Composer Jacob Mühlrad releases collaboration with Swedish House Mafia

House music group Swedish House Mafia have released a symphonic interpretation of their 2010 club classic One (Your Name). The re-worked One Symphony was created in collaboration with 30-year-old Swedish composer Jacob Mühlrad.

Swedish House Mafia announced the release of the single via twitter on New Year’s Day alongside a screenshot of all three band members on a video call with a beaming Mühlrad.

Mühlrad said: ‘My starting point in writing One Symphony was to use the beautiful simplicity of the main melody originally written as a downward scale movement within the interval of a 5th. The 5th is an interval that exists in all musical traditions in the world. I felt an urge to keep trying to keep the gesture both rhythmically and melodically and vary it as much as possible.’

The youngest composer ever to have his work performed at The Royal Swedish Opera, Mühlrad is the second Swede in history be published by influential classical music label, Deutsche Grammophon. His debut album with the label included substantial choral work Time (2018), which explored the word ‘time’ in 27 different languages.

In 2020, Jacob Mühlrad begun a multi-year collaboration with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra including the commission and world premiere of his first large orchestral work REMS in September 2020 at the Konserthuset Stockholm.

The music video for the symphony, released next Friday (14 January), was created in collaboration with Swedish conceptual artist Alexander Wessely. Mühlrad and Wessely met in 2016, when Mühlrad’s Schema accompanied one of Wessely’s art videos, and most recently worked together last year on Cyclical Movements, a video piece exploring circularity, commissioned by textile recycling company Renewcell.

Founded in 2008, Swedish House Mafia reunited last year after a seven-year break with Moth to a Flame, Lifetime and It Gets Better and the announcement of a 2022 international tour.

You can find out more about Swedish House Mafia here.

You can find out more about Jacob Mühlrad at his website.