JOAKIM SANDGREN was born in 1965 in Stockholm. He trained as a percussion teacher first at Ingesund and then at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Between 1991 and 1998 he studied composition for such luminaries as Sven-David Sandström, Magnus Lindberg and Pär Lindgren. His studies for Lindberg whetted his appetite for computer-assisted composition, especially using the Patch-Work software developed at IRCAM in Paris. He built up his own Patch-Work library and his own compositional environment in the computer language LISP, and supplemented his studies with a one-year course at IRCAM. Sandgren now lives in Paris, where he works on commission from the Swedish and French music worlds.

Essentially, Sandgren gives form to abstract processes in his music, although there is often a tendency towards the grotesque and the absurd. Not until "Souvenir 1" for string orchestra (2002) does he embark on an empirical vein that is autobiographical in nature. He claims to carry a legacy from Xenakis (alienation), Stockhausen and Boulez (serialism), Murail and Grisey (the spectral movement), and more recently, Mathias Spahlinger. Yet a seminal piece such as "Cordes sur bois" also seems to have derived nourishment from the baroque era.

What characterises his compositions are detailed scores, eccentric playing styles, a rough, often hard and aggressive sound, spiralling plaited forms, and microtonality. Although Sandgren composes music that can be played in the concert hall (chamber music, orchestral pieces), he likes to replace the concert set-up with distribution via speakers. He has also composed electro-acoustic music, and his tape piece "Morphe technes" (including sampled sounds of a parquet floor: "What I wanted to achieve was the inherent rhythm of the wood.") attracted international attention when it was performed during the ISCM world music festival in Rumania in 1999.

Sandgren's penchant for the spiralling form can already be discerned in his dense and seemingly rock-hewn "Monolit" for brass ensemble, while in another piece from his student years, the saxophone quartet "Jag får så ont i ögonen", a nigh-on theatrical gesture develops. Notable amongst his works for percussion are the grotesquely relentless "Det är du som drömmer" ("It is you that dreams"), and the monochrome tom-tom quartet "Samtal" ("Conversations"). In "Cordes sur bois" for solo violin, he erects a broad arc of melodic ideas in obvious dialogue with the genre's historical traditions, while "Solo pour violoniste" and tape can be described more as a forced, rather dangerous gallop around a forest of repetitive patterns.

Sandgren's orchestral works are hardly recognised for any total or brilliant orchestral sound. Thus in "Sinfonietta" (1997-99) reigns something denatured, effervescent, and heterogeneous. Formally, the piece can be seen as a latticework of three kinds of form section, while in the orchestra work "Orkester" (2000), different layers rub against each other in a remarkable process of fusion and fragmentation. "Souvenir 1" (2002) for string orchestra, with its ornate, mosaic-like development, heralds a new phase in Sandgren's oeuvre.