"Indie-rock bands begging for gravitas, mystics christening avant-garde civic architecture, conceptual geniuses following the fractals of human depravity and the xenophobic state -they've all used the rafter-rattling boom of the pipe organ as a way to construct vastness; if cathedrals didn't already exist, the flying buttresses of the pipe organ's groans would have called them into being. In other words, it's an instrument designed to make a human being, with all of our inner depths, seem very small indeed."
"Over the past decade, Swedish composer and organist Anna von Hausswolff has fashioned her instrument's blasts of air into cavernous spaces that drip with oversized exhalations. With Iconoclasts, she not only shapes the kind of terrible majesty she created with her mostly instrumental 2020 record All Thoughts Fly, she sings to fill it with heartache, longing, rupture, pain, love-normal, human-sized things whose personal stakes she builds to appropriately towering proportions."
Anna von Hausswolff sculpts pipe-organ blasts into cavernous, thunderous sonic spaces. Iconoclasts pairs monumental arrangements with sung heartache, longing, rupture, and love-sized personal stakes. The record's production is expansive and maximalist to accommodate towering emotional arcs. Songs center on the destruction of idols—former lovers, beliefs, and aesthetic principles—and convey a sense of recent liberation that can also read as trembling heartache. Saxophonist Otis Sandsjö contributes gothic-jazz textures, while a duet with Iggy Pop foregrounds confession and self-revelation. The work functions as a requiem for dead relationships and the carapaces of old selves.
Read at Pitchfork
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