Susanna & The Brotherhood Of Our Lady________
A new band and a new sound taking fantastical and nightmarish inspiration from the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.
She stirred up a buzz with her radical cover versions of hits, but Susanna Wallumrød’s original material is even more captivating. Her adventurous, eclectic approach has been compared to Kate Bush and Tim Buckley, and in her latest album with The Brotherhood Of Our Lady, she turns to Hieronymus Bosch for inspiration.
“Somehow when I sat down with his art and with everything that I’d taken in, what came out were kind of folk melodies.”
When Susanna Wallumrød was commissioned by the Vossa Jazz festival in Norway to write a new piece of music to be premiered there in 2017, she decided that her conceptual framework would be the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. She was fascinated by the medieval Dutch artist and had been to a major exhibition of his work at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch in Holland in 2016.
This music appears on her new album Garden Of Earthly Delights, named after
Bosch’s most complex and well-known painting. Like many of his works it was intended to be viewed in church and so it has a moral and allegorical content, with dire warnings on the consequences of human foibles like lust, greed and folly.
“It’s human nature over and over again. Things haven’t changed. There’s certainly a recognition in it and a link to the modern age,” Wallumrød says.
Bosch also revealed the hopes and fears specific to the medieval mindset with imagery that is bizarre, sometimes humorous and often nightmarish.
“It is not really a soundtrack to his paintings but in the process I absorbed
his work and read a lot about it,” Wallumrød notes. “I realised at the exhibition all the layers of meaning in the paintings. It also felt like a link to the work that I’d already been doing on the [2016] Triangle album.”
Garden Of Earthly Delights is a striking song cycle based on Wallumrød’s voice and keyboards, but with a specially assembled band, The Brotherhood Of Our Lady, consisting of guitars, vocals, electronics and accordion. It’s one of her strongest sets in terms of melody, instrumental arrangements and sonics and feels simultaneously ancient and modern.
“It’s turned out a little different to the way I imagined it before I started writing,” she explains. “It felt like it would be something much more surreal and experimental, but somehow when I sat down with his art and with everything that I’d taken in, what came out were kind of folk melodies. I just had to welcome the songs. It was like, ‘OK, I can see where we’re going.’”
The music, lyrics and some of the vocal arrangements were formulated beforehand, including some “open structures”. Wallumrød then invited the musicians to contribute.
“I can only get so far with my own ideas and when I bring other musicians into my world I really want them to be able to contribute, and they know much better than me what they are able to do. So I think it’s a very fruitful collaboration.”
Susanna began her recording career in
2004 with The Magical Orchestra, a keyboardbased duo with Morten Qvenild, augmented by musicians from Norway’s jazz and progressive scene, and their albums were often produced by her husband, Helge Sten, aka Deathprod from Supersilent. How does her current approach compare to these earlier efforts?
“I think it was very similar. There’s a lot of intuition in my work,” she replies. “A lot of the songs I haven’t really understood, and then time passes and I think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why I wrote that song!’” she laughs. “Because it’s also a way for me to understand myself and my own life, and is maybe linked to concepts that I think about or study, or I’m inspired by other people’s work.”
Susanna’s adventurous, eclectic approach has seen her compared to the likes of Kate Bush, Mark Hollis and Tim Buckley. In both her own compositions and her often radical cover versions of other people’s songs, her voice has a poise and understated strength. The arrangements are often sparse and slow, and instead of being showy, they’re full of
subtlety and nuance. Like her version of
Rush’s Subdivisions on 2009 album 3, which streamlines the original to great effect.
Of her choice of covers she says, “I fall for a song for different reasons – it could be the melody, the harmony, the beat or the lyrics, or maybe the original recording. With Subdivisions, I would say that the lyrics played a big part. It’s a powerful song to sing.”
But while her interpretation of that particular piece of prog pop realigns its identity, going back to the jazz festival commissions, and the fact that she regularly plays jazz festivals in her native Norway and throughout Europe – and she has jazz musicians in her family – her music isn’t what you would immediately think of as jazzy. But is there jazz in there somewhere, maybe hiding in plain sight?
“It depends on what you think jazz is,” she replies. “It’s true that I’ve been influenced by the Nordic and Norwegian jazz scene. There’s not a lot of the American traditional jazz in my music, but I feel related to the mentality of jazz. Ever since jazz appeared as a genre it has always been about finding and distilling your own sound, your own voice, your own perception, your own way of doing songs.”
Her singing teacher from the ages of 16 to 20, Solveig
Slettahjell, is an established jazz singer in Norway.
“Solveig gave me a tape of a lot of different singers doing one song, so I could experience different angles, ways of doing something,” Wallumrød recalls. “That’s what I feel related to when it comes to jazz.”
Garden Of Earthly Delights was recorded in the Ocean Sound Studio, which is by the sea on the Island of Giske, located northwest of Ålesund, Norway. It’s tempting to think that such a location might influence the recording, but is that just a romantic notion?
“It definitely does have an impact where you record something, but it is based a lot more on what kind of equipment is there, what kind of a room and what sort of facilities there are at the studio. But of course, Ocean Sound is a wonderful place. It is actually by the sea and there are a lot of windows, so I was able to look out at the sea and the mountains while playing and singing and recording. If I spent, like, a month at the studio making things then I could have said that it had a lot of impact on the way that it sounds. But it was an intensive period and we recorded a lot of it live.
“The Go Dig My Grave album [2018] we recorded live in the studio in one day. That was so intense but it was a lot of fun. For some projects it’s really important to capture the live feeling and interaction between the instruments and musicians, to get the best out of the songs.”
Last autumn, Wallumrød toured while backed by her regular trio of harp, violin and accordion, mainly playing material from
Go Dig My Grave, a typically diverse set of cover versions. But is there any chance that we will be able to hear The Brotherhood Of Our Lady group play Garden Of Earthly Delights live?
“I would very much like to do that but it’s just this particular music that we play together,” Wallumrød replies. “I would say that the album is like one very concentrated version of this music. It’s really interesting to play because it’s constantly evolving and expanding. And live it has a big potential
to grow into other forms.”
Garden Of Earthly Delights is out now via SusannaSonata. See www.susannamagical.com for more information.
“Jazz has always been about finding and distilling your own sound, your own voice, your own perception, your own way of doing songs.”