Kjelli Blaik — an official bio in short form.

Born in 1974, Kjelli has spent the better part of four decades writing songs and recording homegrown music.

With the majority of his catalog — nearly 500 songs and instrumentals spanning over 50 underground releases — distributed under pseudonyms, it can be difficult to pin down the exact contours of his work.

“I started using pseudonyms over 30 years ago as a way to inhabit the songwriting process in a different way. Over time, I guess my output has come to resemble more the musical and writing contributions of a bevy of loosely affiliated fellow travelers as opposed to the singular work of one author. And I’m fine with that.”

In fact, the nickname “Kjelli” is itself a Swedish play on his first name — Shelly (and it’s pronounced exactly the same). It was given to him on tour in 2007 by the trumpeter Niklas Barnö and he started signing off on creative projects with it in 2024 in order to differentiate from his ongoing work in in applied research.

That work — in the field of open source and semantic data — started around 2014 when he teamed up with some colleague ex-pats from Johns Hopkins to build software.

“The connection between language-oriented technical work and decades spent writing stories and character studies in song isn’t lost on me.”

Kjelli lives in the Patapsco Valley of Maryland — a place he calls “effortlessly haunted”. As of the end of 2025, he has been at work on a novel inspired by the forest’s mysteries and paranormal reputation.