M.E.E.O is a Swedish producer of emotionally intelligent house and techno. Beyond the rigidity and seriousness that sometimes impede the evolution of these styles, his 20 years of experience have equipped him to build each of his arrangements around more sincere, heartfelt concepts.
In spite of an eclectic musical journey spanning the breadth of the globe, M.E.E.O (born Mathias Eriksson) has spent the past decade of his career exploring the more intellectual depths of the electronic music spectrum. It’s proven worth the wait. Just as he likens his creative process in the studio to pulling a loose strand from a ball of yarn, his career as a whole has been an exercise in patience that has yielded a rich and dynamic signature sound in recent years. As a result, he now boasts releases on Drumcode, Riot Recordings, and Re:Sound Music.
Born and raised in the rural outskirts of Gothenburg, M.E.E.O’s childhood fascination with the outdoors gave him keen attention to detail from an early age. While he cites songs by rock bands like Queen and Genesis as his earliest musical influences, discovering the track “Das Boot” by German dance music duo U96 around age 10 ignited a passion for techno that still burns to this day.
That’s not to say he followed a predictable course by any means. After outgrowing mainstream techno artists like Members of Mayday and Marusha, he convinced his father to buy him an MC-303 synthesizer and learned to produce gabber house, playing underground events and forest parties in and around Gothenburg and Stockholm.
However, the emergence of Goa trance in the late ‘90s would draw him along his most unexpected musical tangent.
M.E.E.O landed his first professional gig at the inaugural edition of the Romanian psytrance festival Transylvania Calling around the turn of the millennium. Between then and 2008 he released a studio-length psytrance album titled Highlight Me Please, performed a series of gigs throughout Australia, and even collaborated with Dark Nebula and Electrypnose on a the Beatport chart-climbing singles “Racked my Brain” and “Spirit Cave.”
As he matured, he began to favor a more timeless stylistic range of the electronic music spectrum. A fellow Swede, John H, pushed him to produce more house and techno, and from 2013-2015, the two of them released dozens of tracks through Gothenburg label Event Horizon. M.E.E.O and John H’s most celebrated release to date is “Bergsjön Eternal,” their collaboration with Swedish DJ/producer Petter B which came out on Adam Beyer’s Drumcode imprint in 2014.
As varied as his career has been, only recently has M.E.E.O truly come into his own as a world-class producer. In 2016 he refined his creative process down to a science. After jamming out melodies and drum patterns on analog machines until he identifies the emotional core of each arrangement, he now adds and removes layers through a painstaking process of sound synthesis. What results is a style of tech house whose vibrant musicality is matched only by its crisp, seamless production values.
M.E.E.O’s 2017 releases are a clear enough sign of how far he’s come. In addition to the three-track Waves EP and the single “Rise And Fall In Love” – which came out on Frankyeffe’s Riot Recordings and UK label Re:Sound Music, respectively – he’s proven his recent studio breakthroughs to be more than a momentary flash in the pan.
All too often, house and techno producers resign themselves to a formula – but M.E.E.O’s journey as a producer has given him a more developed sense of musical identity. If his trajectory is any indicator, the best is yet to come. Now that he’s determined the ideal means of communicating such powerful concepts, he will surely be an artist to watch in the years to follow.
