Beat Maker Turns Full Time Producer

Becoming a professional musician seemed as unattainable as becoming a professional football player. Now, a laptop and a midi keyboard is all he needs to create magic: Stockholm based music producer Moon Safari works day shifts in sessions with producers, night shifts to write ambient music for Nova. “I had a goal to work with music, because I loved it. I found that to be a very effective driver. It’s what keeps you going in times of doubt”. 

He used to geek over lofi beats on SoundCloud when he started making music in his early teenage years. It’s what got him into music production in the first place, his enthusiasm eventually leading him to his creative home genre, hip-hop. 

Joining Nova, he enriched his palette with ambient music as well. According to him, a genre that at times can be quite challenging to compose in: the absence of a clear verse-chorus structure or a drop makes the composition completely freehanded. Sounds need to be reinvented and reimagined while fitting into a soundscape of other tracks - all this while staying clear of copying someone else’s ideas.

Moon Safari approaches the process in a thoughtful way, sparking ideas by listening to tracks by fellow musicians and getting inspired by it. He will start several different projects, catching vibes, seeing what sticks. After taking a step back and reconsidering his progress, he picks his favourite ones and ties them together into finished productions. This is a method that is no stranger to genres like pop, indie or hip-hop either.  

“I am looking for a specific feeling. It’s hard to describe, but I get it with some tracks, and then I know they belong”. 

Once he built a sustainable routine around music, he bet on himself and dared to take a step into a direction he didn’t know was gonna work out: a bit more than half a year ago he quit his weekend job at the supermarket to work with music full time. A risk he was willing to take to try to follow his dream, an opportunity that got enabled through his collaboration with Nova. 

Now, his schedule is busier than ever: sessions with artists in his home town, sessions with artists abroad, listening to playlists, composing mood music. Moon Safari is one of the people in our roster that successfully made it to working with music on the side of making music. 

While side hustles usually come with the trade of being less cool than the thing you want to focus on primarily, the Swedish music producer doesn’t find it odd at all to work as a hip hop producer for a known artist while having mood music projects on the side. 

“Usually society decides what is cool and what not and mood music got into the crossfire. But it’s just the reality that you have to do something other [than artistry] as well. It might be mood music, it might be sound design, it might be making music for ads. It could be tons of different stuff within the industry. But of course everyone wants to be known about their main project and not the thing they do to support it”. 

Because we are living in an age of AI music and the possibility to "write" a song is available for everyone who has a laptop or smartphone, music that is passively consumed enjoys particular suspicion. Understandably. Which is why conversations with creatives like Moon Safari are especially refreshing. 

When the Stockholm based producer manages to catch a beat in between his early morning energy drink and all day to late night studio sessions, he likes to relax watching documentaries about history. 

A beat maker turns into a professional producer, taking risks and succeeding in creating an environment for himself to work in music full time. An golden addition to our artist roster at Nova. 

Listen to Moon Safari’s music here and enjoy his timeless tunes. ■