ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF'S 'MIRACULOUS' NEW ALBUM

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Touring a few years ago, multi-instrumentalist Anna Von Hausswolff was reminded of her childhood in Gothenburg, Sweden. She was reading a Swedish folk book about children on a spiritual journey to pass time on the road, and was thinking about that only-in-childhood, long-abandoned fairytale space. “It’s a lot about the searching and it’s not so much about the finding,” recalls Von Hausswolff of the folklore classic at Williamsburg’s Freehold café during a recent East Coast tour. “[It’s about] the disappointment that comes with maybe not finding [what you’re looking for] and the uncertainty that you might never know, you might never find it,” she says, “but also the things that you gain during the search, how you can grow as a person just by looking for certain things without really finding them.”

Von Hausswolff was talking about a piece of fiction, but she just as easily could have been reflecting on the existential milieu of—and the search for a magical quality within—her own contemporary adventure. “I thought that the theme of the book was really inspiring and it reminded me a lot about a place that I know and that I constantly visited as a kid,” she continues, describing a favorite forest hideaway near her childhood home. “It was a very mystical place when I was a kid. I still have a feeling like anything could happen there, like there’s a possibility of just finding things that you didn’t know existed.”

The result of this contemplation? The concept for a new album, titled—in an ode to that cherished childhood retreat—The Miraculous. The offering, Von Hausswolff’s third full-length since her 2010 début, Singing from the Grave, is a sweeping gothic fantasy of a production. It’s composed largely on the pipe organ—the massive, nine-thousand-pipe Acusticum pipe organ in Piteå, Sweden, specifically—and mixes the electronic with instrumentation that is, at first listen, chastely traditional. The tracks are dark, tangled, gloomy, but still beautifully classical, genre-defying affairs. There’s “Evocation,” a grand, almost eerie closing anthem that calls to mind the mysticism of Kate Bush, and “The Hope Only of Empty Men,” a somber, half-ancient (the organ is central, the beat is plodding, anxiously building), half-hypermodern (the lyrics, the way she discusses relationships, sexuality) take on transient love. The music feels momentous, almost tortured, and still, because of Von Hausswolff’s directness, intimate.

“This place affects me very deeply in a weird way it’s hard to put words to,” muses the songwriter over iced coffee, thinking again about her youthful sanctuary. “So this [release] is like my perception of this place and how it affects me emotionally, and it’s also about me telling my own story about this place in my own way instead of telling it in a methodical way.”

For Von Hausswolff, The Miraculous draws from childhood folklore, as well as her own musical experimentation (she sometimes submerged the pipes halfway under water during recording). “I think that what makes this place so important to me is that it hasn’t become—I still can’t take it for granted,” says Von Hausswolff, who turns thirty in September. “I still get scared when it gets dark there, it’s weird and I just can’t shake the feeling of this place, so I think it’s interesting coming from an adult person that these things are still here. There’s something really, really pure about this place that just makes me very fascinated about it.”

Now off the road at last, she’ll prepare to sing in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Swedish Opera this September. “But then I hope the rest of the year is still a bit uncertain,” reflects the artist. “I love this about being a musician, but I also hate it—you don’t know what’s coming tomorrow.”

The Miraculous is out now.