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Sweden has a long and rich tradition of folk music recorded. During the 1970s, the genre flourished and got a new boost in the 1990s.

In the regions Norrbotten and Västerbotten a number of artists as Norrlåtar (”North Songs”), JP Nyströms and Burträskara (among others) on numerous recordings produced a well-crafted folk music. The music material was taken from the Swedish, Finnish and Sami music cultures in the region, for example, the yoik.

The recordings were often musically and technically well-crafted and designed an "authentic" sound, recorded in the studio or in a real environment outside the recording studio, for example a dance barn or in a kitchen.

The recorded music was part of a cultural project, that was both to make visible a peripheral region in Sweden and one in the folk world unknown music culture, and simultaneously problematize the concept of folk music. In the recorded music, it’s cultural and geographical ”space”, was expressed in the roominess of the recording.

In this lecture the recordings with Northern Swedish folk music is discussed as studio productions and cultural artifacts. A few analytical models and concept pairs, that describe music recordings as both representations and spatial and temporal design, is presented and applied to the material: the Representation model and the Room Model.