Anna Von Hausswolff @ Atlas
Aarhus, January 25, 2019
It is a cold night in Aarhus, freezing temperature and the promise of a snowfall. It is the first time I go and attend a concert at Atlas, a warm and intimate venue with red walls and a cozy low stage.
There are about a hundred people scattered around, some seating on the steps on both sides of the room, some enjoying a beer in the candle light in front of the stage.
The stage is pretty essential, with guitars, a drum set and mike stands waiting for the opening band — Of the wand & the Moon — to step on it and entertain the crowd with their pleasant-to-the-ears neofolk music.
After just a thirty minutes set, the stage is emptied and as the noise of stormy winds fills the speakers, people fill the space in front of the stage while we all wait for the main artist of the evening, the Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff.
Anna von Hausswolff is a blond pixie with the fierceness of a Viking goddess: she can caress your ears with the softest of the melodies and the moment after she’s orchestrating a raging wall of sound with her keyboard and synths worth of the most brutal death metal bands.
Despite the setlist she plays is only seven songs long, including the encore, she drags her audience into this distorted temporal dimension where music, melodies, noises and sounds all clash together creating beauty.
After the powerful opening sequence with The truth, the glow, the fall, Pomperipossa and Ugly and Vegenful, Anna steps in front of her keyboard and with just voice and a harmonica, she gets hold of the whole crowd with Källans återuppståndelse.
The lights are blue, the moment so magic, her voice so magnetic and mesmerising: you could feel she had complete control of the audience, her charisma filling the whole room.
And then it arrived, the song that I was waiting for: The mysterious vanishing of Electra with its gloomy atmosphere, the oppressive, ossessive guitar riffs that suffocates the listener in a crescendo of agony until the moment when you cannot bear it any longer.
Silence.
And then the fury arrives and liberates all our interior demons like a storm. I am not ashamed to admit I had shivers down my spine.
The set concluded with Come wander with me/Deliverance and Gösta performed among the crowd. The curtain fell on the stage and it was time to step outside into the magic light of a snow covered city.
Photo courtesy of Steffen Jørgensen
