Born in Falun on 8th January 1956. He grew up in Uppsala, where he also began “playing rock music at the time when the Music Movement began and in the fruitful climate which this implied. At the beginning of the seventies people began using synthesizers for rock and this, of course, was exciting for me as a pianist, because it opened up a new world of sound.“

A group project on 20th century music during the senior grades of compulsory school first brought him into contact with the Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm - a “minor revolution and a natural continuation from Hendrix and Zappa“. There followed studies at EMS and the Stockholm College of Music, as well as music and film studies at the Universities of Stockholm and Gothenburg. In addition, he has collaborated closely with the concert organization Fylkingen.

Ever since Bertrand R. was played at Young Nordic Composers Festival in Copenhagen in 1981, Anders Blomqvist’s electronic compositions have ranked among the most interesting to have come out of Sweden, and he has also harvested international successes, not least at Bourges. Like so many other composers of electro-acoustic music, he has also taken an interest in picture shows, and his fateful Jaguar Revisited (1984) has been repeatedly performed at various festivals and on television. For the 1985 Skinnskatteberg Electronic Music Festival he created an effective Fireworks Music together with pyrotechnician Pär Hultgren.

His more recent tape pieces include Carpe Diem, an intensive, brutal critique of the times. In Lag (1986) he uses both concrete and synthetic material, the latter having a depictive, indeed imitative function, while the function of the concrete sound is more abstract. One of the biggest electronic music ventures in Sweden was the music for the MUSIK art exhibition at the Norrköping Museum of Art in September 1982. Each of the five exhibition rooms was given its own, tailor-made music, partly in the form of a continuous background sound and also in the form of half-hour compositions of more elaborately worked-out material, played through at least six loudspeakers in every room, all day for a week. This comprehensive work was undertaken together with composer William Brunson, and one of the many ingredients used in the composition consisted of the names of the two authors, spelt using the system devised by Hervin, the artist whose work was on show.

Together with Åke Parmerud, for the 1987 Skinnskatteberg Festival, he created Termik for two synthesizer players, interspersing improvisations with episodes of strict notation.
Stig Jacobsson 1988