Mads Kjeldgaard is a sound artist and composer from Denmark. His work is inspired by generative processes, biology and sound environments. He draws on techniques from music, text, photography, motor-based sound art, electronics, field recordings, and programming. In 2024, he founded the platform Exformal Records for sound and listening-based thinking, followed in 2025 by hyaline.systems, a platform for creative technology. He studied electronic music composition at The Royal Academy of Music (DIEM), trained as a journalist, and is a member of The Danish Composers’ Society.
On Saturday, 13 September, Mads Kjeldgaard will perform at the opening night of the Berlin Month of Contemporary Music #9 alongside and as part of the AGGREGATE Festival alongside with gamut inc (Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki), and Scottish composer, organist, and performer Claire M Singer, presenting new and existing works for organ.
Questions and Answers:
3 FACTS
1: Capitalism will not solve the climate crisis.
2: There’s a genocide happening in Gaza.
3: History will judge us harshly for facts 1-2.
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Currently I’m very inspired by biological processes, especially growth processes like the ones seen in slime molds, lichen and fungi’s mycelium. Everything around us is in a constant process of communication, nutritional exchange, decay and blossoming, us humans included.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
When I was around 12 I convinced my parents to buy me the software Dance eJay which was my introduction to electronic music production. Soon after I discovered sample-based hiphop-production which sparked an infinite curiosity with music, spending countless hours digging through thrift store record bins for nice records to sample for beats. It was also through hiphop I developed a profound fascination with sounds, zooming in on waveforms, creating loops, etc.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time? (yes we know it is difficult).
Only getting to choose 5 is brutal, arghhh.
– Novos Baianos – Acabou Chorare
– John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
– Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On.
– Alice Coltrane – Huntington Ashram Monastery
– Madvillain – Madvillainy
3. What do you associate with Berlin?
Space, darkness, history.
4. What’s your favourite place in your town?
I live in Copenhagen where my favourite place is *io*, a small tea house in Nørrebro. I have had countless deep interactions with strangers and friends alike there. It has an atmosphere, people and tea there that naturally take you out of your every day life and opens up your soul to all sorts of things.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I would work as a parfumeur, creating and/or selling perfumes. I find smells infinitely erotic, poetic and mysterious, and the ways we associate memories, people and places with certain smells deeply fascinating.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
I recently bought a defunct CD-player and fixed it up so I could start collecting CD’s again. The main purpose of this was so that I could buy a copy of a CD of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar’s *Raga Pancham Kosh*, a piece of hindustani classical music I have listened to on repeat basically for a year now via a crap quality YouTube rip. Listening to this makes me feel like a stick of butter in the summer sun.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I want to do more work with dancers and choreographers. I once saw a William Forsythe performance that created this deep desire in me, so he might be a dream collaborator but I doubt he would give me the time of day.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
In my drinking days I went to Roskilde Festival 10 years in a row an got black out drunk. I saw some of the best concerts of my life in that period, but unfortunately it’s all a big haze so I can’t tell for sure. Maybe Prince’s last performance there?
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Technology is quite integral to my work. In order to realize some of the creative ideas I have, I need to make my own custom software and hardware.
11. What can we expect from your concert at the Month of Contemporary Music 2025 in Berlin?
I have composed a piece of algorithmic music for a robot-controlled pipe organ. The piece is a celebration of life, it’s an intense blossoming movement, and hopefully it’s also fun. It was composed while living in the Pyrenees and witnessing the pure abundance of nature, every crack and crevice of the landscape inhabited by some plant screaming *I WANT TO LIVE*.
