Miike Snow

Miike Snow – consisting of producing team Bloodshy & Avant (Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg), and Andrew Wyatt – is an active Swedish indie pop band, formed in Stockholm, Sweden in 2007. The band is often represented by the silhouette image of a jackalope. The name “Miike Snow” is said to have come from one of their friends named Mike Snow.

Band members Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg were childhood friends who spent time playing in bands and working on various projects in studios throughout the city of Gothenburg. Karlsson was a former member of the Swedish hip-hop band Goldmine, who toured with The Fugees. After separate moves to Stockholm, they reunited in 2000. Karlsson and Winnberg collaborated under the moniker Bloodshy & Avant and enjoyed a significant amount of success as producers and songwriters. They have worked with artists such as Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Kelis, Sky Ferreira, and won a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording for Spears’s track “Toxic.”

In 2004, while working on writing a pop album for Britney Spears, Karlsson and Winnberg met the third band member, American songwriter Andrew Wyatt, who had previously attended music school and studied classical and jazz music, via a “music business guy;” Wyatt adds that “I was in Sweden visiting, and someone told me that I should hook up with these two guys. Actually, it turns out I’d met Christian in the studio maybe a year before, but we only actually recently remembered that.”

Currently, the band has released two albums – Happy to You and Miike Snow – though Wyatt has confirmed a third album to be released in either 2015 or 2016.

Miike Snow has expressed a preference for not using laptops when recording and playing music. Thus, in 2011, in anticipation for the Happy to You tour, Miike Snow collaborated with the Swedish electronics lab Teenage Engineering and one of the engineers from Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) to create “The Blob” (also known as Diana Ross), a 9m × 9m hexagonal synthesiser. The Blob has been introduced by vocalist Wyatt as “Part synthesizer, part testosterone, all headache, ladies and gentlemen, we happily bring you a costly device with planned obsolescence written all over it.” Consisting of digital samplers and old synthesiser parts, some of which were bought from Giorgio Moroder.

Operated by Karlsson and Winnberg and emblazoned with the band’s jackalope logo, the Blob has been used on tours and is known to be able to be taken apart to facilitate travelling.