The Swedish Anna Michaela Ebba von Hausswolff Electra is a singer, pianist, composer, an architecture student and daughter of the sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff. His career began to take off with the release of the EP Track of Time, in 2010, followed by the album Singing from the Grave, which was widely acclaimed by critics, coming to be among the top five albums in Sweden that year.
Ceremony (Kning Disk, 2012), in turn, brings the music of Anna von Hausswolff to a new level, by replacing the conventional piano by the great body of Annedal Church, located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Throughout the disc, the instrument serves as a foundation for the construction of majestic melodies, occasionally accompanied by a guitar and a drum, and the sumptuous voice of Hausswolff.
The comparisons to Kate Bush are already inevitable, but now add to the range of influences from the singer as the most unusual inspirations drone metal and psychedelic rock. The instrumental Epitaph of Daniel is a clear reference to the space rock, complete with slide guitar and keyboard pinkfloydiano. Goodbye back to experimental ambient David Sylvian, with something of Joy Division. But the feeling that prevails throughout the album is the atmosphere of serious scholarly, reverent, almost sacred, emanating from the voice and piano Hausswolff.
Naturally, this quest for a more classic sound and deep implies a disc of smaller pop appeal. Although the band is more captivating Ceremony Mountains Crave, a dream pop handpicked as the first single from the new work, the songs that best represent the disk and the current phase of the singer are precisely the less commercial: Deathbed, Red Sun and No Body - - the succession of squeaks and sound distortions that traverses the latter is to cause chills.
In short, Ceremony expresses the will of an artist to create a unique sound for your music, an identity that transcends comparisons. For Anna von Hausswolff, to enter into a church and religion play an instrument was how to achieve this status and to make his sacred music, so to speak.
