Carl Michael Von Hausswolff

Carl Michael Von Hausswolff works from his base in Stockholm as an installation artist and electronic composer whose minimalist audiovisual pieces have appeared across venues in Europe and North America. During the 1980s and early 1990s he actively championed avant-garde practices by running publications and record labels; from the middle of the decade onward his own output turned increasingly austere, with hour-long works often built from the inventive deployment of just a few sonic elements. Solo recordings have appeared on Radium, Ash International, Table of the Elements, Sub Rosa, and Firework Edition. Among his frequent collaborators are Zbigniew Karkowski, David Jackman, Erik Pauser, Andrew McKenzie, Graham Lewis, and especially Leif Elggren, with whom he established the conceptual venture and virtual nation Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland in 1992.

Born in Linköping several years after Elggren, Hausswolff encountered him only two decades later once both had settled in Stockholm. His earliest tool was the tape recorder, whose feedback loops and captured noises produced dense drones that underscored his installations. Toward the close of the 1970s he moved to Gothenburg and founded Radium as a label, magazine, and production outfit. In 1980 he launched the performance ensemble Phauss alongside Erik Pauser, the vehicle for his initial recorded work; one of the earliest solo releases, The Conductor, followed in 1983. After shuttering Radium he launched the Anckarström label in 1991. Throughout the 1990s two central preoccupations emerged—electricity and contact with the deceased. The first led to a progressively reduced sonic palette that reached its extreme in the stark Ström of 2000, while the second generated performances and discs centered on Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or E.V.P., the capture of spectral voices through radio transmissions.

Running parallel to his individual projects since the mid-1990s is the trio Ocsid, assembled with Wire’s Graham Lewis and Jean-Louis Huhta, which stages extended sets combining electronics and video imagery. Hausswolff shared curatorial duties for the Nordic section of the Venice Biennale in 2001.