MAGNUS ALEXANDERSON was born in Uppsala on the 17th January, 1961. His formal musical training included courses at EMS (Electro-Acoustic Music in Sweden) in Stockholm and he also studied electro-acoustic music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. His teachers include Rolf Enström, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Tamas Ungvary, Ragnar Grippe and Jan W Morthenson, and he has also studied with Lars Sandberg and Miklós Maros.

During the 80s he was involved as composer, musician and arranger in productions at the Fylkingen Society for New Music and Intermedia Art, and in the 90s he has worked as composer and musician on various projects and installations in collaboration with dancers and pictorial artists. His main field of activities consists of electro-acoustic music and chamber music.

During the 90s Alexanderson has taken stock of some of the ideological trends in experimental art music and realised them in a personal way in his compositions. Works such as Tabula Rasa and Smältpunkter (Melting-points) are notated with alternative symbols and text, which means that the identity of the works can vary somewhat from one performance to another. Interference I and Chimes are examples of algorithmic compositions with a certain kinship with various serial and aleatoric compositional techniques.

The text-sound composition Domine and the works FU and Epilogue make use of the stylistic expressive means of concrete music. He has also collaborated with the pictorial artists Sachiko Hayashi and Stina Opitz on installations such as Water Resonance, for example. In Skin Add Scratch he explores the possibilities of minimalistic figures and processes, with timbral monoliths and extended silent passages. Microtonality, live electronics and ideas about music as texture are important features of Alexanderson’s output.