ARTISTS

Olof Dreijer

Sweden
dj

Olof Dreijer is a music producer, DJ, musician and member of the Swedish electronic pop group, The Knife. Olof has been pushing the borders of electronic music for two decades, trying to keep things fun and colourful.

A fledgling DJing career commenced around ‘98 at local school parties, and Olof was soon up and running his first club night focussed on Disco, House, Garage, and Drum n' Bass during his high school years. By the early 2000s, Olof moved into playing Hip Hop and R&B before a period invested in hard Techno, acid house, EBM, Shranz and even Trance. Over the past decade, when he’s not been too busy producing music in the studio, Olof has been DJing throughout Europe at clubs and festivals such as Panorama Bar, Dalston Superstore, Dekmantel Festival, Unsound and Club2Club London. 2023 saw Olof co-found Bamba Club, a local Stockholm club night with friends to play the music they like to dance to themselves with a warm and friendly atmosphere.

Current Olof Dreijer DJ sets feature a tight multi-deck mix of all kinds of grooves he likes to dance to himself, ranging from funky Techno and melodic house to Baile Funk and Batida with a few cheeky acapellas thrown in for good measure. This can be seen in his DJ set at HÖR’s Radar stage at 2023’s Dekmantel Festival, as well as heard on guest mixes for NTS Radio and Hessle Audio’s Rinse FM show.

At the turn of 2010, Olof started working under the secret pseudonym, Oni Ayhun, to release music that explored different kinds of more experimental directions and play with gender, trying different ways of being in drag and fun set designs. One of the first Oni Ayhun shows, at Berghain/Panorama Bar in 2010, featured a stage made of fluorescent green walls covered with landscape paintings and a table covered in golden cloth, with Oni clad in a sculpture-like rococo outfit. Subsequent performances saw Oni Ayhun bring their show to Tokyo’s Liquid Rooms, London’s Corsica Studios and Italy’s Club2Club festival.

A small catalogue of self-released Oni Ayhun singles complemented by remixes for Honest Jon’s Shangaan Electro project, Macro and Kontra-Musik have established the project in the modern experimental music canon.

In 2015, Olof collaborated with studio partners Paula Temple, rRoxymore and Planningtorock on the Decon Recon project. Founded by Temple to play with hierarchies in the electronic music world, Decon Recon toured throughout Europe and Mexico, whilst music released under the name was made with a communal pool of sounds, not knowing who had done what. Nowadays, Olof is mostly active with making his own music, producing and remixing other artists, and teaching music. Olof co-produced several tracks on Fever Ray’s critically acclaimed 2023 album Radical Romantics, produced Tunisian multi-instrumentalist and composer Houeida Hedfi’s debut album Fleuves De L'âme, as well as music by Planningtorock and Konichiwa Records’ Swedish-Kurdish pop artist Zhala. Fever Ray, Nine Inch Nails, Röyksopp & Robyn and Ti Chuong are among the artists to have been blessed by an Olof Dreijer remix.

2023 saw Olof return with a first taste of new solo music, releasing the Rosa Rugosa EP on the celebrated UK label Hessle Audio, the title track described as ‘an unconventional summer banger capable of carpeting the dancefloor in dazzled smiles’ by Pitchfork. This was complemented by the release of Souvenir, a long-gestating project with fellow producer Mt. Sims which centres around the rich harmonics of the steel drum. Further solo music from Olof Dreijer is planned in the coming months.