Swede Dreams

It’s midnight and the Uppsala nu-disco crew are taking Mixmag on a pub crawl. The scene’s leading figures, Oliver Nelson and Tobtok, have blagged the decks in a cavernous pool hall called Interpool. It’s rather different from the kind of places they usually play: the sunken dancefloor of Audio Discotech in San Francisco, or the hedonistic mayhem of Perfect Havoc’s secret London parties. Instead, Interpool most resembles a giant youth club, featuring pool, skittles, slot machines and the addictive Scandinavian bar game of Shuffleboard. It’s typical of Uppsala, 80km north of Stockholm, Sweden’s fourth city and biggest student centre.

Nelson, a few beers merry, jigs about happily and Tobtok drops his bubbly remix of John Newman’s ‘Come And Get It’. It’s an impromptu session courtesy of the local EDM DJ, who watches dubiously from the sidelines as the pair’s DJ-producer mates, Ghassemi, Osmo and Skogsrå, giggle and jiggle on the dancefloor. A few locals join in but, for the most part, Uppsala has not yet embraced its own native sound. The rest of the world, however…

There’s something in the Uppsala water. A wave of high profile remixes has poured out of the city, initially from 25-year-old Oliver Nelson who bridges the worlds of disco and pop with a sound that lends itself perfectly to those wildly successful YouTube channels that illustrate their videos with images of the tanned limbs and distant glance of some anonymous pretty girl.

Remixes for Ella Henderson (‘Ghost’, 6.3 million SoundCloud plays), Justin Timberlake (‘Suit & Tie’, 13.5 million YouTube hits) and Tove Lo (‘Habits’, 4 million SoundCloud plays) have been the most high-profile, but there are many more, from Whitney Houston to Bon Iver to Route 94. He’s notched up 38.5 million cumulative SoundCloud plays, including 1.26 million for his blissed-out, sunshine-laden solo debut ‘Found Your Love’, featuring Skogsrå on vocals (under the pseudonym Heir), and he’s working on new material with Kaleem Taylor (who sang on the Tchami hit ‘Promesses’). His protégé Tobias ‘Tobtok’ Karlsson, 23, meanwhile, has over 10 million cumulative SoundCloud plays and has also been no slouch in the remix department. His lush rerub of Years & Years’ ‘Real’ drew attention (858,000 YouTube hits), as well as remixes for Wretch 32, Icona Pop, Blonde and others. The tropically-inclined single ‘Savanna’ caused a stir, and his new tune ‘Fast Car’ (featuring River) was the most-played track on SoundCloud in December 2015. Big gigs inevitably followed – Ushuaïa, Tomorrowland, Creamfields – and their ongoing association with the emblematic Parisian imprint Kitsuné has led to parties in China and Japan.

It’s 5.30 PM and Oliver Nelson and Tobtok sit beside each other at Hambergs Fisk, Uppsala’s premier seafood restaurant. Nelson tinkers with the remains of a crème brûlée and Tobtok sits back, digesting the half-lobster he’s just eaten. At Mixmag's insistence we’re all sipping the Swedish national drink, a herbal-infused schnapps called Aquavit, although neither of them are keen. “I am not taking a sip for ten minutes,” says Nelson warily.

He is the shorter of the pair, easy going, with blue eyes behind rimmed glasses, floppy blond hair shaved at the sides and clad in simple black and white. Tobtok is more intense, tall at around 6’5”, brown-eyed, brown-haired, lightly stubbled, wearing a black jumper, a big watch and skinny jeans rolled up to reveal sockless ankles. Nelson is recalling how it all started.

“It was 2005 and I was 15 years old,” he starts. “My best friend Jacob made basic tracks on computers. I was into hard rock but I started getting more into the electronic side; I was at his place five times a week, watching him. In 2007 we were listening to the Justice album ‘Cross’. It was a huge influence, that hardcore electro. I said to Jacob, ‘We have to do this – it will take us a month to make something this good.’ But it took four years to make anything I felt proud of.”