The Paris-based, acclaimed Swedish composer and musician’s sound world brings together the unexpected, bridging the gap between eastern and western orchestral techniques with textures of jazz, folk, pop and electronic music. His imaginative and innovative music often features intricate layers of electronics and sampling techniques, adding unconventional instruments in odd time signatures.

Augmenting his decades-long career with music for film and stage productions, his recent commissioned project highlights include the score for Andreas Nilsson’s Claudio’s Song – which premiered  at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival – as well as the acclaimed animated short film The Burden by Niki Lindroth von Bahr. He also created the score to Ricardo et la Peinture, a feature documentary directed by legendary filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, and the Guldbagge-nominated feature documentary LENA by Isabel Andersson. In 2019 Appelqvist was awarded the esteemed Best Original Score Award at the 2019 IDA Awards Ceremony at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles for his work on Marcus Lindeen’s film The Raft.

In 2023, he released his most recent album In the Basement of Apollo Hall, with an accompanying short film. The album explores questions about the nature and purpose of music, drawing inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophies on art, particularly the dichotomy between the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. This concept represents the human struggle between order and chaos, a theme intricately woven into the album's compositions.

For Intonal 2025, Appelqvist presents a new bespoke concert performance, A Villanelle. Set over the course of a day, three characters try to convey what’s going on inside their inner minds, through music, without words. The villanelle is a 19-line poem with a fixed structure and two recurring refrains. This rigid form serves as a framework, inspiring the musical and visual ideas of the work.