Anna von Hausswolff 'Dead Magic'

'Dead Magic', Anna von Hausswolff’s fourth album, was composed in the summer of 2016 in her hometown Gothenburg, Sweden, and recorded the following year in Copenhagen, Denmark. The majority of recordings were done on the 20th-century organ at Copenhagen’s Marmorkirken, “the Marble Church”, one of the largest churches in Scandinavia, with a chapel inspired by the majestic St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The album sees her joined by Karl Vento (guitar), Joel Fabiansson (guitar), Filip Leyman (synthesizers), Ulrik Ording (drums) and David Sabel (bass), with string arrangements on “The Truth, the Glow, the Fall” and “Källans Återuppståndelse” by Úlfur Hansson. The production of 'Dead Magic' was entrusted to the multifaceted Randall Dunn, known for collaborating with iconic bands such as Sunn O))), Earth and Wolves in the Throne Room.

To speak of the music using pre-existing genre tropes is pointless. This is not about gothic rock, pop, drone, dark music or metal, this is music of the spirit and the blood; the feast and the ritual; the baptism and the epitaph; life and its absence in all its poetics; a communion in which one dies and returns to life many times. 'Dead Magic' is a dark crystal that encapsulates the most intimate and extreme human passions, born and grown in a time now passed, dormant, but forever imprinted in grooves on vinyl.