FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Anna von Hausswolff

FEATURE:

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Philip Svensson

Anna von Hausswolff

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THIS is someone whose music…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ines Sebalj

I have loved for years, and I compelled to come back to her. I have included her in features before, though I have never spotlighted her. As her extraordinary new album, ICONOCLASTS, is out and is one of the best-reviewed of the year, I want to shine a light on Anna von Hausswolff. I am going to end this feature with a review for ICONOCLASTS. Before that, there are a couple of interviews from recently that I want to introduce. I want to start out with an interview from Interview, where Iggy Pop (who is a guest on ICONOCLASTS) chatted with Anna von Hausswolff. It was a really interesting interview. A lot of mutual respect and curiosity. I have chosen a few segments from their conversation here:

“POP: Oh, that’s beautiful. I’m curious about Iconoclasts, the name of the record you made. How did you come up with that name?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: One of the first songs that I wrote for the album is “The Iconoclast,” and that song became the starting point. The album is about questioning something and breaking out from something. It could be an illusion, a system, a relationship. I wanted the title to just represent the questioning and the breaking out of worship, worship of a lifestyle, worship of thought, and finding something new.

POP: There must be something in the stars right now because that’s happening up and down levels of society. The boundaries and nationalities right now are often very silly.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think worship can be such a beautiful thing. It can give you so much hope and inspiration. Worship of love, worship of certain people. But when it comes to people in general, you have to be very careful because it could so easily lean over to something extreme, something that is not grounded in who your true self is. We have such a tendency to become obsessed with things or obsessed with people.

POP: It’s becoming evident, probably through social media, that there are certain people who seem to be doing so well. Meaning, if you count up the numbers or look at the size of the yacht or how many jets or how much they can influence a government. And then there are people who just aren’t getting anywhere and they feel that way. I am an old git who loves very, very much the mid-60s to 1970s, which was titled loosely to the free jazz movement. And the first cut on the record, “Struggle With the Beast,” reminds me of the period where John Coltrane would take a Broadway show tune like “My Favorite Things,” and elevate it with very beautiful music. I’d never heard you work with saxophones or anything like that. How was that recorded? Who are the saxophonists?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: For the whole album, and that track in particular, I collaborated with the saxophonist called Otis Sandsjö.

POP: That’s a good player, really.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: He is brilliant. And like almost everyone I work with, he’s someone that I know from my past, from school or my childhood. Before I made this album, I wrote music for a theater play in Stockholm called The Lower Depths, a play by Maxim Gorky. It was the first time I arranged for Woodwind.

POP: You can read music?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: Very badly, but I know the basics, and I think it’s very convenient to work in Logic. Logic has so many tools where you can work intuitively with a MIDI synth and you can play directly. And then you can add layers and it will convert it into notes.

POP: It’s a killer. There are several times, I think, on Facing Atlas—and then on the one we did, “The Whole Woman,” but also on “Young Aging Women”—where suddenly there are melodies that are very close to certain kinds of pop ballads, trying to lift the chorus and everything. You can write that stuff. Hats off.

VON HAUSSWOLFF: I think I wanted, with this album, to stay a little bit true to who I was at the beginning of my musical career and what sort of music I was interested in, aside from all of the rock and experimental music. When I started playing music, it started with me and my sister and our friend. We were singing together. It was a lot of R&B, a lot of soul, a lot of pop. And we were also dancing hip-hop. So, I wanted to bring in more movement, and I wanted to have these very clear, simple pop lines that would just stem directly from the heart somehow. I would not give it too much thought or intellectualize it too much.

POP: For a listener, it’s pretty rare to hear those sorts of things without being accompanied by some horrible productions beating you over the head. On “The Whole Woman,” my favorite lines are when you say, “I’m not afraid to go down to the harbor” and “See you again to tell you the whole truth.” Do you go down to the harbor?

VON HAUSSWOLFF: Yeah, I do a lot. Whenever I need to air out some emotions, the harbor is my place. The ocean is my go-to spot when I need to calm myself or when I need to get out of my own head. I think the harbor is also, for this song, a place to say farewell at the same time, to clean yourself from your past”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Fredrik Bengtsson

A slight detour, perhaps, I did like this feature from The Quietus, where Anna von Hausswolff chose a selection of albums that were important to her. Her favourites. Why these albums are important to her. I have chosen a few to highlight here, as I feel you can detect a bit of each of them in ICONOCLASTS:

“Nils Frahm - Spaces

I became familiar with Nils Frahm through the label Kning Disk, who released my Singing From The Grave and Ceremony records. Kning Disk’s Mattias Nilsson had released The Bells by Nils. That is a very minimalistic classical piano record. When I heard his music for the first time, I fell in love instantly. I had just finished high school, where I had studied classical piano. The classical music world can be really restrained and pretentious. You are supposed to play in a certain way and it is not supposed to be too simple. Simplicity is not anything that you should strive to achieve – or at least that was my impression when I had studied classical music at school.

So, it was a relief to hear The Bells by Nils Frahm. He had a background in classical music but he still allowed himself to play these simple patterns over and over again. He would let the music breath and have a lot of space between each note. At the time, that was very inspiring to hear for me. I then followed him and heard Spaces, which was released in 2013. I heard it when I was touring and was surprised by how much he had progressed, in going from those really simple songs to these huge, grand compositions with a lot of electronic beats. He has took his own way of writing classical music and has combined it with electronics in a very organic way. It felt very new and very special.

I think there are some field recordings and some live recordings on the album. It’s interesting, because all of the songs fit beautifully together. What I am extremely impressed by is his way of making everything sound so organic, even though he is processing sounds through lots of effects pedals or is playing synthesisers on a programmed arpeggio song. That is rare for people who are working with electronics, in the way that he does.

I was his support act for a show in Amsterdam and we have kept in contact by email. He told me a while ago that he built a ‘touring organ’. I was very jealous. I wonder if he treasures his touring organ. I need to steal his touring organ. I then saw him play a show in Paris with his touring organ and he played songs from Spaces, but then he played many new songs on the organ. The new songs were even better. Therefore, his next album may knock Spaces out of this list.

Nico - Desertshore

I got this record from my dad as a birthday gift, but before that I had heard it via my sister. My sister presented this record to me when I was 16 or 17 and then I got it from my dad in my 20s. It was nice to get again from him as I had forgotten how good it was. I remember listening to it a lot when I was 16, but I wasn’t mesmerised in the way I was when I heard it when older.

Nico is probably one of the most influential songwriters for me, when it comes to vocal delivery. She is very brave in the way that she uses her voice and, of course, I am very impressed by the depth of her voice. It is raw, honest, and very authentic. It doesn’t feel like she is putting on a costume and I believe in every single word she is singing. I think it takes a very musical person to deliver such honesty in such complex pop songs. Even though there is complexity to this album, it still feels quite accessible. In addition, there is a very intriguing ambience to this record with lots of interesting sounds. I think it was co-produced by John Cale.

Nico is without doubt one of my most important role models, alongside Diamanda Galás. Diamanda Galás isn’t on this list because I prefer her in a live format than I do on record. With Nico, I love how she delivers her lyrics and I like the rawness in her. She seemed to be a very uncompromising person.

Paul Giovanni & Magnet – The Wicker Man

I have never made a score for a film, but I like to think I am doing a score for a film when I make an album. With a film soundtrack, the artist has to think more of how the pieces are connected to each other and how the album evolves dynamically throughout each song, instead of each song having its own disconnected and separate dynamic from the other songs like a typical pop record. I think that’s why I like to put soundtracks on my favourite album list, because as a whole they are amazing as opposed to an album with five amazing songs and then the rest could be kind of crap.

For The Wicker Man, the music is by Paul Giovanni and Magnet. I think this version of the band Magnet was created for this album. I don’t know if Magnet exist or made anything else apart from this soundtrack. The music is inspired by Scottish, English and Irish tunes and, for me, overshadows the film in its greatness. I like the film as well – it is a very eccentric horror film and at times it almost becomes a musical. I like how the music is so entwined with the film, so they become as one.

I like the record so much because it connects to the places, culture and the people in The Wicker Man. Magnet and Giovanni have taken something old and made something personal and new from it. I like how music traditions can be passed from one generation to another and be changed a little by each transmittance. I realise that now that film is quite old, but for me it still feels contemporary”.

I want to come to an interview from The Line of Best Fit from last month. The Swedish musician and composer talked about her new album. We also learned more about a frightening experience four years ago where von Hausswolff was in a church in Nantes and, outside, there was protest from right-wing Catholic fundamentalists who had barricade fans away from her gig. When it comes to ICONOCLASTS , Anna von Hausswolff “found kindred spirits in rebels and disruptors to create her most urgent work yet”:

“In a break from von Hausswolff’s own tradition, ICONOCLASTS wears its central themes close to its turbulent surface rather than letting them linger in the depths. “A lot of these songs are about love, in various ways, but I wanted the album to feel like a battle cry,” she says, clenching a fist in her lap. “It felt urgent to me to express a sense of wanting things to change and actually taking steps towards that change. It’s so easy to say what you believe but then not really live by those beliefs or follow those rules. For me, I know I have my morals and my ethics, but I don’t always act by them.”

In a way, it's a continuation of a lifetime’s effort to try and unlearn the habit of people pleasing, which she says is still a constant struggle – but it’s bigger than that, too. ICONOCLASTS is a call for greater agency on every level: passivity is out and breaking free of structures and bonds that no longer serve us is very much in. On “Facing Atlas”, a song about the perils of committing too fully to one viewpoint or side, she invokes the hapless Greek Titan condemned to forever hold up the sky as a symbol of what not to become. “The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” she sings, as if taunting herself. “This shit breaks my heart.” She’s sorry, too, on eco-banger “Stardust”, which sings of a life “vaporised into the sky” and vehemently howls “it’s time to make mistakes” – or time at least to care enough to try.

“I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I’m a musician, an artist, and I think that art should be allowed to not always play by the rules of what’s correct and what’s not correct,” she says, so long as it comes from a place of considered intention. At an hour and a quarter long, von Hausswolff’s sixth album is a lot to digest but not a moment of it goes to waste. Even when “The Iconoclast” screams its way into a void part-way through its 11-minute runtime, those few beats of silence carry just as much weight and speak just as loudly.

These days, von Hausswolff has made peace with the fact that she’s sometimes a little pitchy when she sings. After all, it’s seldom through perfection that our real truths our told, but through the heat and charge of the moment. Few people know that better than ‘godfather of punk’ Iggy Pop, who lends his bombed-out vibrato to pop ballad “The Whole Woman”, ICONOCLASTS’ most outwardly straightforward love song. “He felt like a dad to me,” she says, remembering their first meeting years ago. “He had an energy about him that felt like family.” And while the song was originally written as a conversation between lovers, von Hausswolff sees it now as something much more open. Still a love song, but not necessarily a romantic love. Perhaps a conversation between two sides of the same person, even. There’s an almost ritualistic feel to it, as if calling on the power of the sea to wash away the pettiness of life and find new common ground.

This idea of rising above the daily circus of bullshit is one she returns to a few times throughout our conversation, and it all comes back to hip hop, specifically Kendrick Lamar. “I feel like he’s one of those artists who’s so good at not dwelling in the darkness but rising above it, putting a spotlight on problems and openly encouraging change,” she explains, crediting the rapper for inspiring her to want to be a bigger, grander version of herself, and to stand her ground in the process. “He might actually have been the most important artist for ICONOCLASTS, even if you can’t hear it in the music.”

When it comes to world building and musical horror, few have done it better in recent years than Ethel Cain, who joins von Hausswolff on “Aging Young Women”, ICONOCLASTS’ second luminous ballad, a song about the chances that slip away with time and the angst that comes with their passing. Introduced to Cain’s music by her sister Maria, von Hausswolff says she didn’t fully click with it at first. She wasn’t in the right emotional space to receive it. But then came the breakup, and suddenly everything fell into place. “Once I started really listening it felt very genuine to me and I fell in love,” she says. “Something about Ethel really resonated with me, emotionally, musically, and artistically. Her music felt healing, and the music I was writing was also a way of healing, so I wanted to honour her and have her on this song.”

“I’m always drawn to female artists who use dark aesthetics but aren’t afraid to balance that darkness with a little bit of light, to show both sides. Artists like Chelsea Wolfe, Pharmakon, and Emma Ruth Rundle. I can’t listen to their music all the time because it needs a certain time and space. But, like with Ethel's music, once you find that time and space, it's going to be beautiful”.

I am going to end with a five-star review from The Guardian for ICONOCLASTS. Featuring incredible guests spots from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain, this spectacular album “pivots from drones to spectacular pop melodies”. It is clear that Anne von Hausswolff is a truly mesmerising artist. I have known about her music for years and she has not dropped a step. Her sixth studio album, her latest work might well be her very best. An artist that seemingly gets better with every release:

“Iconoclasts is a long album – it lasts the best part of an hour and a quarter – but it still feels crammed with sound. There are heaving synthesised drones that, in their intensity, occasionally evoke the sound of Fuck Buttons’ 2009 masterpiece Tarot Sport; explosions of fizzing noise; cinematic orchestrations; and drum patterns that marry a ritualistic-sounding thunder to rhythms that variously recall the pulse of dance music, the glitterbeat stomp of glam, and even reggae. Von Hausswolff is less inclined to erupt into shrieks and ululations than she once was, but her singing still has a blazing forcefulness that cuts through the echo she is frequently doused in.

It’s music that feels as if it’s in constant motion, amplified by the fact that the melodies, rich and beautiful as they are, seldom adhere to any standard verse-chorus structure: the songs here usually end up somewhere very different from the place they started. Indeed, its maximalism might be too overwhelming to take in one long sitting.

But if it is too much, it’s too much of a good thing: with their sense of movement, their twists and turns, their radiant tunes, their emotive power, these songs are exhausting because they’re exhilarating. For an album with a worldview summed up by a striking line from Facing Atlas that declares life on Earth “full of shit and full of evil”, that ponders ageing and paralysing depression, and on which it is frequently unclear whether the songs are dealing with something personal or with current events (“the sky is crashing down upon the ships of freedom … the life we had has vaporised into the sky”), its overall mood is a kind of frazzled euphoria. The songs surge and build, the bursts of noise feel cathartic. It’s as if the music is fighting against the tone of the lyrics, urgently pressing forward despite everything. “I’m breaking up with language,” Von Hauswolff sings on Stardust, “in search of something bigger.” In the strange, unique, expansive, impassioned and experimental take on pop presented on Iconoclasts, she seems to have found it”.

I am going to wrap up there. I am surprised that I have not spotlighted Anna von Hauswolff yet. I have included her for Modern-Day Queens, as she is one of the greatest musicians in the world. A phenomenal composer and a hugely consistent songwriter, you can check out her tour dates here. She has a couple of U.K. dates in January, so catch her if you can. ICONOCLASTS is a masterpiece that everyone needs to hear. Her music is so atmospheric and evocative. You put it on, close your eyes, and let it carry you…