra. The LHO toured Europe in 1986 and 1987 while also tracking the fifth KRAX release, Vendeltid, at the Chickenhouse with a five-piece lineup. Vendeltid marked a high point, preserving the charm, melodiousness, and inventive rhythms of his earlier solo and Samlas work while adding music of haunting, ethereal beauty that hovered between the lightness of Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the darkness of Univers Zero.
Tracks drawn from the five 1980s solo Hollmer albums, including Vendeltid, later appeared on the 1993 single-CD compilation Lars Hollmer 80-88 (subsequently reissued as The Siberian Circus), documenting his artistic development across the decade. In the booklet Fred Frith addressed the futility of pinning stylistic tags on Hollmer, noting that, like all great composers, Hollmer’s music reaches listeners on a deeper plane. “Like Astor Piazzolla, Lars Hollmer is a serious composer working in a popular traditional language and one who defines his own terms,” Frith observed. “Sometimes Lasse’s manic skittishness and infectious enthusiasm give way to the most eloquent expression of our inherent loneliness that I know of,” Frith added. “This is no small gift.”
Within Hollmer’s compositions from this era one can detect echoes of classical pieces possessing a magical atmosphere—Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium from Le Carnaval des Animaux, for instance—yet infused with a rustic character foreign to the concert hall, as though the Hungarian folk themes Bartók collected and incorporated had been reclaimed from classical settings and restored to their earthier origins while retaining a contemporary vitality. (Hollmer remained self-taught.) His music avoided the superficial grafting of folk elements onto rock that characterized many prog bands’ treatments of the classics; instead it retained an authenticity, originality, and emotional depth rarely approached by those more straightforward ensembles.
During the same period Hollmer began scoring music for film, theater, and dance projects, including collaborations with former Von Zamla bassist Wolfgang Salomon. Two Hollmer/Salomon efforts appeared on Salomon’s Chance Records label: 1989’s Alice im Wunderland, drawn from a theatrical adaptation of the Lewis Carroll novel, and 1996’s Neunerplatzmusik No. 3, a trio recording by Salomon, Hollmer, and Thomas Heinemann of the Theater am Neunerplatz in Würzburg, Germany, issued as a Chance/KRAX co-production. From the late 1980s into the 1990s Hollmer also belonged to the progressive world/folk quartet Fem Söker En Skatt, which shared certain affinities with Ramlösa Kvällar and likewise included saxophonist Ulf Wallander and trumpeter Kalle Eriksson.
In 1988 the original Looping Home Orchestra gave its final concert, though subsequent versions of the ensemble continued, and Hollmer kept composing new material for the group. The fourth incarnation of the band, assembled in 1992, comprised Hollmer, Haapala, Krantz, and Frith together with Fem Söker En Skatt keyboardist/percussionist Olle Sundin and Montreal multi-instrumentalist Jean Derome; this lineup performed at the 1992 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Quebec and toured Europe in 1993. Selections captured at FIMAV and during the European dates were released as Door Floor Something Window: Live 1992-1993 on the Victo label in 1994. In many respects the recording summarized Hollmer’s solo work to that point, uniting dynamic, fiery live performances and off-kilter sonic details with the composer’s evocative melodies and overarching structural sensibility.
In 1993 Hollmer began recording solo material at a rebuilt Chickenhouse—the original facility had been demolished in 1992, and Hollmer, a capable carpenter, constructed the replacement largely by himself—including eight tracks among the twenty-six that comprise the odds-and-ends collection Vandelmässa, gathering pieces composed and recorded over the preceding decade yet absent from prior albums, with still more material to follow. In 1996 Hollmer became the first musician invited by Klucevsek to join Accordion Tribe, an international quintet of accordionists that also featured Maria Kalaniemi from Finland, Bratko Bibic from Slovenia, and Otto Lechner from Austria; the ensemble toured widely across Europe and Canada, issued three well-received CDs, and became the subject of a feature-length documentary. In 1997 Hollmer completed a new solo album, Andetag, issued the following year.
Composed between 1993 and 1996, Andetag represented another pinnacle—simultaneously comfortable and demanding, traditional and forward-looking, incorporating the broad range of stylistic reference points listeners had come to expect. Once again Hollmer performed most of the instruments (accordion, piano, keyboards, melodicas, and percussion) with assistance from bassist Wolfgang Salomon, violinist Santiago Jimenez, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans. In 1999 Andetag received a Swedish Grammy Award; the citation read: “To a giant in the Swedish musical society…from Samla Mammas Manna to ‘Boeves Psalm’ to the new CD Andetag…there’s always wonderful music coming from the Chickenhouse.”
Hollmer launched a new project in 1999, convening many of the same musicians who appeared on Andetag along with Coste Apetrea (banjo), Matti Andersson (flute), and Kalle Eriksson (trumpet) to record the neo-classical chamber-music-influenced Utsikter, released in 2000 and a fitting successor to Andetag. The Utsikter endeavor also encompassed a touring unit that included Salomon, Jimenez, Berckmans, and Andersson; this ensemble performed at festivals and concerts in Russia, Serbia, and Sweden during 2000 and 2001.
Meanwhile the intermittently active Samlas had resumed activity, and in fall 1998 Hollmer, Krantz, Bruniusson, and Apetrea reconvened at the Chickenhouse to record Kaka, a recording that alternated between powerful and zany passages and incorporated live concert material from 1993–1998 plus voice-over “comments and interpretations” by narrator John Fiske aimed at newcomers. The album appeared in 1999, yet in November of that year Bruniusson—who had been present since the Samlas’ earliest days three decades earlier—departed. Samla Mammas Manna persisted after exchanges between Uppsala and an unexpected destination, Japan. In 2000 Hollmer accepted an invitation from clarinetist Wataru Ohkuma and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to perform with them in Tokyo, and he traveled there accordingly.
The journey to Japan opened another chapter in Lars Hollmer’s musical path as he joined Ohkuma, Yoshida, and others—most prominently violinist Yuriko Mukoujima—to form the band SOLA. In December 2000 Hollmer played multiple concerts at Tokyo’s Mandala-2 with this ensemble and was sufficiently impressed to return to Japan during summer and fall 2001 for further performances and recording. The resulting CD, SOLA: Lars Hollmer’s Global Home Project, was released in 2002. With Bruniusson no longer in Samla Mammas Manna, Yoshida stepped in as replacement, imparting an incisive, frenetic Ruins energy to the group’s sound.
The Swedish/Japanese Samlas can be heard on the fourteenth KRAX release, Dear Mamma, captured live from a single DAT recorder in the audience in Uppsala on May 16, 2002. The disc notably includes a lengthy track recorded in 2001 at another Uppsala venue; featuring the quartet of Hollmer, Apetrea, and Ruins members Yoshida and Hisashi Sasaki, “Fredmans Session 2” leans more improvisational than most Samlas output yet stays dynamic, focused, and purposeful at high energy. (A 2007 Bonus Tracks edition of Dear Mamma removed “Fredmans Session 1” and “Fredmans Session 2,” substituting eight shorter live tracks recorded at Fab and La Mama in Tokyo during September 2002.) Maintaining the SOLA connection, Hollmer revisited Japan in spring 2003 to perform and record in duet with violinist Mukoujima; selections appear on the mini-CD Live and More, the fifteenth KRAX release.
After appearing with the Looping Home Orchestra and Accordion Tribe at Victoriaville, Hollmer sustained his Quebec ties, returning in August and September 2004 for an accordion festival performance in a trio with Jean Derome and drummer Pierre Tanguay, plus two intimate concerts at an auberge near the tiny village of St. Fortunat—one with Derome and Tanguay, the other augmented by the nineteen-piece wild, circusy big band La Fanfare Pourpour, known for its street-carnival sensibility and friendly, homespun charm. Hollmer performed in duet with Michel Berckmans at the April 2005 Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal and joined Montreal avant-prog stalwarts Miriodor onstage with Berckmans as well. He contributed accordion to Miriodor’s Parade, issued on Cuneiform in May 2005; he recorded his parts in Sweden and integrated them via an approach inconceivable when the Chickenhouse resident first adopted the accordion—exchanging work-in-progress files across the Atlantic on CD-Rs.
Hollmer revisited the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in May 2005 for another Quebec appearance with La Fanfare Pourpour, delivering an upbeat, rollicking yet warm and emotionally resonant concert of music written by Hollmer and orchestrated by Derome, including fresh compositions that nodded slightly toward FIMAV’s avant-garde orientation. In October 2006 he returned to Quebec to record Karusell Musik with the Fanfare Pourpour; the album emerged as a joint KRAX and Monsieur Fauteux M’Entendez-Vous? release in spring 2007. September 2007 brought another trip to Quebec, where Samla Mammas Manna performed at Le Festival des Musiques Progressives de Montreal and Hollmer—appearing barefoot onstage, as was his custom—accompanied Miriodor on a selection from Parade. The following spring (March 2008) Hollmer appeared onstage at the Melloboat seafaring prog-rock and metal festival organized by the Mellotronen label; the two-day event took place aboard the Silja Symphony luxury ferry cruising the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and Helsinki. Lars performed with the Mats/Morgan All Star Team in a set that featured a rollicking “Nationsjazz” and prompted audience clapping along to “Boeves Psalm.”
In November 2007 a new Hollmer solo album, Viandra, appeared in Japan on the Disk Union label; a U.S. release on Cuneiform followed in May 2008. A reflective, at times melancholic record—tempered by the expected flashes of happiness and exuberance—Viandra was recorded between 2001 and 2007 at the Chickenhouse, with Hollmer multi-tracking himself on numerous instruments (and creating the cover photo collage). Several longtime collaborators participated, notably Michel Berckmans, Santiago Jimenez, and (on one track) Ulf Wallander. Remarkably, given Hollmer’s nearly forty-year recording career, the Cuneiform edition of Viandra marked his first U.S. solo album release. As events unfolded, Viandra became the final solo album issued during Lars’s lifetime.
Lars Hollmer was an artist who regarded the past with affection and embraced his experiences with family, friends, and musical collaborators around the globe, yet he continually looked ahead. It therefore came as a shock when he fell gravely ill in 2008; diagnosed with cancer, he could not join planned European tours of Accordion Tribe (Amy Denio substituted) or Fanfare Pourpour, the latter ensemble devoting its entire October tour across France and Sweden to Lars’s repertoire. During the tour’s final concert, however, before a sold-out Uppsala audience, Lars mustered the strength to join Fanfare Pourpour onstage for a complete performance of the compositions from the joint Hollmer/Fanfare album Karusell Musik. The set drew heavily from favorites spanning his previous quarter-century as solo artist and bandleader, and he appeared genuinely happy as the crowd offered repeated ovations for renditions of his classic pieces, including “Boeves Psalm.” It would be Lars Hollmer’s final onstage appearance. On December 26, 2008, Lars lost his battle with cancer at age sixty.
Soon afterward Guy Klucevsek reflected on his Accordion Tribe colleague: “
Lars Hollmer produced most of his recordings inside the Chickenhouse, the home studio he maintained outside Uppsala, Sweden. There the original lineup of Samla Mammas Manna gathered between 1969 and 1970 to lay down the group’s self-titled debut, which appeared in 1971. Hollmer handled keyboards for that session—though his earliest childhood instrument had been a zither, later transformed into a prepared zither after his grandmother presented it as a gift—alongside bassist Lars Krantz, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and percussionist Bebben Öberg. Guitarist Coste Apetrea entered the fold in 1972, and the quartet of Hollmer, Bruniusson, Krantz, and Apetrea issued Måltid the next year. Throughout the 1970s Hollmer’s reputation rested primarily on his contributions within the Samlas orbit, encompassing Klossa Knapitatet (1974) and Snorungarnas Symfoni, a 1976 release actually composed by American Gregory Fitzpatrick yet performed by the band. He also participated in the folk- and world-music quintet Ramlösa Kvällar during the late 1970s; that ensemble featured Apetrea together with saxophonist Ulf Wallander, trumpeter Kalle Eriksson, and percussionist Bill Öhrström, and it released Nights Without Frames in 1978. Notably, Hollmer’s first sustained work on accordion occurred with Ramlösa Kvällar.
Within the various Samlas configurations Hollmer served as co-composer and fusion-minded electric keyboardist—bearing a faint Canterbury imprint—without functioning as formal leader. The band blended prog and jazz-rock foundations with unpredictable elements that ranged from playful nonsense vocals to open-ended free improvisation, a sufficiently daring mixture that, after a brief disbandment and reformation as Zamla Mammaz Manna (with guitarist Eino Haapala stepping in for the temporarily absent Apetrea), placed the group alongside Henry Cow, Univers Zero, and Etron Fou Leloublan in the Rock in Opposition collective. During this phase the newly renamed Zamlas issued the double album Schlagerns Mystik/För Äldre Nybegynnare (1978), pairing one disc of folk- and prog-oriented songs with another of improvisations that drew especially strong praise from Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler.
Because Samla/Zamla LPs on the Silence label reached American listeners chiefly through specialty mail-order sources such as Wayside Music—still a reliable outlet for Hollmer material—many stateside fans first encountered Hollmer and his Samla/Zamla colleagues via their contributions to Fred Frith’s Gravity, issued domestically on Ralph Records, half of which was captured at the Chickenhouse in August 1979. That album merged the Henry Cow guitarist’s idiosyncratic explorations with a pronounced European folk-dance sensibility to which Hollmer and company supplied vital support. From March through June 1980 the Zamlas tracked and released Familjesprickor (also known as Family Cracks), described in the liner notes as music created “during a period of transition” and therefore “not as optimistic and happy as it used to be.” The record proved to be the final Zamlas appearance until Kaka surfaced in 1998, following the band’s early-1990s reformation. In the early 1980s Hollmer redirected his energies toward solo projects that would extend across the subsequent two decades and beyond.
Once fractures within the Zamla family again dissolved the group, Hollmer and Haapala united with Denis Brely and Jan Garret—two members of eccentric French avant-popster Albert Marcoeur’s band—to launch the Von Zamla quartet, sustaining the thread of folk-tinged instrumental experimental and avant-prog rock while occasionally incorporating fusion and neo-classical touches. The first Von Zamla album, Zamlaranamma, appeared in 1982; the unit soon expanded into a sextet that no longer included Brely or Garret but added Univers Zero bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans and Munju bassist Wolfgang Salomon. This lineup toured Europe and recorded No Make Up! at the Chickenhouse during May and August 1983. As of the late 2000s the most widely circulated document of Von Zamla remains the live CD 1983, captured in Bremen and issued by Cuneiform in 1999. In the enthusiastic liner notes Hollmer recalled that the band traveled by bus and performed on an enormous array of instruments—keyboards, guitar, bass, accordion, melodica, drums, glockenspiel, bassoon, oboe, English horn, ring modulator, plus homemade plates, metal pin-filled cans, and bottles of varying kinds.
Although Hollmer wrote that Von Zamla “had TREMENDOUS FUN!!,” he was simultaneously establishing himself through independent solo work, beginning with XII Sibiriska Cyklar, which he recorded entirely alone at the Chickenhouse across June and October 1980 and March 1981. (Von Zamla disbanded in fall 1984, briefly reconvened with a changed lineup in 1985, then split permanently.) The album contains the two-and-a-half-minute “Boeves Psalm,” an homage to his late uncle Edvard that stands among Lars’s most celebrated and cherished pieces for its straightforward beauty and charm. Fellow accordionist, friend, and collaborator Guy Klucevsek called “Boeves Psalm” “one of the most beautiful melodies ever written,” while composer “Blue” Gene Tyranny observed that the “delightful song” employs a “deceptive cadence with a Mozart feel.”
XII Sibiriska Cyklar was succeeded in 1982 by Vill du Hora Mer, the inaugural release on Hollmer’s own KRAX imprint, followed by Från Natt Idag in 1983 and Tonöga in 1985. On these Chickenhouse-recorded albums Hollmer sang and performed nearly every instrument, moving between intimate folk-flavored songs and wild yet tuneful, focused instrumental pieces. Across his entire solo catalog he consistently featured himself on keyboards and accordion while exploring additional textures—glockenspiel, bells, eccentric percussion, glass bottles, the sound of boots crunching snow, and the voices of his own young children and, later, grandchildren on lullabies or celebrations of new life. Such sonic experiments always served the emotional core of each piece rather than existing as isolated sonic studies detached from human context.
The year 1985 proved pivotal when Hollmer formed his first band as leader, the Looping Home Orchestra. The LHO toured Europe in 1986 and 1987 while also tracking the fifth KRAX release, Vendeltid, at the Chickenhouse with a five-piece lineup. Vendeltid marked a high point, preserving the charm, melodiousness, and inventive rhythms of his earlier solo and Samlas work while adding music of haunting, ethereal beauty that hovered between the lightness of Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the darkness of Univers Zero.
Tracks drawn from the five 1980s solo Hollmer albums, including Vendeltid, later appeared on the 1993 single-CD compilation Lars Hollmer 80-88 (subsequently reissued as The Siberian Circus), documenting his artistic development across the decade. In the booklet Fred Frith addressed the futility of pinning stylistic tags on Hollmer, noting that, like all great composers, Hollmer’s music reaches listeners on a deeper plane. “Like Astor Piazzolla, Lars Hollmer is a serious composer working in a popular traditional language and one who defines his own terms,” Frith observed. “Sometimes Lasse’s manic skittishness and infectious enthusiasm give way to the most eloquent expression of our inherent loneliness that I know of,” Frith added. “This is no small gift.”
Within Hollmer’s compositions from this era one can detect echoes of classical pieces possessing a magical atmosphere—Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium from Le Carnaval des Animaux, for instance—yet infused with a rustic character foreign to the concert hall, as though the Hungarian folk themes Bartók collected and incorporated had been reclaimed from classical settings and restored to their earthier origins while retaining a contemporary vitality. (Hollmer remained self-taught.) His music avoided the superficial grafting of folk elements onto rock that characterized many prog bands’ treatments of the classics; instead it retained an authenticity, originality, and emotional depth rarely approached by those more straightforward ensembles.
During the same period Hollmer began scoring music for film, theater, and dance projects, including collaborations with former Von Zamla bassist Wolfgang Salomon. Two Hollmer/Salomon efforts appeared on Salomon’s Chance Records label: 1989’s Alice im Wunderland, drawn from a theatrical adaptation of the Lewis Carroll novel, and 1996’s Neunerplatzmusik No. 3, a trio recording by Salomon, Hollmer, and Thomas Heinemann of the Theater am Neunerplatz in Würzburg, Germany, issued as a Chance/KRAX co-production. From the late 1980s into the 1990s Hollmer also belonged to the progressive world/folk quartet Fem Söker En Skatt, which shared certain affinities with Ramlösa Kvällar and likewise included saxophonist Ulf Wallander and trumpeter Kalle Eriksson.
In 1988 the original Looping Home Orchestra gave its final concert, though subsequent versions of the ensemble continued, and Hollmer kept composing new material for the group. The fourth incarnation of the band, assembled in 1992, comprised Hollmer, Haapala, Krantz, and Frith together with Fem Söker En Skatt keyboardist/percussionist Olle Sundin and Montreal multi-instrumentalist Jean Derome; this lineup performed at the 1992 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Quebec and toured Europe in 1993. Selections captured at FIMAV and during the European dates were released as Door Floor Something Window: Live 1992-1993 on the Victo label in 1994. In many respects the recording summarized Hollmer’s solo work to that point, uniting dynamic, fiery live performances and off-kilter sonic details with the composer’s evocative melodies and overarching structural sensibility.
In 1993 Hollmer began recording solo material at a rebuilt Chickenhouse—the original facility had been demolished in 1992, and Hollmer, a capable carpenter, constructed the replacement largely by himself—including eight tracks among the twenty-six that comprise the odds-and-ends collection Vandelmässa, gathering pieces composed and recorded over the preceding decade yet absent from prior albums, with still more material to follow. In 1996 Hollmer became the first musician invited by Klucevsek to join Accordion Tribe, an international quintet of accordionists that also featured Maria Kalaniemi from Finland, Bratko Bibic from Slovenia, and Otto Lechner from Austria; the ensemble toured widely across Europe and Canada, issued three well-received CDs, and became the subject of a feature-length documentary. In 1997 Hollmer completed a new solo album, Andetag, issued the following year.
Composed between 1993 and 1996, Andetag represented another pinnacle—simultaneously comfortable and demanding, traditional and forward-looking, incorporating the broad range of stylistic reference points listeners had come to expect. Once again Hollmer performed most of the instruments (accordion, piano, keyboards, melodicas, and percussion) with assistance from bassist Wolfgang Salomon, violinist Santiago Jimenez, drummer Hans Bruniusson, and bassoonist/oboist Michel Berckmans. In 1999 Andetag received a Swedish Grammy Award; the citation read: “To a giant in the Swedish musical society…from Samla Mammas Manna to ‘Boeves Psalm’ to the new CD Andetag…there’s always wonderful music coming from the Chickenhouse.”
Hollmer launched a new project in 1999, convening many of the same musicians who appeared on Andetag along with Coste Apetrea (banjo), Matti Andersson (flute), and Kalle Eriksson (trumpet) to record the neo-classical chamber-music-influenced Utsikter, released in 2000 and a fitting successor to Andetag. The Utsikter endeavor also encompassed a touring unit that included Salomon, Jimenez, Berckmans, and Andersson; this ensemble performed at festivals and concerts in Russia, Serbia, and Sweden during 2000 and 2001.
Meanwhile the intermittently active Samlas had resumed activity, and in fall 1998 Hollmer, Krantz, Bruniusson, and Apetrea reconvened at the Chickenhouse to record Kaka, a recording that alternated between powerful and zany passages and incorporated live concert material from 1993–1998 plus voice-over “comments and interpretations” by narrator John Fiske aimed at newcomers. The album appeared in 1999, yet in November of that year Bruniusson—who had been present since the Samlas’ earliest days three decades earlier—departed. Samla Mammas Manna persisted after exchanges between Uppsala and an unexpected destination, Japan. In 2000 Hollmer accepted an invitation from clarinetist Wataru Ohkuma and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida to perform with them in Tokyo, and he traveled there accordingly.
The journey to Japan opened another chapter in Lars Hollmer’s musical path as he joined Ohkuma, Yoshida, and others—most prominently violinist Yuriko Mukoujima—to form the band SOLA. In December 2000 Hollmer played multiple concerts at Tokyo’s Mandala-2 with this ensemble and was sufficiently impressed to return to Japan during summer and fall 2001 for further performances and recording. The resulting CD, SOLA: Lars Hollmer’s Global Home Project, was released in 2002. With Bruniusson no longer in Samla Mammas Manna, Yoshida stepped in as replacement, imparting an incisive, frenetic Ruins energy to the group’s sound.
The Swedish/Japanese Samlas can be heard on the fourteenth KRAX release, Dear Mamma, captured live from a single DAT recorder in the audience in Uppsala on May 16, 2002. The disc notably includes a lengthy track recorded in 2001 at another Uppsala venue; featuring the quartet of Hollmer, Apetrea, and Ruins members Yoshida and Hisashi Sasaki, “Fredmans Session 2” leans more improvisational than most Samlas output yet stays dynamic, focused, and purposeful at high energy. (A 2007 Bonus Tracks edition of Dear Mamma removed “Fredmans Session 1” and “Fredmans Session 2,” substituting eight shorter live tracks recorded at Fab and La Mama in Tokyo during September 2002.) Maintaining the SOLA connection, Hollmer revisited Japan in spring 2003 to perform and record in duet with violinist Mukoujima; selections appear on the mini-CD Live and More, the fifteenth KRAX release.
After appearing with the Looping Home Orchestra and Accordion Tribe at Victoriaville, Hollmer sustained his Quebec ties, returning in August and September 2004 for an accordion festival performance in a trio with Jean Derome and drummer Pierre Tanguay, plus two intimate concerts at an auberge near the tiny village of St. Fortunat—one with Derome and Tanguay, the other augmented by the nineteen-piece wild, circusy big band La Fanfare Pourpour, known for its street-carnival sensibility and friendly, homespun charm. Hollmer performed in duet with Michel Berckmans at the April 2005 Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal and joined Montreal avant-prog stalwarts Miriodor onstage with Berckmans as well. He contributed accordion to Miriodor’s Parade, issued on Cuneiform in May 2005; he recorded his parts in Sweden and integrated them via an approach inconceivable when the Chickenhouse resident first adopted the accordion—exchanging work-in-progress files across the Atlantic on CD-Rs.
Hollmer revisited the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in May 2005 for another Quebec appearance with La Fanfare Pourpour, delivering an upbeat, rollicking yet warm and emotionally resonant concert of music written by Hollmer and orchestrated by Derome, including fresh compositions that nodded slightly toward FIMAV’s avant-garde orientation. In October 2006 he returned to Quebec to record Karusell Musik with the Fanfare Pourpour; the album emerged as a joint KRAX and Monsieur Fauteux M’Entendez-Vous? release in spring 2007. September 2007 brought another trip to Quebec, where Samla Mammas Manna performed at Le Festival des Musiques Progressives de Montreal and Hollmer—appearing barefoot onstage, as was his custom—accompanied Miriodor on a selection from Parade. The following spring (March 2008) Hollmer appeared onstage at the Melloboat seafaring prog-rock and metal festival organized by the Mellotronen label; the two-day event took place aboard the Silja Symphony luxury ferry cruising the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and Helsinki. Lars performed with the Mats/Morgan All Star Team in a set that featured a rollicking “Nationsjazz” and prompted audience clapping along to “Boeves Psalm.”
In November 2007 a new Hollmer solo album, Viandra, appeared in Japan on the Disk Union label; a U.S. release on Cuneiform followed in May 2008. A reflective, at times melancholic record—tempered by the expected flashes of happiness and exuberance—Viandra was recorded between 2001 and 2007 at the Chickenhouse, with Hollmer multi-tracking himself on numerous instruments (and creating the cover photo collage). Several longtime collaborators participated, notably Michel Berckmans, Santiago Jimenez, and (on one track) Ulf Wallander. Remarkably, given Hollmer’s nearly forty-year recording career, the Cuneiform edition of Viandra marked his first U.S. solo album release. As events unfolded, Viandra became the final solo album issued during Lars’s lifetime.
Lars Hollmer was an artist who regarded the past with affection and embraced his experiences with family, friends, and musical collaborators around the globe, yet he continually looked ahead. It therefore came as a shock when he fell gravely ill in 2008; diagnosed with cancer, he could not join planned European tours of Accordion Tribe (Amy Denio substituted) or Fanfare Pourpour, the latter ensemble devoting its entire October tour across France and Sweden to Lars’s repertoire. During the tour’s final concert, however, before a sold-out Uppsala audience, Lars mustered the strength to join Fanfare Pourpour onstage for a complete performance of the compositions from the joint Hollmer/Fanfare album Karusell Musik. The set drew heavily from favorites spanning his previous quarter-century as solo artist and bandleader, and he appeared genuinely happy as the crowd offered repeated ovations for renditions of his classic pieces, including “Boeves Psalm.” It would be Lars Hollmer’s final onstage appearance. On December 26, 2008, Lars lost his battle with cancer at age sixty.
Soon afterward Guy Klucevsek reflected on his Accordion Tribe colleague: “
Albums
