• Hip Hop / Rap
• Beat Art
• Electronic
• Black Grooves
• Rock / Indie
• Exotic Grooves
• Pop & Various
• Kleidung & Accessoires
• EXCLUSIVES
• BOX-Sets

Anna von Hausswolff - Ceremony

Vinyl 2LP

20.. Repress - Black Double Vinyl in Gatefold Sleeve.

It begins with the sound of a church organ, an arpeggio played on the lower notes, a melody teased out in the higher register, before a snare drum beats out an ominous, stuttering tattoo. Three minutes in, guitars begin to rumble like clouds gathering on the horizon, the melody slowly swelling, threatening to tear the sky apart. This is Anna Von Hausswolff’s ‘Epitaph Of Theodor’, and as dramatic, instrumental openings to albums go, it’s close to overwhelming. But it’s followed by something even more intense: ‘Deathbed’, which growls and resonates sinisterly before shards of metallic thunder shatter the drones and a funereal beat forces the song to lurch forward. Only after some four and a half minutes of this ferocious clamour do we hear a human voice, and it’s unleashed with a fierce power, rising and swooping, a vast bird pursuing its prey until the song reaches its final, unexpectedly triumphant climax.
You want to talk about compromises? No. Nor does Anna Von Hausswolff.

These two songs alone represent a quarter of Ceremony’s sixty minutes, but there are eleven more on an album that confounds and dumbfounds from its start to its end. To those who used Anna Von Hausswolff’s debut album, Singing From The Grave, to compare her lazily to Kate Bush, it will come as a brutal shock. The fragile atmospheres of that impressive debut, one that earned her huge acclaim in her native Sweden, have been blasted away, and what’s emerged from the wasteland left behind is a dizzying masterpiece that, she proudly states, calls upon, amongst others, Elizabeth Fraser, Jefferson Airplane, PJ Harvey, Earth, Barn Owl, Nick Cave and Diamanda Galás.
Though she now lives in Copenhagen, she grew up in the once vibrant, bohemian neighbourhood of Haga in Gothenburg, Sweden, to a family who counted amongst their ancestors Bernhard Reynold von Hausswolff, an 18th Century governor of Falun, Sweden, who helped bring an end to the burning of witches. Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and visual artist who’s also co-monarch of the kingdoms of Elgaland-Vagaland, so it’s perhaps not surprising that she’s chosen to pursue a radical direction with her music.
“I didn´t just want Ceremony to be a collection of songs,” she says. “I wanted it to be like a film, with every single part connected to the other, with shifting moods and settings, but a thread holding all the tracks together. I listen to a lot of film scores, and in many the music is able to move freely without the typical structures that we find in commercial music.”

Arguably Ceremony’s most significant ingredient is the church organ of Gothenburg’s vast Annedalkyrkan, whose pipes are featured on the album’s striking cover. Employed on nine of the album’s thirteen tracks, it also provided von Hausswolff with the excuse to record for five days in the century old building, its cavernous space adding to the record’s formidable magnitude. (Work was completed at weekends over several months in producer Filip Leyman’s studios.) She found in the organ’s sound a link between her own writing and a developing obsession with ‘drone metal’, allowing her to add layers of thick textures to the songs. But – thanks to its inevitable associations with existence and mortality – the organ also suited the themes that lay at the heart of the record, which she defines as “nature and death, or the division of humanity and nature. From the moment we exit the womb, we start our paths towards materialism and destructive behaviour, and these days I feel that the gap between nature and human is growing bigger. I wanted to grasp my inner nature and be unified with nature again. Ceremony is a celebration of life and everything that it contains, especially death, because in death we will be truly one with nature again.”

That’s not to say that Ceremony is a bleak record, something highlighted by the extraordinary ‘Harmonica’, which sounds like Dead Can Dance channelling a Vashti Bunyan song with arrangements by Ennio Morricone. “It’s a song I wrote just after my grandfather passed away,” she recalls. “It’s about how culture and traditions can travel from generation down to generation, and in this case from him to me by music. Just before he died, he gave me a harmonica and he told me to practise hard and only write about things that are relevant to me. His deathbed inspired me to make Ceremony.”

He’d surely be proud of the bold, single-minded consequences of his legacy. Whether it be the placid but grandiose ‘Ocean’, the hymnal ‘Mountains Crave’, the grim, experimentalist ‘No Body’ or the oddly exhilarating ‘Funeral For My Future Children’, Ceremony is a genuinely thrilling, timeless, inventive and even sometimes – in the purest sense of the word – gothic accomplishment.

“This record isn´t really about Anna von Hausswolff as a vocalist or as a person” she concludes. “It´s about the music and all that it contains. Singing from the Grave was a raw and emotional record that happened fast. I think of it as an impulse. Ceremony is more of a vision: something unfinished and unresolved, a glimpse of the future.” 

Tracklist

Der innerdeutsche Versand erfolgt mit DHL und ist immer ver- sichert. Direkt nach dem Versand der Sendung wird dem Kunden eine Trackingnummer per E-Mail zugesendet, womit die Bestellung nachverfolgt werden kann. DHL unternimmt zwei Versuche, ihr Paket an zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Werktagen (Mo.-Sa.) zuzustellen. Bereits, wenn der erste Zustellversuch nicht ausgeführt werden konnte, erhalten sie eine Benachrichtigung. Sie haben dann die Möglichkeit mit dieser Benachrichtigung ihr Paket in der nächstliegenden DHL/Deutschen Post Filiale abzuholen. Auch Lieferungen an eine Packstation sind mit DHL möglich. Wenn sie innerhalb von 7 Werktagen nach ihrer Bestellung ihr Paket nicht abholen, wird es an Vinyl Digital zurückgesendet und es entstehen zusätzliche Kosten. Wir bitten sie, falls sie eine Bestellung bspw. kurz vor einem Urlaub ausführen, uns darüber zu informieren oder direkt eine alternative Lieferadresse anzugeben. Wir akzeptieren Zahlungen, die mit Überweisung (Vorkasse) oder mit PayPal vorgenommen werden. Unsere Bankdaten sind bei Ebay hinterlegt.

International shipping takes place with the German post service or DHL. The shipping of 1-3 vinyl records takes place with the German post service priority airmail and is uninsured. That is to say that we’re not obliged to any liability for conveyed items in this shipping method. Nevertheless, in a given case we’ll of course try to encounter you with the best goodwill. The shipping as from 4 vinyl records is always insured and includes Tracking – accordingly we take any liability for the delivery of the items. Please also take note that deliveries to non-EU countries are subject to additional duties and fees.

   Die neusten Videos und Informationen rund um das
schwarze