Tor Lundvall isn’t listed on Metacritic. This might not seem like a big deal to many, but for many recording artists, not having a critical record of your work is strange, especially in the digital era.

Wyckoff native Tor Lundvall is a painter and composer. “I’ve always done both,” he says. “My art and music developed side by side, but I still consider myself a painter first.”

He may not be a household name just yet, but Tor Lundvall — a visual artist and ambient musician in equal measure — has more than left his mark on the instrumental scene.

In 2009, ambient pop artist Tor Lundvall announced he said all he really needed to say. Following that year’s Sleeping and Hiding, Lundvall’s trademark, soft falsetto had completely disappeared from his music.

John B. McLemore is probably best known as the charismatic, obsessive, antique-clock-repairing, hedge-maze-building, dog-loving, murder investigating, tattooed focus of S-Town, the hit podcast from 2017. But he was also was a composer, who remixed the music of an artist he never met.

Every episode of S-Town led to a new twist about the life of John B. McLemore, the charismatic, mercurial focus of the hit podcast. He had his hobbies and obsessions — repairing antique clocks, building a hedge maze, mentoring local kids, getting tattoos and piercings, caring for his dogs, and trying to get to the bottom of a murder that never happened in his “shit town.”

In the fall of 2012, the reclusive American painter and ambient composer Tor Lundvall began an online correspondence with a stranger. A musician had written to ask permission to upload a mix he’d made of some of Lundvall’s music – tracks he’d deemed Lundvall’s greatest hits, which he’d woven in with some of his own material.

In both his visual and auditory work, Tor Lundvall expresses a surreal lucidity — familiar, but didactic — perhaps drawing from something not unlike the collective unconscious.

I follow my own path and I steer clear of the things that disturb my soul. My happiest moments have been those when I’m alone in Nature, painting or recording music, laughing with an old friend or spending time with my dog. I can only speak for myself regarding religion which serves no purpose for me, however I couldn’t survive without my spiritual connection with Nature.

Ambient composer and painter Tor Lundvall manages to translate the feel of his surroundings so well that in his works you almost feel the soft coldness of the first winter breeze, decadent smell of autumn leaves, the intense scent of pines in the hazy summer forest, breath of chimneys of some small and remote village or the distant dawn or twilight covering the urban horizon.

Tor Lundvall (born 1968) is both a visual artist and ambient composer from Wyckoff, New Jersey. His early works were collaborations with Tony Wakeford of Sol Invictus, and much of their artwork came directly from Tor.

I first became aware of bands like Coil, Current 93 and Sol Invictus around 1987-88. Up to that point, I was listening to synth-pop and ambient music mostly.

On his website Tor Lundvall has a brief piece about the history of his painting style, a style which indelibly marks his musical efforts as well. Of the figures which populate his artwork, he says they are “merely passing through the mystery and silence of the landscape.”