HOOKED ON A FEELING
Three albums in, and Hanne Hukkelberg just keeps getting darker…
TYPE CASTING: In Trondheim two years ago, the last By:Larm to take place outside of Oslo, Hanne Hukkelberg bewitched an audience with a performance of exquisite fragility that gathered together strands of smoky late night jazz, sweet Scandinavian pop and the avant-garde. Her schtick was not only a magical voice but the presence on stage of both a bicycle and a typewriter, employed gainfully as sources of percussion during the show. She’d just completed her second album, Rykestrasse 68, and the fact that it was recorded in Berlin perhaps inspired this Einsturzende Neubauten Lite behaviour.
She’s back now with her third record, Blood From a Stone, written over seven months in a village on an island in the Arctic. You’d think that this solitude and peace would have inspired a music of similar incline, but in fact it seems to have provoked in her a need to do exactly the opposite. Instead of dropping the Einsturzende Neubauten references in favour of the twittering of birds - hell, Kate Bush managed to build a record around such things so it’s not impossible – Hukkelberg has upped the ante. She’s dropped the bicycle and the typewriter, but in its place she has a band which at times – and deliberately, it must be added – make a noise that feels like the sinews of one’s arms are slowly being shredded.
VOICING HER OPINION: Hukkelberg has one hell of a voice, that’s for sure. It swoops and glides gracefully, evocative and full of yearning. But it’s as though she’s so scared of being pigeonholed as another cutesy Scandinavian female in the mould of Stina Nordenstam, Anja Garbarek and Bjork that she’s gone running and screaming like a banshee in the opposite direction. And what she’s found at the other end of the line are her old PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth records.
For this reason, despite the fact that at times tonight there are curious reminders of last year’s By:Larm sensation Lykke Li, most of the kookiness that she might be in danger of exhibiting is buried beneath the clatter of dustbin lid percussion and the clang of detuned guitars. There’s a depth and complexity wholly absent from the synthetic pop of Li, and within this context Hukkelberg sounds more and more like Siouxsie Sioux or perhaps Polly Harvey, the strum of her guitar imbued with a threatening menace, the shadowy figures behind her lending her music an almost gothic mysticism.
SKIN & BONES: Hidden in the cracks of these gnarly, skeletal arrangements are unexpected hints of melody, and this stripped down but oddly metallic approach has brought out a new confidence in Hukkelberg’s delivery. The catch is, however, that while it’s enormously easy to admire the aesthetic it’s not so easy to enjoy the reality. This is less music, more intricately plotted art: determined and uncompromising, quietly but indefinably charismatic. It’s a puzzle that needs to be pieced together and, as the show progresses, it clearly baffles members of an audience that half way through begins to thin out. Those left behind, however, display a reverent devotion for Hukkelberg’s performance, and while she’s unlikely to be the name on everyone’s lips when they retire from By:Larm at the end of the week, she’s considerably more likely to keep on coming back with fresh and challenging music than most of the acts in attendance this week. It won’t be easy to listen to, one suspects, but it will always be hard to ignore.
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