ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF

Inspired by the black metal scene, Anna von Hausswolff’s otherworldly, organ-driven music has entered its own sphere of exhilaratingly raw emotion

raised on drone and black metal, Sweden’s organ-playing chanteuse is opening up a new frontier.

If a musician draws inspiration from varied artists like György Ligeti,

Swans and PJ Harvey, you can be sure that the outcome is going to be unique and exceptional. In the case of Swedish singer/songwriter Anna von Hausswolff, it results in organ-driven, nocturnal shadow music that feeds on an almost childlike fascination with death and otherworldly experiences – yet refuses to be a gothic cliché.

“When I make music, I think about it as in a landscape. It can be a kind of sound or a texture that I’m looking for, or clashes between different kinds of textures and atmospheres,” the 31-yearold explains in regard to the release of her fourth album, Dead Magic. “I can’t say that I want to create a specific genre or that there is a singular thing I want to say. I see music more as storytelling or a way to explore a certain universe.”

Even though her music contains elements from pop to contemporary classical music and folk, there is a heaviness and gloom to it that inevitably traces back to Anna’s gusto for metal.

“I started with classic bands like Black Sabbath and AC/DC,” she recollects, “because I played drums in high school. I wasn’t very good – I was extremely hard and loud but not very technical. So then I really liked these slower, easier hard rock bands that were still very heavy.”

But it wasn’t until she moved to Copenhagen in her 20s that she learned to appreciate black metal as something fresh and inspiring. “I was at a friend’s place and he started playing Burzum,” she explains with a bashful smile, knowing the dangerous potential this name has; in 2013 the singer faced some serious backlash after appearing on the cover of a Swedish newspaper in a shirt of extremist neo-paganist Varg Vikernes’ band – eventually leading her to distance herself from his personal views.

Remembering her first musical encounter with Burzum, she proceeds: “I couldn’t continue talking because there was something very captivating about the melodies and harmonies and the atmosphere. So that was a starting point for me.” From there she discovered more Norwegian and then Swedish black metal and now cites Attila Csihar, singer of her favourite black metal band, Mayhem, as one of her main vocal inspirations, alongside the likes of avant-garde queen Diamanda Galás.

“When I sing, I try to be as direct and as much in connection with my emotions as possible,” she explains, drawing parallels. “I don’t like to use filters. I like it when you hear flaws, when you hear that something is fragile or ugly. You can hear that the core emotion is raw and primitive, and the expression is very primitive as well.”

Knowing Anna’s background, her musical output and the unexpected twists and turns it takes come as no surprise; she’s the daughter of the renowned visual artist and experimental musician Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who has spent decades in Sweden’s underground and art scenes, which have been working with drone music for many years. This background fed into her spirit to push and cross stylistic boundaries, but it also caused a sense of intimidation that she only learned to overcome after discovering the heavier side of drone.

“The art scene works in a different way to the underground experimental scene. It’s more elitist and I think my entire life I’ve been afraid of that scene because it can be extremely pretentious.”

Getting to know bands like Earth and Sunn O))) strengthened the Gothenburg-based musician’s trust in her own potential and ability to step outside the world of singer/songwriter music and engage in layered and textured spacious and ponderous soundscapes.

“When I heard Earth for the first time, I was very relieved to hear a band who weren’t coming from the art scene but from the metal scene, and they were trying to challenge people and the genre and make it their own,” she recalls. “It was inspiring to see that bands are starting to explore the drone territory within the more popular culture and that I can come from this place and also allow myself to enter more challenging and experimental territories.”

Since 2012, her weapon of choice for that is the organ. After releasing her piano-driven debut, Singing From The Grave, in 2010, the recording sessions for her sophomore album, Ceremony, were her first physical encounter with a pipe organ. “And now I’m stuck,” she says, laughing.

She enjoys playing with the whole room, making use of a giant frequency range that can be put to use for simple and quiet parts as well as noisy and heavy ones. “You can orchestrate entire songs with just one instrument because the possibilities are endless,” she swoons. Her new release, Dead Magic, sees her become more familiar with the pipe organ while her live experiences of getting carried away by the music made her push both the instrument and her voice to new extremes. “There’s been this ongoing craziness that I’ve been longing to capture on an album. I think we managed a little bit on Dead Magic, it’s there,” she agrees.

Working with producer Randall Dunn (Wolves In The Throne Room, Sunn O))), Earth) for the first time, Dead Magic sees Anna engage in longer songs than before, each track its own journey through the soul. “I like the longer format because it helps me get into a certain state of mind or a different world and explore it a little bit,” she explains. “My first idea was to make one long track because I really love the idea of making an album like it’s a movie – that there are no breaks, no pauses, just one long fluid line that goes up and down in various angles.”

But when it came time to start working on her fourth album, Anna’s mind was scattered and she found herself overwhelmed by emotions that led to a more fragmented writing process. “When I wrote this album, I was not in a good place. I was exhausted, I was in a passive state of mind. It felt like I was not really in contact with my emotions and my creativity,” she says.

So she did what she does best; she processed her feelings in an artistic way, putting the things that dragged her down into music to eventually overcome them. Now, over one year later, the musician realises that she was stuck in a paradox that was connected to her previous album.

“The Miraculous was very much about how your mind and imagination work,” she says. “You can combine fantasy with reality to manipulate your surroundings and create this magical place. With this album, it was like I’ve been preaching about that place and about the importance of imagination and creativity for so long and then suddenly, I’m in a place where I don’t feel I have contact with it anymore.”

Experiencing and defeating this destructive power that was playing tricks on her mind, Anna von Hausswolff sees Dead Magic as a celebration of the imagination, an encouragement to never stop believing in it and, not least, in the spiritual and transcendental power of music. As she explains, “It’s important that there is a mystery to music, another universe that you can’t really explain or understand; you just feel the energy of it. That’s quite magical, I think.”

DEAD MAGIC IS RELEASED ON MARCH 2 VIA CITY SLANG

“It’s Important that there

Is a mystery to musIc”

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF TESTIFIES TO THE OTHERNESS OF TRUE ART