Fuck Yeah! Anna von Hausswolff

DYC Reviews Anna and Efterklang

“Anna Von Hausswolff started the gig off with a mind-blowing performance. I have to confess I never researched her before the gig so I was going in blind apart from a friend telling me she had a voice that resembled that of Kate Bush…I could see where he was going, but there was enough of a difference that, combined with her band and much more Sigur Ros feel. The songs were lengthy and built up with intrinsic levels of looped e-bow and synth, with vocals dropping in and out. A worthy band to introduce Efterklang.”

KINDA MUZIK - Ceremony Review

“An icy death march full of drama, but without excessive pathos Ceremony, opens the second album by the young Swedish Anna von Hausswolff. Maybe doing her surname only bells ringing but with the work of her father, the sound artist Carl Michael has to do. Her musical craft little Though: even with daughter love dominates a certain rigor and effective use of pure tones. However, they wrapped ingredients in simplicity and accessibility.

The organ pipes on the cover are not focused on deaf ears. The majestic sounds were worn then rampant in the round on this record. They call a minimalism of shifting pulses as is known, for example, Philip Glass. Patience appears to Von Hausswolff a virtue; haste can do again some other time. Or not. She keeps the listener on the edge of the seat, always ask your help wondering what will follow and tumble subtle surprises (like a roaring electric guitar or drum machine) from a seemingly nothing about each other.

Von Hausswolffs structure in sound is grand and monumental know vocal interfaces with Kate Bush and terms of drama is The Cure Disintegration while not far away. Darkness can not call her work but she paints it in vague grayscale: bleekneusjes in a fog bank above a snowy plain, at the onset of a cold night. Cold and distant, she is not at all; Von Hausswolff know precisely the strong thread in terms of tone that runs through the entire album to share by keeping an emotional ‘cell’ the listener caught a sledgehammer blow out.

The power of Ceremony is it that when listening at very high volume (that they would have learned from her father?) The immense width of the sound really comes into its own. The tightness of a somewhat swampy or blunt sound at low volume is shed and the brilliance and purification in a minor key takes you to unprecedented heights and unsuspected depths. Ceremony not turn on your MP3 player or quickly between. You’re gonna sit. There you make time for. There you go all the way in, even long after the final show have died away.”

-Sven Schlijper