Ulf Gunnar Ekberg (born 6 December 1970), also known as Buddha, is a Swedish musician, best known as a founding member of the pop group Ace of Base, along with siblings Jonas Berggren, Linn Berggren and Jenny Berggren.
Ace of Base released its debut album in 1992 and went on to attain major chart success throughout the 1990s. Ekberg played an integral part in the production of the Happy Nation album, co-writing nearly all of the album's tracks. Ekberg would continue to provide writing and production for the group's future works, notably the singles "Love in December" and "All for You."
Ekberg has produced several artists, TV productions, films and events and has sold over 50 million records worldwide.
In 2009, he started a new music production/publishing and management company together with Jonas Berggren based in LA, London and Stockholm.
After Ekberg experienced the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, he founded the Surin Relief Fund to support affected children by providing facilities to educate children and care for orphaned children.
On 27 March 1993, Expressen reported that Ekberg had once been a member of a band called Commit Suiside. Commit Suiside was a band active in Gothenburg from 1984 to 1986, when Ulf was between the ages of 14 and 16, described as "a New Wave music band creating and performing electronic music on synthesizers without any political touch or agenda." In 1998, songs that were claimed to have been recorded by Commit Suiside (with explicit racist lyrics) were released on the unauthorized album Uffe was a Nazi!. However, the cited songs were not recorded by Commit Suiside. Other media outlets reported that Ekberg had been a neo-Nazi in his youth, for which Ekberg has repeatedly expressed regret.
Ekberg has repented of and criticized this part of his life multiple times since its reporting. In the 1997 documentary Our Story, Ekberg said: "I told everyone I really regret what I've done. [...] I took the experience from it, I learned from it. But that life is not me. It's somebody else." In 2013, he said: "During the early 1990s I did dozens of interviews, all around the world, about the people I sometimes found myself surrounded by in the 1980s and how profoundly regretful I am now about associating with such individuals. Those interviews covered every aspect of my past, as I strove to be an open book to anyone who asked. [...] The teenage mistakes I did make in terms of my chosen ideas at the time were unfortunate and if I were to live through those days again I would have done things very differently! I'm truly deeply sorry for any hurt and disappointment this has caused for our fans, and I want to be very clear that Ace of Base never shared any of these opinions and strongly oppose all extremist opinions on both the right and left wing."
Ekberg dated the Swedish model/actress Emma Sjöberg from 1994 to 2000. Until summer 2010, Ekberg lived in London. He currently lives in Stockholm with his girlfriend Johanna Aybar and their three children.
Source: Article "Ulf Ekberg" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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