Basshunter

• Genre: Trance

About

Malmo, Sweden's Jonas Altberg was born in 1984, and you can hear his youthful exuberance leaping out of the music he records as Basshunter. In his teens, he began experimenting with Fruity Loops music software, and by 2006 he'd scored a deal with Warner Music -- not a bad learning curve. In his official bio, he sounds a bit baffled himself by the rate at which he went from being a video-game expert to a musician "that performed almost every day all over Scandinavia." (Some things haven't changed: He still lives at home with his parents.)

Basshunter's first release was 2006's Anna Boten single, a glammy trance stomper notable in part for its Swedish vocals. Later that year he followed up with his debut album, a collection of stab-happy trance ("Strand Tylosand," named after the beach by his family home) and harder, more acidic fare ("I'm Your Bass Creator"). In 2008, with his international profile bolstered by Ultra's re-release of his album, he came out with the singles "Please Don't Go" and "Now You're Gone," both of them lighters-in-the-air trance ballads.

- Philip Sherburne