A Saucerful Of Secrets
Anna von Hausswolff’s fourth album, Dead Magic, digs deep into a dark yet enchanting world, with a little help from a 20th-century organ. The Swedish singer and musician meets Prog to discuss writer’s block, the wide variety of artists who inspire her, an
Writer’s block is the scourge of creative ambition. Returning home to Sweden after touring her last album, 2015’s The Miraculous, Anna von Hausswolff underwent an artistic slump. “I’d been playing and talking about that record so much that I fell into this place where I totally lost contact with my own creativity,” she tells Prog. “I had this extremely passive, kind of hopeless and neutral state of mind. My dark imagination was projecting ideas onto me, telling me that I didn’t have any. So it was kind of degrading itself. This dark force was pushing out the lighter ones.”
Von Hausswolff decided to respond by doing what she does best – making music. “I think I was suffering from exhaustion,” she says. “I’m a very sensitive person and need to learn how to cool down a little. So I started writing music again, because that’s what I know. But when you’re not in contact with your creativity and curiosity, it’s very hard to feel the magic. Then gradually I pulled myself out of it. The songs you’re hearing on Dead Magic are the ones I wrote when I was in that void.”
Dead Magic is an extraordinary piece of work. Written during that creative impasse of 2016 and recorded last year in Denmark, its central motif is the sound of the 20th-century organ at Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken, one of the largest and most imposing churches in Scandinavia.
Von Hausswolff and her five-piece band, overseen by US producer Randall Dunn, frame her buzzing drones in atmospheric arrangements that swing from the thunderous to the ambient. It’s often a shatteringly intense experience, her impressionistic songs stretching out into vast, textural epics. Similarly, von Hausswolff’s vocals shape-shift from subtle invocations to fearful shrieks.
In person, von Hausswolff is petite and gregarious. It’s difficult to equate the brooding immensity of her voice and music with her bright personality and physical stature. She’s happy to talk about almost everything, though she’s deliberately cagey when it comes to the inner meaning of
Dead Magic. The press release for the album consists of a brief paragraph from Swedish writer Walter Ljungquist, bemoaning an age deprived of silence and secrets.
“Walter Ljungquist is my favourite writer and I always turn to him if I need to clear my head or get some perspective on things,” she says. “He’s someone I’m always coming back to; he’s my guiding star. The quote
I’ve chosen is everything I’m feeling right now about the transparency of our society, where everything has to be explained on a micro level.
“It can be good in certain cases – in politics, for example – but when it comes to art, I feel it’s important for the perceiver to use his or her imagination to get a more personal bond with the subject. I want people to use their own creativity, to make their own interpretations of these songs.”
This guardedness also extends to the intriguing image that adorns the cover of Dead Magic. An unsettling female portrait bathed in red, von Hausswolff will only disclose that she has a personal connection to the image. “It’s a photo I’ve had in my possession for 16 years,” she says. “I will reveal what it is, eventually, but right now it’s a secret. I’m getting fantastic stories and interpretations of it.”
As for the thematic concerns of the album, songs like The Truth, The Glow, The Fall and The Mysterious Vanishing Of Electra hint at transformation and salvation. The video for the latter is typically cryptic. Von Hausswolff is shown striding across a moonlit field, then clawing a body from the earth, finally running towards the camera (caked in mud) down a creepy backwoods road. Like her other recent videos, it was directed by her sister, Maria.
“Like me, she’s extremely secretive in what she does and how she approaches things,” von Hausswolff says of her sibling. “The story is an ongoing thing across my other videos. It’s constantly twisting and turning and becoming something else. This one was filmed in the middle of the night and it was really cold and wet. We were out in this bird field and the mud smelled like shit, so it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. I covered myself in all this shit and worked my way through the song. I think the physical circumstances make you go deeper into the character. I really felt like I’d been dug up and was struggling and losing my senses, because I wasn’t in my right element at all. Watching it afterwards was a challenge, it was so embarrassing.”
On a musical level, von Hausswolff is more forthcoming. Dead Magic is her fourth album. Like immediate predecessors The Miraculous and 2013’s Ceremony, it continues to explore her fascination with drone music and the fluid sound possibilities of pipe organ.
“I studied at the art academy in Copenhagen, which is only a few metres away from that church,” she explains. “I’ve seen concerts there, all involving experimental artists who are very extreme in their fields, including two by Diamanda Galás. To have her set up in an acoustic environment like a church, with just a grand piano and her voice, was so pure and raw. She was perfect for that environment.”
That said, it took the arrival of Randall Dunn to suggest recording in the Marmorkirken, known locally as ‘the Marble Church’. “I’d recorded on that organ before, with a Danish band called Sort Sol,” von Hausswolff says, “but was a little sceptical about doing it again. He sent me some sound clips and they were really good, but the attraction in this case was the room, which is just as important as the instrument itself. When everything is in harmony like that, a small organ can sound really big. And this room was just beautiful, a dome-shaped building with everything made of marble.”
Known for this work with Earth, Sunn O))) and Wolves In The Throne Room, Dunn was an ideal choice of collaborator. Indeed, Wolves In The Throne Room enlisted her for Mother Owl, Father Ocean, the centrepiece of last year’s Dunn-produced Thrice Woven. But the key inspiration for Dead Magic was the late Hungarian classical composer György Ligeti.
“I’d been listening to Ligeti’s Atmosphères [1961] a lot the year before I wrote the album,” von Hausswolff says. “Atmosphères was written for orchestra, but I felt that it would also be perfect for pipe organ. He works using micro-polyphonic technique, which is like a vertical way of composing.
The idea of creating clusters and ambience and just having the contrast with the pure melodies and harmonies working together.
It’s something that’s been following me lately and is a bit of an obsession.