Varg2™ Sheds His Skin

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It’s been five minutes since our scheduled meeting was meant to start — five painstakingly valuable minutes — so I refresh my email for any updates. “Jonas says the link doesn’t work,” says his publicist in my inbox, so I make a new meeting and respond with another invite. Three more minutes pass. Another gut-wrenching response: “He says it still doesn’t work. Can you set up a Google Meet?” Fuck, I think to myself, We’re already off to a great start. I didn’t know how right I was.

Before I can even open a new tab in an attempt to salvage something — anything — from this potential meeting, an unknown caller barges into the vacant Zoom chat. The username “iPhone (5)” pops up onscreen, camera off, ushered in by the obnoxious clamor of bustling 808 drums compressed and distorted to hell. Once the camera is turned on, the music is paused; and there lies Varg2™ in the flesh. He gleefully chiefs the joint perched between his lips from under the hood of his black sweatshirt, clutching a pink Bratz Doll mug full of coffee. This is his morning routine. Even on first impression, I feel as though this sort of introduction makes perfect sense for him. His presence radiates a strangely familiar sense of camaraderie, effortlessly exuding the warmth of an old friend. Without hesitation, Varg2™ escorts me through the crux of his headspace, detailing his creative process, his affinity for trap music, and the path he’s taken towards self-actualization.

Olivier Lafontant— How are you? 

Varg2™— I’m good, man. I’m good as fuck, I just woke up like an hour ago.

Where you at right now?

I’m in Sweden, it’s like 9 in the evening. I wake up in the nighttime. For me this is morning.

You’re waking and baking at 9 p.m., that’s kinda crazy.

I’ve been smoking since I opened my eyes, I need to smoke as soon as I wake up. Otherwise I don't feel right. But yeah, my days are kinda fucked up, I went to bed at 3 p.m. today.

What have the past couple days looked like for you?

I’m not gonna lie bro, I’ve been out. It’s been good, me and my Swedish crew been out painting, making music, getting it done.  

You still doing graffiti?

Every day.

What does that do for you? How do you process your life and your emotions through that?

To be honest, I think it’s the only thing that’s ever been consistent for me. It’s been my one true friend, it’s just always been there for me. It’s a lot of work that I don’t even put into my music. If I have struggles with my music or with some other shit I need to do, I’m just gonna be like “Oh fuck this shit,” and then paint. It’s just effortless love, unconditional love. It’s fucked up my life many times but it’s still the one that’s been there for me.

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Something that’s stuck out to me about you is how you make very electronic, cinematic music, but you’re very influenced by artists like Shawny Bin Laden, Ballout, OLA Runt, a lot of American street rappers. How do you process those influences and make it so that you’re still putting out music that’s true to you?

I think why [someone] listens to Ballout, or trap in general, or black metal — it’s music by people who speak their own truth. My music is true to what I see. It’s not about translating [what I like to listen to], ‘cause I make ambient soundscapes and shit like that. I’m just translating my emotions. It’s the same with trap. You can have shit like Lazer Dim 700 that’s super low [sound] quality, the production of it doesn’t really matter; it comes down to how well you can tell your own story, type shit. I saw 21 Savage just bought a new G Wagon for his mom’s birthday, and in the photo she had a white Richard Mille on. I’m sure as fuck 21 Savage also bought that Richard Mille. That shit fire. I sat and I looked at that picture, and his mom looked so happy, bro. And it’s like "Yeah, materialistic love, she got a G Wagon, whatever, whatever,” but I’m sure that 21 Savage was an annoying piece of shit when he was a teenager — I bet he snuck out, I bet he had girls’ parents calling his house, [he was] selling drugs, shit like that.

That smile is not about the fact that she got a G Wagon, [it’s about] the fact that her shitty ass son who kept talking about robbing people into a microphone can actually afford to buy her one from doing that. That journey is fuckin’ genuine and honest and beautiful. And you can talk about the “value of the lyrics” and shit, but that’s the thing, this is just the truth. These are the real poets, man. An artist goes to a place where normal people don’t dare to go and they report back.

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Now that you're six albums into the Nordic Flora series, what do you feel like you've learned, and what makes this album different from the rest of them? Not just sonically, but also in terms of the emotions and the process you have at this point in your career?

Not gonna lie, I stopped making music for a pretty long time. I kind of found my way back making this album. It wasn’t meant to be a Nordic Flora record from the beginning, it just became that. The main difference is I made half of [the Nordic Flora series] on an iPad inside of a car in motion, [and] at airports. One tape, I forgot to turn the iPad microphone off and you can hear German men in the Lufthansa Lounge in Munich fuckin’ complaining about the bratwurst being out and shit. It’s a very honest record series. I put out my first record in 2013 and since then my music career has been an open diary. This record was made in Sunset Sound Studios with Yves Rothman, my good friend, in Los Angeles, an iconic studio. The fact that within the same record series and without signing major, just by my own two hands, I’ve gone from making wonky tape experiments in the north of Sweden to playing the celesta the Beach Boys played — for me that’s legendary. Now there’s definitely not gonna be no more Nordic Flora, I feel like I’m a new person now. I already have three new albums coming out, I don’t give a fuck. I got so much music.

You’re really on your Gucci Mane shit now!

Me and Christ Dillinger dropping a massive project.

Something that you said that caught my attention was the fact that you feel like your music is such an open diary, but as a producer you're not putting your voice onto the songs. How do you feel like you're still getting a distinct message out through your sound or the features you choose?

When the feature's on there, they’re telling their story. If I make a track with you, I clearly felt something with you. I work with my friends, I work with people I look up to and admire, you know? I never do a feature for clout or payment, I don’t give a fuck about that shit. The features I have on my tracks [make] music I listen to, [they're] people I respect, and people [whose] universe I feel correlates with how I feel. For me it’s logical, maybe it’s not logical for the listener, but that’s not up to me. And also what you said about music without words — sometimes words are not necessary, bro. Like, for example, for some reason I always think about big boats sailing away, you know? And it doesn't even need to be about like a goodbye or something. It can be just a fucking cargo ship, but you see the lights at the horizon going away. That's a feeling I keep feeling. And I don't know what that feeling is, but I definitely know what it sounds like.

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Last year you had the “Fucked For Life” art exhibition with Bladee in Manhattan, and you also recently opened your own gallery in Stockholm. Considering how this is a different medium for you to express yourself, do you see it as a bridge to connect to your music? Or do you have two separate worlds where your art is in one place and your music is another place?

A lot of people try to separate what they do, but bro I’m not trying to do any of that. I’m not that complex. I live in one place, I live in one world and it’s my world. I made my own spot and this is where I exist. What I paint is what I see. I just do what I feel, and for me it doesn’t matter if it’s painting, or graffiti, or cooking, or writing, or walking and looking, or making music. For me it’s all in the same universe. And yeah it can be hard. I lost a lot of friends, I lost a lot of partners. It’s tough to be with someone who lives in their own world. I don’t really compute with society. My therapist of a few years said the most lame ass shit — she told me that every day when I wake up, I should choose the path of happiness.  And I was like, "Choose to walk the path of happiness, that sounds like something a fucking Christian person would do," you know? And I'm like, "I'm not Christian and I'm not walking the fucking road to happiness, you dumbfuck." But that doesn't mean that [it has to be] this “good boy Christian road." The road to happiness can just be waking up, you know? And as long as you don't hurt other people through taking that road, just take it.

You mentioned as part of your process, you take time out to write. What is it that you write and how do you feel like you process yourself in your writing?

For like a lot of my older records, there's a lot of poetry and texts and stuff. I wouldn't say that I write poetry, but I write down my thoughts. I write a lot. I can see at least 15 different stolen moleskin pads laying on the ground here filled with notes. I just write down what I feel and like I said, I don't see a difference with that and painting or music because also when I sit making music, I go through and read my texts and I'm like, “Oh, I remember feeling that shit or thinking that shit.”

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At this point in your life, what is it that brings you clarity? Are you searching for clarity?

I’m 33 now. I don’t know, I’m not searching for any clarity. I’ve seen a lot of my friends die from drugs or suicide or mental health fucking them up and shit like that. I’m not gonna lie, my mental health’s been pretty damn fried for most of my life. I've been struggling with hella anxiety and depression, low self-esteem and antisocial behaviors and shit like that. But lowkey the day I turned 30 I was like, “You know what? I'm so blessed.” My parents — who I fuckin’ love — they threw a birthday party for me.

I stopped going to school at a very young age, and one of the things that made me stop going to school was 'cause I was so fucking bullied in school. I come from a small town, they would bully everybody. It was the 90s, there were no openly gay people, we barely had immigration. Even me being a white, kind of straight guy, I had problems in school because in a tiny village in the north of Sweden, you don’t have to do much to stick out, you know? One day they gave out [superlatives] to all the kids who were gonna start high school. Everything was like “Jock of the Year,” “Sexy Bitch of the Year,” and then they were like “Fat Loser of the Year” and they gave it to me. I was the only sixth grader that got something.

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That’s fucked up.

That shit was so humiliating, and my principal forced me to go up and get that prize while the whole school was laughing at me. I remember because the room that this happened in was one of my favorite rooms. We had this very beautiful socialist wall painting in this room, and [since then] that painting and that room has always been stuck with me like a fucking nightmare. The room that was something I really liked turned into something that just made me feel like I wanted to disappear, you know? And on my 30th birthday, my parents threw me a party in that fucking room bro. And it was crazy.

I kept thinking that all my friends from my childhood are dead, because most of them are, but I was sitting there with a few of the survivors and my parents. That day kind of changed my life. And I'm not gonna lie, bro, for the last three years I just been happy and on my shit. People are stressing about turning 30 because they still feel like they haven't reached anything, and I lowkey felt that too. I was like “Damn, I haven't done shit.” And then I was like, “You know what, bro? I’ve lived my own damn life by my own damn rules, my whole fucking life, bro.” And I'm gonna keep doing that.

That’s amazing, bro, honestly. I feel like a big part of social interaction in general is just being a reflection of the energy that you get around you, both the negative and positive. You talk about how the bullying affected your sense of self, but it’s the love of your parents that helps you see the light in everything else.

Yeah, but also these bullies, bro, what the fuck do they do today, bro? They do nothing. They do jack shit. They work at the local gas station in my hometown. Fuck y’all! I'll make your yearly salary in a day, in an hour. I'll flip that in an hour. Bitch ass punk.