Karl Sölve Steven is an award-winning New Zealand/Swedish composer who devises unique scores from his home of Pārāwai Thames, a once-affluent former gold rush town nestled between rainforests and beaches at the southwestern end of the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand's North Island.

Karl works with an ever-evolving array of musicians and ensembles, whether in Auckland at Neil Finn's Roundhead Studios, in Wellington with the Stroma Chamber Ensemble, or further afield in London, LA, Sweden and Iceland. In 2024 he was invited to attend the Cannes Film Festival as one of ten international composers as part of the Marché Du Film’s ‘Spot The Composer’ initiative.

From a young age, Karl was making recordings with his parents’ old reel-to-reel tape recorder, building instruments, and gradually acquiring synthesisers, samplers, and sequencers along the way. At 17, he left school to work as a trainee sound engineer, working extensively with tape and early digital technologies and then began composing theme music, soundtracks, and scores for films.

Having written for, co-produced, performed in, and toured extensively with multiplatinum-selling Supergroove in the 90s, his curiosity was constantly fuelled by second-hand bookstores visited on the road, and once back to sedentary life he moved to the UK where he completed a PhD in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy from Trinity College Cambridge.