We Caught Up With The Amazing Anna Von Hausswolff

Anna von Hausswolff is well known for her extraordinary and riveting music. Dead Magic is her fourth album and it's probably her most personal yet mysterious record to date. Going through some difficult times while writing it, Dead Magic is just an exquisite and fascinating effort that came from a really obscure place. Anna told us how the creative process behind Dead Magic was like, the recording sessions on the 20th century organ at Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken, and her collaboration with Randall Dunn for this masterpiece.

Words: Andreia Alves // Photos: Lady Lusen

Dead Magic is your fourth album and you wrote it in the summer of 2016 in your hometown (Gothenburg, Sweden) and then recorded it the following year in Copenhagen, Denmark. What was your mindset going into the writing of your new album? It was actually not a very good place when I wrote Dead Magic. I’d been a touring a lot. I’d been working constantly. When I got back home after a very long tour, I felt a little overheated and then I just kinda went numb and passive. I went into a sort of grey area. When I look back at that period now, it was like I lost contact with my imagination, with my imaginary mind and my creativity. I was making music to kind of make my way out from this place and music is something that I do and something that I’ve always done. I was making music, but I wasn’t making fully contact with it. I couldn’t really appreciate and I couldn’t really see the magic of making the music. I just wasn’t in contact with my creativity whatsoever, so I was just writing, saving the songs, finding my way into a certain territory and trying to sing in a way that helped me to kind of get in contact with my emotions... Trying to be a little bit more physical with my body and my voice; standing up and singing and just to kind of activate the body where I would easily get contact with my emotions. It wasn’t until after I kind of came out from the period when I started to make something out of these songs. I started to make interpretations of them and they started to have a specific meaning, but I can’t say exactly what I was thinking at that moment. It was just very passive state. The imagination is a very strong force that you carry around and it can work in both ways. It can be good for you, but sometimes it can be destructive for you as well. I felt like I didn’t have any imagination, but of course that is not true because you can never lose these things, but that’s how I felt. It was just like my imagination was projecting its ideas and thoughts onto me and kind of degrading and destroying itself in a way.

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