Biography : Sonic Station
He tried his father’s acoustic guitar, always lying around in the house, at an early age and when he was nine he got his first guitar lesson.
Early on Alexander started taking his guitar some hundred meters down the road to visit his friend and neighbour Jonathan Fritzén who played keyboards and the piano. Together they had jam sessions fooling around with jazz harmonies and even trying out some of their own compositions.
Today Fritzén is a big star in the smooth jazz genre and has had several number 1-hits on the Billboard charts in the US. He also appears on Alexander Kronbrink’s Sonic Station record. As does Alexander on Fritzén’s records!
Even though he never stopped practising his guitar in the music room of the family’s villa, it wasn’t until his early 20’s Alexander decided to dedicate himself completely to music.
After going into a variety of music genres in his teens it was when a friend of his father’s, a jazz critic, introduced him to the American guitarist Lee Ritenour, Alexander started to see a direction in his playing. Through Ritenour he discovered the music of such giants as Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins, composer och producer David Foster and guitarist Jay Graydon, to mention a few.
Some years later, while studying music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, he teamed up with Marika Willstedt, a singer and pianoplayer, and they started writing music and playing together. A collaboration that turned out to be the beginning of the Sonic Station record.
Willstedt is today a well known artist and session musician. In 2011 she became a household name in Sweden after appearing as pianist and teamleader in a hyped prime time tv-show on national television for ten weeks. She sings and plays keyboards on the Sonic Station record and has also written most of the lyrics. Two of the songs have lyrics by Alexander’s father, Hans Kronbrink.
During the second half of the 00’s, while working on his Sonic Station project, Alexander also played the guitar with different artists and groups. Among them the thrilling side project Moonlight Sailors with, once again, his friend Jonathan Fritzén on keyboards, accompanied by drummer Aron Mellergård and bass player Henrik Linder. The last two founders of the very hot group Dirty Loops, celebrated by both Lee Ritenour and Jay Graydon! Mellergård and Linder have also contributed with their talents on the Sonic Station record.
From the very beginning the Sonic Station project has been based in the 80’s music and the west coast-sound, as performed by artists like for instance Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.
The focus is on melody, and the Sonic Station-sound is a meticulous and exciting mixture of pop and jazz. To get the most quality out of each song Alexander, who composed ten of the songs and also produced and arranged the whole record, engaged four singers with different singing styles and voices: Marika Willstedt, Magnus Bäcklund, Kristoffer Fogelmark and Tove Lo.
Backed up by a long line of session musicians and Alexander’s brilliant guitar playing they have created an expressive and warm record where each song has an obvious and immediate hit feeling.
With Sonic Station Alexander Kronbrink has taken the 80’s into the future!
Source : http://www.sonic-station.com/bio.html