Press Release

By ?
Published: Independiente 'This is...' press release biography (auralgasms.com)

"Stina Nordenstam is one of the greatest individual talents to have emerged in the last decade in European music. Those who have encountered her albums, starting with 1991's staggering debut Memories Of A Colour, have been beguiled by her deceptively fragile, eerily childlike vocals and her meticulous musical arrangements, forever shifting in shape and colour to reflect the emotional intensity of her lyrics, stark stills culled from great unmade European movies. However, she's reluctant to compromise, to be packaged as mere trip-hop or ambient ("I hate ambient music!") or lazily to lend her unique voice to be cut-up for one-off techno collaborations with superstar DJs ("it's depressing to be used in the wrong context"). Consequently, she has been ill-served by a media too inclined to spoon-feed the public with easily digestible pop fare. Her large body of fans have had to find their own way to her, unguided by the majority of critics or MTV and have been well rewarded for their efforts.

Her latest album, This Is, however, represents a shift away from the darkness of much of her Nineties output, such as 1996's brilliant but at times emotionally pitch-black Dynamite. Featuring guest vocals from Suede's Brett Anderson, these songs reflect a sense of an artist finally at ease with herself, having arrived at a philosophical plateau. It's a breakthrough album, a place where Stina and a wider audience can properly get to know each other. It's also the culmination of an extraordinary and often solitary journey she has taken to get where she's at today.

Born and raised in Stockholm to parents who reacted against their own conservative upbringing by joining the Communist party, Stina found herself the bizarre victim of displaced, sackcloth middle class guilt. It was forever impressed upon her, by her parents and at school by one somewhat warpedly idealist teacher, that she should feel ashamed of herself for her "privileged' background. "The idea was that people who had less were better human beings." When beaten up by a less "privileged' child in her class, Stina found herself scolded for not being friendly enough to the boy.

Stina eventually discovered a natural aptitude for music which she used as a means of escape from this impossible, loveless existence. "I guess as a kid, I did music, just to keep my self occupied and not be at home. It's not that I was really interested in music. I wasn't really interested in anything, not even living, because I was severely depressed until I was 20. I was sealed off. I didn't have one healthy relationship until I was 20."

In her teens, Stina enrolled music school, though she was alienated by the snooty and hierarchical nature of that more conventionally upper middle class classical musical establishment. By 10th grade, however, she transferred to a more mixed college and, fraternising with a more diverse crowd of students, fell in with a small jazz community, playing in bands around Stockholm. While this was temporarily liberating, whooping it up on the bandstand, Stina was dismayed by her fellow band members' lack of ambition. They were happy to bash out cover versions taken from an A-Z of classic jazz standards whereas Stina, bored to distraction at the prospect of merely revisiting the same material again and again, took the songs and began adding alterations of her own. It was then that she decided to write her own songs, in English.

"For language to make sense, it needs to communicate and I didn't have that when I was growing up so it was easier to develop my musical language in English, which also has the advantage of being a more profound language than Swedish, with a richer musical heritage."

Stina was also in the process of discovering her own, highly idiosyncratic voice. Slothful critics, reaching into their grab-bag for the nearest comparison, have compared Stina to the likes of Bjork, or Ricky Lee Jones. In fact, the nearest possible reference points to Stina's voice come from jazz - think of Billie Holiday or Chet Baker, whose voices were small yet heartrendingly intimate and expressive, or trumpeters like Jon Hassell (who features on Stina's second album, And She Closed Her Eyes) - or Miles Davis. Like Miles, Stina decided to eschew the conventional virtuoso styles of jazz and invent her own, distinctively muted vocal style. "I wrote for my voice and sang like my voice wanted to."

And so, Stina was drawn towards the fringes of pop and rock. She won a local competition, the prize for which was to record an album. This attracted interest from a number of British labels, including 4AD, before Stina settled with East/West.

The four albums Stina recorded during the Nineties were rich and liquid in their musical thinking but lyrically not for the faint-hearted. They, abounded with spare and evocative tales of unrequited love and inevitable sadness, some of which may be reflections on Stina's own life. More darkly, there are tales of suicide ("Little Star") and, on Dynamite, "Mary Bell", a sober, non-judgmental paean to the British schoolgirl who murdered a young boy in the Sixties.

Stina's musical career, however, though initially euphoric, was followed by a sense of depression. Indeed, in the mid-Nineties, she retreated to a house on an island on the edge of Stockholm, going for long walks through the forest ("it was like walking through my own mind"), painting pictures of her "demon", who took the form of a bald man depicted over and over again.

"I had to almost die and be born again." She finally emerged from the long shadows of her life, quit the island, went back to Stockholm and told her family she never wished to see them again. She never has.

Freedom. 2001, a new label and This Is, her first album since 1998's People Are Strange, which featured unearthly cover versions of unsuspectingballads like "Sailing" and "Love Hurts".

A sort of freedom, anyway. As "Welcome To Happiness" illustrates, as Stina explains, "it's welcome to all sorts of feelings . . . it's the idea that when you open up, all kinds of feelings will come and temporarily you will feel euphoric but the happiness won't stay."

With this warning in mind, songs like "The Diver', "Clothe Yourself For The Wind' and the almost halcyon, sunlit "Sharon And Hope" exhort the listener to embrace life. As Stina says, "The only thing I want is to live an exciting life. I don't want anything else. I don't want success, I don't want money. That's all I want."

This sense of giddy, random adventurism is reflected in "Trainsurfing" and "Keen Yellow Planet", both of which feature vocals from Brett Anderson, sounding quite unlike his stereotypical camp, mockney self. "He came out to LA to record the vocals,' says Stina. "I met him a couple of times in England previously - I thought maybe it would be difficult to work with him or get him, with the fame attached to him but he was very nice. I think this is one of his best vocal performances. He adapted easily, fell into the groove."

However, those addicted to Stina's narcotic sense of melancholia won't be disappointed here. "The only possible happiness I can have is one with the pain and darkness in it," asserts Stina and there's plenty of that on "Everyone Else In The World", with its swirling keyboard line swelling in defiance, bridles with the sort of hardy, affirmative strength that has got Stina through life. "Everyone else in the world will love me some day ... but not you . . " could be a parting shot to a lover, or maybe to her parents. While Stina's lyrics are open-ended and often unresolved, their vividity is paid tribute by the 10 short videos commissioned to accompany these songs, featuring vomiting ballerinas, trips to cartoon space and Stina herself, disguised as ever in a black wig, serenely walking through fast motorway traffic.

Musically, This Is is another heady mixture of instrumentation, courtesy of Stina herself and a band that includes co-producer Mitchell Froom on keyboards. Hurdy-gurdy drones, bossa nova rhythms, distantly decaying riffs, muted electric keyboards, chopstick piano chords, oddly lethargic rhythm guitars, understated, meandering melodies, all coalesce around Stina's seemingly strengthless yet utterly irresistible voice, like breath on the eardrum, to quietly spellbinding effect.

Deceptively fragile? Don't be deceived. This Is is as "soft" as steel. "I have a strong survival instinct," she says, "I'm very strong in that aspect."