Typewriters, traffic, clockwork toys winding down, purring cats - Norway's Hanne Hukkelberg will use anything to make music, so long as it works, she tells Pascal Wyse
Hanne Hukkelberg's latest album, Rykestrasse 68, is like a car-boot sale. Lots of surprising things surface, but somehow none of them seems out of place. You learn to expect the unexpected - the sound of a chandelier being played, a purring cat, a typewriter being struck - alongside the more usual guitars and keyboards.
All this bric-a-brac could make for an infuriating, tuneless ride. But what makes it work on Rykestrasse 68, and on previous album Little Things, is that the singer and composer has treated the objects not as special effects, but as musical instruments. "I don't start with the finished package, the bass and drums, derr-de-derr-de-derr," she says. "If everybody begins on bass, drumkit, guitar and voice, the music becomes really similar. When I was at the Oslo Conservatoire, on the jazz course, I learned that there are four musical elements: rhythm, melody, chords, form. But I would add dynamics and effects to that. So I divide music into six. That way you become aware of what music is built up from, like atoms and molecules. You see more clearly what you have to choose from. Then you can start with, say, a rhythm - which can be played on a ball, glasses, a kitchen table. It just needs to be musical. If it is musical, I don't care what it is done on."
It was her father who instilled this curiosity for "found" sounds. Hukkelberg says that, when she was a little girl, he would often appear with a microphone and talk to her on tape. So recording came to seem very natural, though Hukkelberg admits she found the questions a bit weird: "I think he was more interested in the quality of the recording than the questions and answers."
There was also plenty of music: Hukkelberg's father is a church organist and choir conductor, and her mother sings and plays piano. The family used to gather and perform in the evenings. "When I sleep over there, I often wake up with the sound of them playing the piano. They have always been really supportive - even when I was singing in a metal band."
Hukkelberg counts Radiohead, Motorcycle and Nina Simone among her many influences. As for what other people hear in her music, common comparisons are with Joanna Newsom, the Swedish singer and composer Stina Nordenstam, Billie Holiday and - constantly - Björk. "Every time a female artist from Scandinavia does something alternative, they say, 'Ah, it's Björk.' It's too easy. Sure, she has inspired me, but so have so many other groups, and so many male artists."
HUKKELBERG IS NOT happy with the idea of being a pop star. It's the music that matters: "Pop stars, they can't last for a long time. It's all quantity over quality. It's not the artist who is the piece of art. The piece of art is the music, the lyric. Of course, you can't take away that I am writing it; I use my inspiration and my way of thinking, and I write the lyrics. But it is really important to cut that cord between you and the thing you produce. It is not about me. The lyrics are from my imagination, a fantasy world."
In these fantasies, a man at sea considers suicide, the wind and the sun make a bet, Hukkelberg pictures herself as a ticking bomb - and Obelix, the family cat, gets his own tribute. Listen carefully and you can hear him purring. "That song is a bit scary," Hukkelberg says. "I don't know if I have expressed myself in the right way. I just like this purring so much; it makes me feel something that no other object can make me feel. When I was little, I would put our kitten's nose in my ear when it was purring, to send me to sleep. That song is about respect for animals. A lot of people just laugh about it, but I mean it as a serious track."
HUKKELBERG IS A harsh critic of her own lyrics, and admits she worked harder on them for Rykestrasse 68, having felt embarrassed by some of the words on Little Things. The music just always came first. "When I was little," she says, "I didn't know a single lyric off by heart. It was always the bass line or a guitar solo I would remember. Lyrics didn't interest me. As a teenager, I would write lyrics instead of a diary, so I have thousands of lines. But I had not reflected much on them. I just wrote my feelings straight down. I was trying to describe a picture and didn't really make it. The inner logic didn't really work out." But her pictures are perhaps improved by being a little out of focus, or logically a bit wonky. It isn't just the words that conjure images. The rich harmony of the music (which has a healthy disregard for the distinctions between classical, jazz and pop), and the sounds of typewriters, traffic and clockwork toys winding down, all have a part to play.
For Hukkelberg, each of these songs has to come from nothing, a blank moment. "That is what I find hard about being a musician. You need so much time doing nothing. It has taken me a long time to accept that sometimes I just need to sit down and stare at the ceiling."
Rykestrasse 68 is out now on Nettwerk