Anna von Hausswolff - The rebirth of magic

Born in Gothenburg in 1986, Anna Michaela Ebba Electra von Hausswolff has managed to translate the sound of the church organ into a contemporary neoclassical dimension, blending drone music, doom metal and dark songwriting in an utterly original way.  The whole is enriched by extraordinary vocal performances, suspended between the celestial heights of Kate Bush and the demonic singing of Diamanda Galás.

Having emerged at home as a promising young indie-folk artist, the eclectic Swedish singer - a devotee of Tchaikovsky and black metal - soon ventured into far more experimental territory, amid drones, doom passages and stoner drift. Her family background helped too: the daughter of musician and contemporary artist Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Anna began studying singing and classical music (piano and organ) from a young age, alongside a genuine passion for rock and a growing interest in Scandinavian legends and folklore.

Anna von Hausswolff made her debut on February 5, 2010 with the EP Track Of Time, which paved the way for the album Singing From The Grave. While retaining a delicately pop vein, the album reveals deeply dark and melancholic shades. The title track, for instance, is a meditation on one's own past life, written from the point of view of a corpse attending its own funeral. "Track Of Time", meanwhile, is a song about loss and the marks left behind by time. The theme of the transience of earthly life immediately emerges as a central concern in the Swedish songwriter's poetics, as her later work would go on to confirm.
The piano notes, played by von Hausswolff herself, pair well with the shifts of her versatile voice, capable of ranging from high-pitched tones to moments of dark depth. In short, this is a debut that stays within the bounds of a sui generis songwriting style, somewhat reminiscent of artists like Regina Spektor and Joanna Newsom. Here and there, one can also detect a fascination with the more intimate, reflective side of Nick Cave, something she would explore further later on, venturing into even darker and more experimental territory.
Singing From The Grave won over critics at home, thanks above all to the Swedish artist's voice, which quickly earned her flattering comparisons to Kate Bush for her ability to hit extremely high notes with total ease. But above all, the album hinted at exciting developments to come, showing solid songwriting skills and engaging, melancholic melodies. Thanks to the positive response, Anna received a number of new opportunities, playing at numerous festivals and opening for artists such as Tindersticks and Lykke Li.

In 2013, with her second album, titled Ceremony, we witness an interesting shift in her music. The record relies, as its main instrument, on an antique pipe organ from the Annedal church in Gothenburg. The extraordinary range of tones, sounds and timbres allows von Hausswolff to build refined melodies with an attitude somewhere between gothic and neoclassical, without shying away from other kinds of sounds either. Following the Singing From The Grave tour, Anna in fact grew closer to the music of drone-rock pioneers Earth, who, as she herself has admitted, would from then on become a major influence throughout her career.
Ceremony broadens the scope of the Swedish artist's work, as she launches into long, baroque compositions combining organ sounds, electric guitars, drums and synthesizers. It ranges from the funeral march of "Epitaph Of Theodor" to the soft, dark "Deathbed", accompanied by a video directed by her sister, filmmaker Maria von Hausswolff.
There's no shortage of dark dark-ambient interludes ("No Body") and delicate elegiac moments ("Liturgy Of Light") that recall the sounds of her debut. The peak of the album, however, is reached with the inspired "Red Sun", one of the most emotionally charged tracks composed by the Gothenburg artist, alongside "Epitaph Of Daniel", suspended between echoes of Angelo Badalamenti's music and magical, dreamlike atmospheres.
The themes of death and the fleeting nature of earthly experience remain present here too. Von Hausswolff has also revealed that the album was written following the death of her grandfather, to whom the track "Harmonica" is dedicated in particular (the instrument he had given her on his deathbed). Even the title and lyrics of a track like "Funeral For My Future Children" leave little room for light, in an episode that revives the folk sound of her early days through a ballad rooted in the Nordic tradition.

After the US release of Ceremony through Other Music Recording Co., Anna von Hausswolff's name became increasingly known beyond Sweden's borders, earning highly positive reviews and international acclaim.
That same year Anna officially revealed her passion for black metal, posing for a photo for Dagens Nyheter wearing a t-shirt by Burzum, the alias behind which Varg Vikernes operates, a controversial artist also known for certain criminal incidents in the Nineties involving a series of Norwegian church burnings. Vikernes was also charged and convicted of murdering Euronymous, member of the black metal band Mayhem.

In 2014 the artist released an EP titled Källan (Prototype) on Touch. The limited-edition work is the result of a performance she recorded on October 19, 2013 at Lincoln Cathedral in England. It's an instrumental suite in which she explores the potential of the cathedral's pipe organ, a minimalist composition in two parts that looks to La Monte Young and Terry Riley, as well as to drone music and the kosmische scene of the Seventies.

Her third album, The Miraculous, came out on November 13, 2015 on City Slang (released in Scandinavia through Pomperipossa Records) and is inspired by the landscapes and fairy-tale imagery of Swedish tradition. Anna told the press that the miraculous place that inspired the record is Källan (Swedish for "the source"), an imaginary place from her childhood tied to reading the book of the same name by Walter Ljungquist. Published in 1961 but still unavailable in Italy, the Swedish writer's book tells the story of three children searching for the fountain of eternal youth. The album was recorded for the most part in Piteå, a small town in northern Sweden, with the help of an enormous acoustic pipe organ made up of 9,000 pipes.
The album brings the ideas of Ceremony to full maturity, also opening up to forms of drone-rock and doom metal indebted to Earth and Sunn O))). Listen in particular to "Come Wander With Me/Deliverance", a funereal monument of unrepeatable intensity, with syncopated stoner guitars and the martial tread of the drums dominating the second half of the track. While the ghosts of Nico and Swans stir in the distance, in the video for Evocation (also directed by Maria von Hausswolff) Anna's isolated figure appears on an uninhabited islet in the Stockholm archipelago. The setting is somewhat reminiscent of the Isle of the Dead painted by Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. The eruption of the supernatural against the backdrop of an immanent nature that relentlessly overwhelms the human is a theme that would recur in the following album.

In 2016 Källan (Betatype) came out, a limited-edition EP released by Ash International. The record is a reworking of the previous Källan (Prototype), but this time recorded in a studio. Also that year, Anna von Hausswolff toured with Michael Gira's Swans, further consolidating her live presence.
In 2017, further proof of her ongoing interest in certain sounds, the Swedish artist lent her voice to a couple of tracks on the album by cascadian black metal band Wolves In The Throne Room. The album, titled "Thrice Woven", marks the group's move toward heathen themes rooted in the Scandinavian lands.

2018 saw the release of her fourth full-length. Dead Magic came out, like its predecessor, on City Slang, establishing her as one of the most profound, uncompromising and compelling artists to emerge from Sweden in recent years.
The album was recorded by Sunn O))) producer (and Marissa Nadler producer) Randall Dunn. Among the instruments used is also a huge twentieth-century pipe organ found in a Copenhagen church, the Marmorkirken.
Anna ventures into dark territories, amid drones, doom passages and stoner drifts, without forgetting introspective moments where intense gothic ballads emerge. Epic, visceral and extremely ambitious, the new work opens with the swelling strings of "The Truth, The Glow, The Fall", over which von Hausswolff's voice rises progressively, now fully aware of its own vocal range. In the following "The Mysterious Vanishing Of Electra" we're thrown into a dark kaleidoscope in which the Swedish artist's voice recalls that of Diamanda Galás. In the track we can catch echoes of Swans but also a hypnotic sound reminiscent of Wolves In The Throne Room. In "The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra" we witness an obsessive, ethereal conflict between light and darkness.
"Ugly And Vengeful" is a feral track that progressively builds an ethereal climax with a dark-folk flavor, on top of which it erects a sort of Goblin-esque horror soundtrack, before the plunge into the instrumental "The Marble Eye", where the sound of the organ once again dominates. The finale, with the melodies of "Källans Återuppståndelse", draws dreamlike, fairy-tale soundscapes, closing the circle of an album that will surely stand as a milestone in the work of the artist from Gothenburg.
"Källans Återuppståndelse" means "the resurrection of Källan" in Swedish, a magical place imagined in the prose of writer Walter Ljungquist in a 1961 book that had also inspired the previous album. The ending thus seems to echo the themes of "The Miraculous", creating a sort of fil rouge between the two works.
Here too there's a musical meditation on disappearance, death and the afterlife, but also on rebirth, as suggested by the gloomy video for "The Mysterious Vanishing Of Electra", also directed by her sister Maria: the Swedish artist's full name is in fact Anna Michaela Ebba "Electra" von Hausswolff, and it's her we see crawling out of the grave like a kind of screaming zombie.

The words of the poet Walter Ljungquist, quoted in the album's liner notes, offer an interesting key to understanding Anna von Hausswolff's artistic vision:

Take the fate of a human being, a thin pathetic line that contours and encircles an infinite and unknown silence. It is in this very silence, in an only imagined and unknown centre, that legends are born. Alas! That is why there are no legends in our time. Our time is a time deprived of silence and secrets; in their absence no legends can grow

The rebirth of magic can only happen in a time that learns again to appreciate silence and the secrets of a place beyond the present and the human. The Swedish artist's music seems to aim at that form of transcendence, beyond the fleeting earthly dimension.

All Thoughts Fly (2020) is a return sui generis, dedicated entirely to the Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo (Viterbo), designed by architect Pirro Ligorio in 1552 for Prince Vicino Orsini. The album is entirely instrumental, made with a pipe organ located in Gothenburg, Sweden, and aims to represent the absolute liberation of the imagination. This is a release that confirms von Hausswolff's class and skill, as she manages here to create a truly magical, enveloping atmosphere, a worthy heir to her previous album.
At times the organ's sound has been processed with effects, but most of the time it's developed purely acoustically. The result can evoke a neoclassical vision that embraces the cosmic attitude of Tangerine Dream. Here and there one can hear minimalist drifts reminiscent of Philip Glass (particularly on "Persefone" and the title track), but overall what prevails is an almost baroque interplay that elaborates complex spatial visions in music.

After closing out 2021 having to deal with controversy stirred up by a group of Catholic fundamentalists, which arose around some performances the Swedish artist had scheduled in France (Nantes and Paris), 2022 opened with the release of Live At Montreaux Jazz Festival, a live set Anna had performed in 2018 at the prestigious Swiss venue.
Von Hausswolff, following the release of The Miraculous and especially Dead Magic, was going through what you might call a period of grace, and this sumptuous, dramatic concert fully reflects the emphasis and power already unleashed on the grooves of those two studio albums.
Confirming this, the track list on offer is drawn entirely from the two aforementioned masterpieces, elevated if anything, in this performance, to even higher levels of intensity, arrangement and overall emotional charge.
An antidote to the alienation of the present, Anna von Hausswolff's music brings contrasting elements to the surface: calm and drama, harmony and dissonance, light and darkness.

Having already built a decade-long career on subversion thanks to her shattering gothic liturgies, on Iconoclasts (2025), her debut on the new label YEAR0001, the Swedish artist destroys even her own icons. Reinventing herself once again, with courage, in a cathartic record that is nothing less than a disarming, regenerative journey into herself.
Her forward flight continues, aligning itself with a more fully realized exploration of the ballad form, with the support of exceptional guests such as Ethel Cain, Iggy Pop and Abul Mogard. The result is a new gothic, visionary intoxication, through which, however, a few rays of sunlight filter in, opening the sound up to a more ecstatic, dreamlike dimension, through complex, layered sonic textures that reach out to touch on different territories, from art rock to jazz to ambient. A sonic magma in which symphonic drones worthy of Fuck Buttons' "Tarot Sport" coexist with bursts of shimmering noise and dreamy cinematic orchestration.
The ace up her sleeve is saxophonist Otis Sandsjö, an avant-garde musician whose disorienting interjections run through the whole album. He's the one leading the ecstatic instrumental "Consensual Neglect", a tribute to the free jazz of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, and the nearly 9 minutes of "Struggle With The Beast", built on a crooked, ever-shifting funk, with Anna's voice breaking in amid the furious crescendo to heighten its pathos. And it's Sandsjö again who lends warmth to the spectral "The Mouth" and the convulsive "Stardust". A constant presence, alternating rough moments - you can almost hear fingers striking the keys - with softer, more contemplative sections, as in the rarefied "Aging Young Woman", a duet with Ethel Cain: a suspended hymn, somewhere between elegy and prayer, evoking the most aching melancholy of Lana Del Rey, reflecting on the awareness of time passing and the dream of a family that "slowly fades away".
The sax, then, is the guide that accompanies von Hausswolff on her journey to the underworld: a vertiginous descent into the concentric circles of the human mind, through guilt, redemption and desire. But nothing ever feels intrusive in the universe of Iconoclasts, too vast to be dominated by a single element. We're majestically introduced into it by the splendid overture of "The Beast", an instrumental of spiritual tension recalling Coltrane's cosmic meditations. A suspended, solemn introduction that sets the stage for an emotionally intense journey, starting with the following "Facing Atlas", which unfolds expansively, thanks to a voice that rises almost supernaturally, like a Lisa Gerrard immersed in ethereal dream-pop nebulae: between myth and reality, Anna chases a lost love like Orpheus after his Eurydice, only to realize that the past cannot be held onto ("that's not what you want").
At the center of the album stands the long suite "The Iconoclast", over 11 minutes that marry the drama of Kate Bush with the tectonic tremors of Swans, building to a crescendo that culminates in the touching closing line "Can I protect you": a promise of tenderness amid a blanket of reverb.
Among the collaborations, one that inevitably stands out is the one with Iggy Pop: the Iguana's hoarse, cavernous voice contrasts with, and at the same time blends into, Anna's diaphanous one on the almost slowcore ballad "The Whole Woman". While "The Mouth" moves instead in a more folk, almost spiritual dimension, with a warmth evoking a gospel choir, and the hypnotic "Consensual Neglect" slips into a Fifties jazz-club mood, "Stardust" brings in industrial pulses à la Einstürzende Neubauten and even kraut-rock echoes, within a track that seems to follow its singer's emotional oscillations.
The final triptych is a slow, solemn descent leading (perhaps) out of the abyss: the funereal ambient of "An Ocean Of Time" weaves ethereal, impalpable sounds together with vocal fragments from von Hausswolff and organ textures courtesy of Abul Mogard; "Unconditional Love" - performed together with her sister, director Maria von Hausswolff - is a moving ode to the strength of family bonds; while the instrumental "Rising Legends" evaporates in just two and a half minutes like a quiet final fade-out.

The hour and a quarter of Iconoclasts thus arrives as the definitive consecration of von Hausswolff, who for the occasion also shows herself more measured vocally, toning down the screams and searing invocations of the past. Having shed her garb as gothic vestal, the Swedish artist confronts universal themes head-on - loss, faith, love, old age, depression, disillusionment in the face of a world "full of evil", as she sings in "Facing Atlas". And she does so with a new kind of vulnerability. In the end, perhaps, this is exactly where her deepest iconoclasm lies: in the courage to strip away the myth in search, at last, of humanity.

Contributions by Cristiano Orlando ("Live At Montreaux Jazz Festival"), Claudio Fabretti ("Iconoclasts")

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