Hanne Kolstø has now released her first Nynorsk-language album in November. We spoke to her and co-producer Øyvind Røsrud Gundersen about how the songs were written, and how the song "Snakkeboble" was recorded in the studio.
/ 15/11/2016 / codexText: Kai Lofthus, photo: Willy Martinsen/TONO
The 35-year-old sickly Hanne Kolstø has been called “better than the Beatles” by Morgenbladet (2011) and “Pop’s new trendsetter” by Aftenposten (2015). When she was supposed to write her new album in January 2016, she isolated herself in her makeshift, ten-square-meter kitchen studio in Oslo – with an oven as a stand for her analog Roland Juno-106 synthThere she worked out a number of instrumentals.
– A song always starts for me in Photo Booth on the Mac, says Kolstø. – The next step is to record whatever the bass, riffs or chords on guitar or piano are, straight into the microphone on the Mac and into Garageband.
– So I left it at that, until me and the co-producer Øyvind Røsrud Gundersen traveled to the Lyrics Writers' Fund's apartment in April. There we worked more on the songs, and I sang my first line in Nynorsk. It only came late one evening, I remember it was really embarrassing, I blushed. It took a while for the rest of the lyrics to come, but I seem to remember they ran out in a couple of days in June. Then it suddenly felt completely natural for me to sing in "Sykkylvsk", she says.
One album a year
Kolstø herself is the author of most of the songs on the new album, with the exception of "Prøv igjen" and "Mengdetrening", which were written with Røsrud Gundersen. Also involved in the production is a former bandmate, Morten Martens, who adds what she calls "raw, completely wild" beats. Central to the compositions is preserving the fragile and imperfect, to sing with the soul and not the technique.
– That's why in recent years I have chosen to work under a deadline, one album a year, because it does something to the working method. I don't get the opportunity to go into so much detail, censor and polish. Another advantage of working like this is that I am always challenged to be uncertain. It is more important for me to be uncertain than to be satisfied. The song should preferably be trembling in the air between something that feels good and close, and the bottomless shame one can feel over having given oneself away.
We let Hanne Kolstø and Øyvind Røsrud Gundersen explain in their own words how they created the album's opening song "Speech Bubble".
Female: "Snakkeboble" was the song I was most pleased with as an instrumental, and I was even more pleased when I started singing in Nynorsk. And it's so strange in structure. It's impossible to make sense of. I love that.
Oyvind: As a production, "Snakkeboble" is one of the songs that I think stands out on the record, a production that contains a lot of different things that I like. From Morten Martens' deep, big beats, smooth basses and angular pianos to the end with Vangelis synths and guitar covers. I really like it, and I don't get tired of it. It's a journey of a song. Some of the strongest lyric lines are here - a little emo, but really just incredibly beautiful.
Female: On “Snakkeboble” I first filmed sketches played on the piano at home in Sykkylven, before I borrowed Øyvind’s studio to get them into Garageband on click. But on this album I actually used a sound card on the piano and synth for the first time, and it worked. It was really good that the work I put in alone with the sketches could be put straight into the studio project and used. Otherwise I worked on the song as I had so many times before – I used the ugly synth bass in Garageband “Arena Run” with distortion, recorded an acoustic guitar straight into the Mac, added vocals, and manually typed in beat sketches with hip hop drums with distortion. Then it was Øyvind’s turn to clean up.
Oyvind: We used all of Hannes' pianos and synths on this song, but since it was originally an instrumental, we had to rearrange a lot, add the parts where the verse comes multiple times and so on. It's quite a bit longer than the demo, and quite a bit more pompous. We started, as we often do, by putting the demo elements into Pro Tools, and in this case I did some rough gridding before we added a new bass. I think we used a Moog Slim Phatty, and prog some slightly better demo beats. What we did on this record at this stage was make some simple drum machines in Live with a mix of Hannes's kitchen pots and pans sounds, some generic Garageband sounds, tweaked a bit with good distortion plugins and some of my own sounds. We used these for several of the songs, and it was a cool way to have both a common thread in the drum sounds, and to always have this at hand. I like to have the drum programming in a different program than the tracking program. It gives a nice illusion that you are working with an instrument and not a computer program.
It felt very uncomplicated, I remember, until the vocals came on. Then we suddenly had to add the verse several times, because it was so damn good, and to create a kind of anchor in the song, something to come back to. Then the need arose to get some beats that match the vocals better, and that's when it's so cool to have access to such a good beatmaker like Morten Martens. People like that "play beats" like an instrument, and do things I would never have thought of myself and it also sounds completely finished when I get the files. I rarely need to tweak these tracks much.
After this we added an extra piano with a Yamaha CP80 sample with lots of sound, a new acoustic guitar similar to the demo, but recorded a little better and lots of electric guitars. I often like to add subtle guitar jams over the songs in the idea phase, and some of this continues on. I am against the doctrine of “If you don’t hear it in the mix, then take it away”. I find texture and soundscapes to be very fun to work with and interesting to listen to, plus such “jams” can provide fertile ground for other ideas. On Snakkeboble, these guitars became some lines that we added with the fabulous string players Ole Henrik Moe and Kari Rønnekleiv, which gives the production a little extra finesse and melancholy.
At the end of the song there are also quite a few layers of guitars with extreme distortion. I think we did five takes, but all with different guitars and voicings and some with close mics and some with room mics. Then I mixed it all together into a stereo track with a guitar wall right away. Finally Ole Henrik played tremolo madness strings over the whole thing – we wanted it to end with a bit of hellish violence and evil, á la Nerve Tattoo by Motorpsycho. It’s a song that both Hanne and I have a strong relationship with, and we were completely starstruck when we realized that it was him playing on this one, and we could use that reference in that way.
TONO: To what extent were the songs finished before you went into the studio? Was there any improvisation along the way?
Female: The songs are finished in the sense that I have completely emptied myself of ideas. The songs have a melody and lyrics. I have sung all the voices I hear. It usually has several layers of synth, several layers of piano, as in the case of Snakkeboble, acoustic guitar, often quite simple but still important beat sketches, and a really ugly bass synth from Garageband that makes Øyvind squirm in his chair. Then we sit in the studio and recreate the sketch from Garageband, only with a slightly better sound. Øyvind always improvises what he wants to play while we are in the studio, it can be bass, guitar, synth and/or drums, and we start arguing about what should be included and what should not.
TONO: Have the recording methods changed anything since you started collaborating?
Oyvind: On the first disc (Riot Break (Spotify link) from 2011) we recorded on a 16-track Tascam tape recorder that I didn't really know that well. I had only produced one record at that point, and we were both pretty new to the technical side. But it really just opened up a lot of space, creatively. When you don't know how to do something, you just do it, you're not constantly considering everything. It's nice to start things off. Then I transferred everything to Pro Tools because during the process we started making more songs with beats and programming, and from there we've been working here and in Live. On the third record «Stillness and Panic» (Spotify link) from 2012, we did a lot of sampling and beats in Live that we tracked into Pro Tools. This combined with analog synths and more traditional methods on guitar, bass and drums became the methodology on the next albums, and how we still work. I often start by putting Hannes Garageband demos into Pro Tools, tightening things up a bit, getting it at the right tempo and such – there are a lot of organs and Casios in the demos on this album – before we then add layers upon layers on this. Replacing some sounds but trying to keep what does the job. The combination of demo sounds, lofi drums, piano sounds and a hifi world is always interesting to me.
(The story continues below the picture)
TONO: How do you work on the lyrics? Do you have any "holy grails"?
Female: I love reading, and looking for answers that don't exist in books. But sometimes I only watch series. And then I get bored, and then it's just reading, and that's how the pendulum swings. I was very busy reading non-fiction for a while, preferably psychology and philosophy, and was very inspired by that. But I've always read novels on the side, and more poetry in the last year. Before, I preferred to read in English, since I wrote English texts. Now I read as much Nynorsk as I can. My writing method is "stream-of-consciousness", I write down everything I think for half an hour here and there, and from that I pick out what I like, and supplement it with words and sentences I've collected from books and series and the like. Sometimes it's a bit like solving a crossword puzzle, but that's if I'm going to find sentences for an already written melody. On the last album I've done the opposite, writing lyrics first, and putting melody to the words. It was lovely to set the text free. I listen to very little of other people's music or lyrics, it gives me such performance anxiety, it hinders my writing. But I usually send sentences to Erlend Ropstad if I get stuck. Erlend is a good friend, whom I trust completely when it comes to lyrics. He was actually the first person I played the finished version of Snakkeboble to. It was really scary, but when he more than approved it, it was a very touching moment.
TONO: After writing in Norwegian, do you feel like you want to continue doing so?
Female: Yes. When I told Ropstad that I had started writing in Norwegian, he looked at me quizzically and said: "..and now you can never write in English again!" And he is absolutely right. Now only my native language matters to me. It is so good to get so close to myself, and so close to those I sing to.
Recorded at Brageveien Studio in Oslo
The recordings were made between April and June in Brageveien Studio in Oslo, and mixed by Røsrud at the same place in August. They were then mastered by George Tanderø at Livingroom in Oslo. But she did not want to be involved in the mastering.
– Øyvind was present on this album. I was so incredibly bored that I asked to be let go, she says with a smile.
Who knows, maybe that's why she's already working on a new album. According to Gundersen, you can set the clock to when Hanne will start writing again, even if it's shortly before the upcoming album release.
Fasten your gaze is published by Jansen Plate Production on LP, cassette, CD and in a special edition with LP and book. If you can't wait until you're in a record store, it's also available on Spotify.
Here you can watch the video for one of the songs: