KASBO

From Gothenburg to Foreign Family

Kasbo is Carl Garsbo, born in 1995 and raised in Gothenburg, who began uploading tracks in 2013 and gathered momentum with the five‑track Umbrella Club EP in October 2015. Early singles such as World Away (released via ODESZA’s Foreign Family Collective in late 2015) placed him among a cohort of melody‑first electronic artists who criss‑crossed between streaming platforms and club shows. By the end of that year he was already on US dates with ODESZA, exposure that helped seed his stateside audience.

The debut album arrived on 23 March 2018. Places We Don’t Know (Counter Records/Foreign Family Collective) consolidated the palette he’d been honing: spacious drums, Scandinavian folk tonalities and vocal features used as textural counterpoints to wordless hooks. Around its campaign, Kasbo announced and played his first headlining North American tour and slotted further support runs for ODESZA, including Red Rocks. Those cycles quietly established him as a live draw rather than only a playlist fixture.

A setback shapes the sound: 2019–2020

A period of stress‑related hearing loss in 2019 forced a halt to production and touring. He spoke later about rebuilding his practice and expectations; the interruption courses audibly through The Making of a Paracosm, released on 23 October 2020 through Foreign Family Collective/Counter Records. Interviews from that period describe an escapist world‑building impulse and a leaning into Swedish collaborators (including Frida Sundemo and Freja The Dragon) while he learned to work within new physical limits. In hindsight, Paracosm reads like a bridge between the coming club‑leaning shift and the luminous, widescreen electronica of his debut.

The album that reset the compass

On 7 June 2024 Kasbo issued The Learning of Urgency on Foreign Family Collective. Written largely in Gothenburg and Stockholm and tracked at Riksmixningsverket (RMV) — the ABBA‑owned complex in a former naval warehouse on the island of Skeppsholmen — it is a self‑reckoning set that confronts the burnout that preceded it. Label notes at release were explicit about the stress‑induced hearing condition that nearly ended his career, and about a new attraction to euphoric club energy. Singles Drift and Atlantis (with Shallou and BJOERN) framed the record’s aquatic, slow‑the‑pulse concept; later highlights included I’m In Trouble (featuring ViVii) and This Is It (with Frida Sundemo). Media across 2024 underscored the context: a musician relearning pace, paring the studio down to essentials and committing to make music on his own terms. The album was accompanied by a short trailer confirming the date and its intent.

The 2024 campaign also widened the live lens. In January that year, he launched a filmed ‘Labyrinth’ mix series with a high‑angle DJ set at Washington State’s High Steel Bridge (published 18 January 2024), a striking contrast to the multi‑player live rigs of late‑2010s tours. The new emphasis: extended, place‑specific DJ performances that let his material breathe among edits, remixes and allied melodic house.

‘Labyrinth’ becomes a show

The filmed Labyrinth concept became a touring format in 2025. On 20 September 2025 he played a three‑hour sunset set at the Mishawaka Amphitheatre outside Fort Collins, Colorado; the venue later published a recap describing a flow through material from Places We Don’t Know, The Making of a Paracosm and The Learning of Urgency. The full performance, shot on the night and released on 4 December 2025 as Labyrinth Vol. 2, confirms the shift: a marathon, narrative DJ mix sequencing his own catalogue among adjacent club records rather than a fixed ‘live band’ run‑through of album tracks. Joplyn opened that Mishawaka show — a small but telling detail about how these evenings are now structured.

2026: new label partners, new material

Alongside the Foreign Family catalogue, 2026 has seen Kasbo step into Lane 8’s This Never Happened orbit. On 5 February he released All This Time as a standalone single on the label. In April, Lane 8, Kasbo and BJOERN issued World Is Mine (23 April 2026) as the headline track on a five‑track EP collecting Lane 8 collaborations. And on 3 September 2026, days ago, Kasbo followed with another solo cut, Falling Slow, again via This Never Happened. The pattern is clear: a producer who came up through an ODESZA‑adjacent lane is, in 2026, a core voice in Lane 8’s melodic house ecosystem while still carrying his own album identity.

On the road now, and what’s next

The touring picture mirrors the release schedule. In late summer 2026 Kasbo booked a run of three‑hour, often outdoor, Labyrinth DJ sets across the US: a day‑party at Austin’s Scoot Inn on Saturday 5 September 2026 and a 7pm start at ZeyZey Miami on Sunday 6 September were advertised as ‘3‑hour DJ Set’ shows. Further ahead this month is a New York booking with Lane 8 at Brooklyn Storehouse on Saturday 26 September 2026, billed with Robby East and MYRNE — listings for that event flag Lane 8 B2B Kasbo as the headlining shape. Europe follows quickly: on Saturday 24 October 2026, Kasbo appears on a DGTL‑presented This Never Happened daytime programme at Kromhouthal in Amsterdam.

All of it sits comfortably with the ‘Labyrinth’ idea that has framed the last 18 months. These aren’t 60‑minute festival sprints; they are three‑hour stretches that allow him to thread the lighter, folk‑tinged pieces from 2018 and 2020 into the sturdier club chassis of the 2024 album and the 2026 singles. It’s a format that has re‑centred Kasbo in rooms and courtyards rather than only on headphones, and in 2026 it is the defining way to see him at work.

What the work adds up to

Across three studio albums — Places We Don’t Know (23 March 2018), The Making of a Paracosm (23 October 2020) and The Learning of Urgency (7 June 2024) — the throughline is melody and patient build, even as the scene around him has swung harder towards peak‑time utility. The recent singles, All This Time (5 February 2026) and Falling Slow (3 September 2026), are a neat precis of that balance: the first a vocal‑forward melodic house tune issued under the discreet, no‑phones TNH banner; the second a more expansive document that would slot cleanly into the last hour of a three‑hour sunset set. World Is Mine, his April collaboration with Lane 8 and BJOERN, shows he can share the foreground without diluting that signature. For 2026, that’s his standing: a Swedish producer who has translated album craft into long‑form DJ storytelling, and who is now finishing nights as often as he used to open them.