Anna von Hausswolff

Hailing from Sweden, Anna von Hausswolff has earned widespread critical praise for her work as a vocalist, composer, pianist, and organist. Her first album to reach the national Top Five, Singing from the Grave, appeared in 2010. Far from a conventional artist, she draws heavily on European Gothic and classical lineages that shape her subsequent recordings. Her voice spans remarkable territory, encompassing the operatic register of primary influence Kate Bush, the spectral wails associated with Diamanda Galas, and the feral snarls identified with Jarboe. Ceremony, issued in 2012, centered on an Annedal church organ and incorporated drone-based structures inspired by the post-rock band Earth. The Miraculous, released in 2015, further explored the instrument’s potential through sessions on the 9,000-pipe Acusticum organ built by Gerald Woehl, augmented by a metal ensemble. Dead Magic, helmed by producer Randall Dunn in 2018, was captured in nine days with her band and string section; the principal keyboard was a twentieth-century pipe organ housed in Marmor Kirken, Copenhagen’s Marble Church.

Born 6 September 1986 in Gothenburg, Sweden, she is the offspring of internationally recognized sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff. Her first public performance took place in 2008. An appearance at the following year’s Way Out West Festival in Gothenburg positioned her as an emerging figure within the Swedish alternative scene. In collaboration with the independent imprint Kning Disk, she issued her commercial debut, the Track of Time EP, in 2010. Reviewers responded favorably, citing parallels with singer-songwriters Kate Bush and Antony Hegarty. That acclaim paved the way for her full-length debut, produced by Henryk Lipp, which entered the Swedish albums chart at number five only months later. After relocating to Denmark, she altered both her instrumental approach and sonic palette on Ceremony, recorded chiefly on a church organ and first issued domestically before an international rollout seven months afterward; outlets ranging from the New York Times and NPR to heavy-metal publications greeted the album with enthusiasm.

Following a handful of live dates, among them one in Brooklyn, New York, von Hausswolff resumed studio work. In autumn 2015 she unveiled the video singles “Evocation” and “Come Wander with Me/Deliverance” ahead of November’s The Miraculous, a cycle spanning gothic folk and pop to black and death metal, with her expansive pipe organ and vocals supported by a hand-picked ensemble of rock and classical players. In 2017 she invited American producer Randall Dunn to Copenhagen for nine days of recording that featured her band and the twentieth-century pipe organ at Marmorkirken, the city’s ornate marble rococo church. December brought the announcement of an album whose scant details included the title Dead Magic, its artwork, a poem by Sweden’s Walter Ljungquist, and the doom-laden single “The Mysterious Vanishing of Elektra,” whose video followed in January. February saw the release of the second track, “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall.” Issued on City Slang in early March 2018, the Dunn-produced Dead Magic received the strongest notices of her career to date, after which she toured Europe and the United States.

Late in 2019 she joined the roster of Southern Lord, the label run by fellow Earth admirers Sunn O))). Sacro Bosco, the celebrated sixteenth-century garden commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini at the Orsini castle between Rome and Florence, supplied the conceptual spark for her next project; its stillness, melancholy, and striking overgrown statuary prompted a new set of compositions. Performed and tracked alone on the pipe organ at Gothenburg’s Örgryte New Church, the entirely instrumental All Thoughts Fly appeared in September 2020 and contained the track “Sacro Bosco,” for which von Hausswolff filmed a video on site with Gustaf and Ludvig Holtenäs.