Name: Klara Andersson aka Fågelle
Nationality: Swedish
Recent release: The new, sophomore Fågelle album Den svenska vreden, is out January 27th 2023 via Medication Time.
Recommendations: Anders Petersen photographs from Cafe Lehmitz and Jenny Hvals amazing record from 2016, Blood Bitch.

If you enjoyed this interview with Fågelle and would like to find out more about her music, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

Music has been in my life since an early age. As a child, I wrote songs and explored different instruments. I was also fascinated by documentary photography which I studied as a teenager.

There have been layers of different Inspirations throughout the years. The first time I heard something that spoke to me on the radio was when I was nine years old and heard Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” In a sea of Britneys and Christinas, she represented a different way of being a girl.



Later, I found mainstream artists on the edge of the underground, like Radiohead, Björk, and The Knife. They became a gateway to experimental and electronic music.

I’m not sure what first drew me to music, but what kept me there is that it's a way of finding order in chaos. It's sending smoke signals to strangers and hoping they will understand you. It's a way of being parts of yourself with other people that it's very hard to be in any other way.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

Music is a reference and starting point baked into my history and identity. It's a way of relating to the world and myself, and it's where I've explored who I am.

I have a lot of different ways of listening. I listen with my partner in the kitchen on a Friday night, dancing around and drinking beer. I listen by myself on long train rides. I listen nostalgically, I listen technically. Sometimes I want something to scratch my brain or insides. Sometimes it's about movement, memory, mood.

I want my music to be an invitation to a personal universe, as far from generic as possible. I want it to be specific and distinct. I bring all my different modes of listening into the production process. It's good if you can approach the music in many different ways over time. Then it's music that can last.

It takes a long time to make but also a long time to explore.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can remember, and in my teen years, I performed them solo with guitar, later with a band. I’d been slowly feeling more and more limited by the pop and band format, and when I was 19, I was invited to a workshop with the saxophone player Mats Gustafsson and his free jazz band The Thing. That changed my life.

[Read our Mats Gustafsson interview]

It was the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. But the energy was thick and palpable, and it stuck with me completely. After that, I knew I wanted to experiment more freely and with other types of sounds.

I bought a bunch of effect pedals and noise boxes and hung out on my living room floor. I also started making field recordings and building my own library of sounds. It was the era of the loop pedal, and there were a lot of amazing female solo artists like Grimes that opened up the door for me to see the possibilities of performing solo with electronics.

What was and still is interesting to me about it is the sense of control on the one hand and the feeling of trying to tame a wild animal on the other. That’s how I prefer to work with electronics. I want them to be able to surprise me. From this, Fågelle as a project grew. I wanted to combine the impulsiveness and rawness of music like free jazz and noise with indie music's emotional, melancholic qualities.

I went on to study sound art at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg and did my final year at UDK in Berlin, which put me in touch with the more extensive history of sound experimentation. In 2014 I met the producer Henryk Lipp, and he encouraged the dark, noisy parts of what I was already doing, and together we started sketching on music where poetry, sound art, and lyrical songs could coexist.

I'm always looking for more raw honesty. To be brave with my perspectives and honest with myself, and what I do. That can mean a lot of things. That can mean coming from an experimental point of view but writing songs with lyrics, melodies, and choruses. It can also mean going into full-on harsh noise inside a pop song. To do whatever the song needs and what the lyrics need and be faithful to the sentiment of it.

I think the personal voice comes from starting from where you're at. Everybody has influences and they should not be ignored but rather embraced. I am a maximalist at heart. So the idea of having this representation of everything I've experienced throughout my life come out in a song or an album excites me a lot. I have a personal cultural footprint which makes what I do inherently unique.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Music and identity are often intertwined. I think it's important not to let the music I listen to define me in a way that limits what I'm open to. I listen to all kinds of music, and I listen for different things. It can be groove, energy, or some sound quality. A layering that I love. An expression of a generation that I'm not a part of. To be curious about the world around me, both as a person and as an artist, is vital.

But when it comes to what I do myself, I have to be really honest about who I actually am at this specific point in time, which is never static. To try not to make music from the perspective of who I want to be but from who I am.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

With the Fågelle project, I see it almost as a collection of images.

It's the southern Swedish brown-grayish winter. It's old old history of mud. Brittle trees. It's me as a kid in a warm overall, just digging my face into moss and old leaves and hiding under trees and inside bushes. It's that harsh calm of winter and generations and centuries of that.

I write about the existential. The mundane sluggish parts of life and the friction between people. Trying to face the darkest parts with curiosity, to be brave, and see it all for what it is.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I want to carve out a space for myself in music. A place where nobody else has been. In that sense, originality or specificity is essential to me.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Continuously gathering field recordings is a longtime practice for me and something I enjoy both the process of and the way it adds specificity and grit to the productions.

Generally, I like to have a close relationship with the gear I use. I like using SuperCollider patches for their bare-bones digital qualities and analog synthesizers for their warmth and grit. Building sounds in multiple layers, making them almost otherworldly, is fascinating to me.

Working deconstructively with the guitar has also been important to me. Finding new sounds and expressive ways of playing and almost merging with the instrument on stage.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

My daily routine depends on whether I'm in Sweden, Berlin, or traveling.

But when I’m in one of my homes, I usually wake up around 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, have breakfast, go for a walk, and then start working. Mornings for me are  good, but after lunch, I usually get into a slump and need to take a break. Depending on what I have going on, I finish up around 19 and then go for either a walk or a run. I feel like physical activity keeps me sane

The pandemic made me rethink work and what it means to be productive, and I became much gentler with myself. The idea that I have to prove my worth by being a productive human doesn't serve me or anybody working, but rather the people owning the means of production. Standard socialist stuff.

Nowadays, my working day can contain all sorts of shenanigans. Sometimes I play computer games, sometimes I watch a documentary. I'm not hurting anybody, and it's all good as long as I take care of myself.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

I wrote the song “Kroppen” when I’d just moved to Berlin for the first time, in the empty living room when my flatmates were away. It was an attempt at understanding where I was, where I was heading, and what I’d possibly left behind—an intense feeling of vulnerability in the face of my big ambitions and dreams for the future.



I built the song inspired by Wilco’s “Radio Cure” around a simple electric guitar and an orchestra of noise lurking in the background.



It was a dream and a big honor to work with Joakim Thåström. When I was writing the song, years before we recorded it, I knew it had some of its origins in Joakim’s music. Which is something I don’t shy away from.

I think every artist's personal expression is a mix of all the things they’ve been exposed to, and especially the things that have touched them. So inviting him to sing on the song was like opening the door to that influence and letting it take physical form.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I like working alone. There's something sacred about that.

But over the years of working with Henryk Lipp I’ve found our feedback loop to be a crucial part of the process that keeps me moving forward. I build something, he reacts to it, we talk about it, and I continue.

It's also nice bringing in musicians to do specific things because it forces me to define my ideas and allows me to open the process up to somebody else's input. I think having a couple of different hands working on something gives it depth.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Music has a unique way of creating space for deep connection between people that is instant and wordless. I think all art, including music, functions as a reference point for society. It creates a space for conversation and is in itself a metaphor for order.

French economic and social theorist Jacques Attali wrote about music as a way of organizing the chaos of the world and proving that Society is possible.

“[…] Music, prior to all commercial exchange, creates political order because it is a minor form of sacrifice. In the space of noise, it symbolically signifies the channeling of violence and the imaginary, the ritualization of a murder substituted for the general violence, the affirmation that a society is possible if the imaginary of individuals is sublimated.”

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Music has a way of holding space for big emotions, and sometimes that is all that is needed in a crisis. To be held by something bigger than you.

I guess that is the role of religion for most people. But music also holds that role, sometimes as escapism and sometimes as a way to get closer to the core of the hurt. I’ve definitely experienced this myself.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Science is an enormous field, and there’s a lot of overlap with the arts. They both have the fundamental driving force of curiosity and exploration, but music most often has a more subjective and personal point of view.

I think science generally aims to answer questions while the arts can keep asking them. Through this continuous asking of questions, circling some sort of ungraspable truth. There's a freedom there that the fields of science don't have.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I think the mundane is really interesting and very worth looking at closer. But what makes art so exhilarating is the fact that you're in the realm of something closer to spiritual or divine. It functions as a gateway to those states of mind.

There’s an existential despair that is hard to look at in the stark daylight. It is a feeling that needs to be read through poetry and song. If not, it’ll be misinterpreted as negative. It exists like the counterpoint to ecstatic, glistening euphoria.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our eardrums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it is able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I have a lot of respect for the cognitive and neuroscience field, so I don't want to botch this by giving a pseudoscience artist's answer.

I think it has something to do with math and symmetry and us being social creatures. But any more than that, you'd have to ask an actual researcher on the topic.