Anna von Hausswolff

Since 2010 · Sweden

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Dead Magic (2018)

Dead Magic lets the pipe organ's full, room-filling weight dominate the record, Anna von Hausswolff playing the instrument with a volume and physicality closer to a rock musician than a church organist. "The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra" builds its dread slowly, organ drones swelling under her wordless, operatic vocal until the track's scale feels closer to a cathedral than a studio recording. Recorded in an actual Copenhagen church, the album uses the room's natural reverb as an instrument in its own right. It stands as one of the most physically overwhelming drone records made with a fundamentally classical instrument.

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Anna von Hausswolff

Dead Magic · 2018

Anna von Hausswolff builds her music around the pipe organ, an instrument she plays with a rock musician's sense of volume and drama rather than any conventional liturgical restraint, pairing its massive low end with her own operatic, wordless vocal cries. Recording often in actual churches to take advantage of the instrument and the room's natural reverb, her work sits at the intersection of drone, dark ambient, and a kind of gothic grandeur that draws on both classical and rock traditions without settling comfortably into either.

Dead Magic (2018), recorded in a Copenhagen church, is generally considered the fullest realization of that approach, its long, slow-building tracks giving the pipe organ's full physical weight room to dominate the mix in a way few other records attempt. Von Hausswolff's willingness to let a single instrument's texture carry an entire album, rather than building around conventional song structure, has made her music a direct point of connection between the classical organ tradition and the drone and heavy-ambient scenes she is more commonly grouped with.