Stina Nordenstam: Magnificent strangeness
By Kevin Harley
Published: The London Independent, Oct 15, 2004
Stina Nordenstam sings spooky and wistful songs about love, airports and
murder. Kevin Harley meets an enigma.
"It's my secret trick," says Stina Nordenstam, moving her
coat slightly and looking mischievous. The singular, slightly built Swedish
singer is giving a rare interview as the sun sets in Kensington Gardens,
but for a minute, it seems as if some of it might be lost because her coat
has been draped over the microphone of my dictaphone. Cunning or what? "I
thought if I covered it you might not be able to hear what I said after-wards,"
she says, grinning: "That might not be so bad."
Nordenstam is the quiet woman of European avant-pop. Since releasing her
debut album, Memories of a Colour, in 1991, she's accrued a cult audience
and much acclaim while steering well shy of the mainstream. This is inevitable,
in a sense, given the magnificent strangeness of her intricately sculpted
music, where spooked clatterings and eerie electronics bother warm acoustic
sounds and wistful melodies on songs whose subjects range, with great emotive
empathy, from love to murder. And then there's that unique voice, which
is more a law unto itself than merely "child-like": at once fragile
and direct, bare and elusive, and possessed of a certain jazzy swing.
Nordenstam's distance, though, is also an extension of not pandering to
the press game. The woman on her album sleeves barely resembles the woman
in person, thanks to wigs and make-up. She's turned down offers to collaborate
with the Chemical Brothers and to record a Bond theme song. And as the airport
and station imagery of her last album, the achingly sad yet pop-flavoured
This is Stina Nordenstam, suggested, she always appears to be on the point
of leaving, just out of reach. Add the rareness of her English-language
interviews, then, and getting home to find the tape blank wouldn't feel
entirely inappropriate.
Still, she's here to talk about her sixth album, The World is Saved, which
puts at least an almost positive spin on the idea of being on the move.
It's her warmest album yet, pairing organic, almost lounge-jazz arrangements
with songs that push her voice up in the mix. Its key theme seems to be
one of getting up and getting on, of new beginnings, from its opener, "Get
On with Your Life" ("All over the world they get out of bed"),
via the comic "Butterfly" ("Too late I fell out of bed/ Hit
the ceiling instead/ I'd turned into a butter-fly"), to "The End
of a Love Affair" ("Getting up is easy").
"That's what I feel about the album," Nordenstam says. "That
it's coming from a feeling of reaching a turning point. A couple of things
brought that on but also it's a general thing that is in everyone's life,
to different extents. You can feel it on a level when it's not such a big
thing, or you can feel it on a level when it is about your whole life, when
you're deciding to lift yourself. There's been a couple of things in my
private life where I have that."
In a sense, then, the world being saved is internal: "I find it interesting
how it has been my experience - even though it's just how you experience
things on that level, which is absurd - that if you're depressed or have
a panic inside, you experience the world changing, like it's going down
or in danger. It's sort of a renewed feeling of meaning from the position
of knowing that something is painful, but still being positive."
Nordenstam's struggles with depression are well documented. Her extraordinary
1996 album Dynamite played like a reflection of the breakdown she had at
the time, pitching her voice in among fuzzy guitars and baroque orchestration.
Creativity seems to have been a solution. "Creativeness is not ever
tough for me," she nods. "The creative process has helped me through
the years, because it is for me where things make sense. At times, I've
had problems with normal language and the context of reality, where everybody
seems to share the same context; but art contexts have been really sort
of concrete."
Did her struggles with reality mean that finding a unique voice came naturally?
"That makes sense," she says. "Because you have to. To me,
it's been important to have clarity. With music, maybe I don't know what
sound I'm looking for but when I hear it I can immediately say yes or no.
Not that those are the right choices, just that I'm sure in making them.
That makes it personal, somehow. A lot of energy goes into defining."
Clearly, the process of creating attracts Nordenstam more than the result.
In this regard, her decision to avoid the album-tour treadmill makes perfect
sense. She's only played one London concert to date, at the Jazz Cafe in
1992, but while the audience found it unnervingly brilliant, Nordenstam
didn't. "It was a nightmare. There was nothing new, we were just supposed
to repeat the record."
While her reluctance to be interviewed is part of a crackpot Nordenstam
package for some critics, it makes sense in this regard, too. For sure,
there is a fragility about her that explains a wariness to be over-exposed
in itself. But also, as a musician and a sometime photographer, Nordenstam
gives off a sturdy sense of inalienable creative self-certainty - and she
wants to stay on the creative side.
"With my first album," she says, "I did all the press I was
asked to do and was shocked when I read about myself. It would be weird
for anyone to change perspective like that, but especially for me because
I had to work on the concept of reality. Also, an important thing for me
was to be behind the camera. Then I was on the other side, and I read all
these thoughts about myself and I was speechless!" She laughs and shakes
her head: "I just lost it. And it took me ages to recover."
So does her decision to be interviewed for The World is Saved tally with
a tentative sense of optimism? "I don't like making decisions and keeping
them for life," she says. "Not that I like doing interviews,"
she says, gazing off into the sunset and musing like someone trying on a
notion for size: "but the way I feel now is like, if someone comes
up with a bad idea, I'd rather say, `Well, OK, let's try it', than go on
saying, `No, I don't think
|