Maiko Collection will take you on a journey through different electronic music genres and also on a journey with me as I was learning production, mixing, and mastering and trying to recover from illness when life throws you a curveball.

I contracted COVID in the spring of 2020 and had to stop being an athlete. I was more than an athlete; it was a lifestyle. Furthermore, I was helping other athletes with training, nutrition, and recovery programs.
When I wasn't training or coaching, I studied exercise and nutrition. On my "rest" days, I went out in the forest with my son, or we did some kind of physical activity together. I have a problem being still; I relax when I move.

I also played the 2-row button accordion, but I struggled with cognitive problems, so I forgot how to play. I tried to get back into it for a year after, but it was never the same; my brain and my fingers wouldn't cooperate any more.

I created a recovery program for myself using all my experience and knowledge from my education and work in health care and from working with other athletes to try to heal and get better. However, not being able to train as I used to, I started to notice other mental health problems that had been masked by my active life: difficulties sleeping, broken sleep, difficulty focusing, and difficulty in social situations. Very likely, I have some neuropsychiatric disabilities (gifts).

In the summer of 2021, my oldest son moved in with us after he finished folk high school, and one evening I heard a nice melody coming from his bedroom. He was messing around with a melody in FL Studio, and I thought it was so cool the things he could do in the DAW. I realised that I wasn't restricted in any physical way in a DAW. I fetched my Casio SK-1 keyboard and our debut track Afterglow was born that night.

I said to my son "this is good music, we need to get it out there, I need to learn mixing and mastering" So I bought Bitwig as it seemed easy to get into, I started to just mess around with the DAW producing tracks and tracks and more tracks just to learn. I watched Bitwig tutorials, and when I was confident with the DAW I started to enter online production competitions to get feedback, having a deadline to meet and to learn production, mixing and mastering. I did 10 different production competitions before I felt confident enough to start to mix and master Broken Nomads tracks.

During the productions of these tracks, I realised that I wanted to keep making tracks as Chemical Shift and experiment and explore many different genres in electronic music, and spice it up with elements from other genres I listened to throughout my life.

So this Album is the story of me, recovering from post-covid and exhaustion syndrome, finding my way back into life through music.

Hope you enjoy the journey

Love
Mattias

All Songs written and produced by Mattias from Broken Nomads (apart from Drifitng Again which was tracked by Alex Reid)

Mastering by Mattias from Broken Nomads