Anna von Hausswolff: The Miraculous

Growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolff occasionally retreated—as so many kids do—to her own alternate dimension. Like all fanciful realms, this hallowed spot, deemed "the miraculous place", honed the young von Hausswolff’s imagination like a gym for the mind. "The border between fantasy and reality was so blurred," she recently told the Quietus. As the former monarch of the woods across the street from my elementary school, I can attest to this sensation: there’s something about self-created folklore that sharpens the spirit like no other exercise can, and one could argue that such myths lay at the heart of not just childhood, but human experience as a whole.

To craft her third full-length LP—so named for her special place—von Hausswolff made a pilgrimage to the city of Piteå, home to the Acusticum Pipe Organ. One of the largest instruments of its kind in that region, it is equipped with 9,000 pipes, built-in percussion (including vibraphone and glockenspiel), recording/looping tools, and nefarious sounds produced by submerging the pipes halfway underwater. If von Hausswolff’s wanderlust is the soul of The Miraculous, then the Acusticum is its gothic, frequently grotesque heart, its mechanical pulse tempered by the organic approach of the musician's four-piece backing band.

Consider The Miraculous’ universe a carnal Camelot, not far removed from the fucked-up mythologies of Angela Carter or George R.R. Martin. There’s no Ren-Faire tackiness, though; rather, the LP bridges high fantasy with human emotion, as the opening line of "The Hope Only of Empty Men" attests: "I think I see a knight/ I’m gonna fuck him for a while." Considering the religious contexts in which we’re used to hearing the organ, such lines seem downright heretical, and that’s exactly the point: The Miraculous transforms an instrument regarded by many as one of the stuffiest in music into a lusty, lustrous marvel.

For instance, the Swans-reminiscent highlight "Come Wander With Me / Deliverance" pits the puritanical pipes against a pair of droning guitars and an aqueous wail created through the aforementioned pipe-submerging method. It’s a battle that ends with a noise-ridden reunion, the marriage of sacred and profane. There’s darkness embedded within the songs’ dynamics as well; as Von Hausswolff lets out an ascendant wail at the start of "Evocation", the pipes swell up around her like the nightmarish offspring of a THX sound test, imbuing the musician's corporeal angst with divine strength. 

There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding. The album’s meandering latter half proves dull: "En Ensam Vandrare" and the title track drift along like flotsam on a lazy river, doing little to command the listener’s attention. Like most stories, The Miraculous take a few retellings for its ultimate magic—invigorating contrasts, medieval madness, and von Hausswolff’s role as foul-mouthed, fantastical raconteure—to sink in. Nevertheless, this is a dimension worth thorough investigation.