Hanne Hukkelberg takes a holiday in the Arctic Circle to squeeze Blood From a Stone

By Selena Fragassi
Published: May 19th, 2009 | 7:00am

Even before the state of the current economy made waves in Europe, Hanne Hukkelberg was well-practiced in the ways of being resourceful. In 2003, around the time her solo career began, the Norwegian singer and musician discovered a way to transform her music through the use of natural “instruments” surrounding her — an original method that she dubs “found sounds.”

Over the course of two albums, Hukkelberg has used these sounds to create an organic rhythm section that guides her ambient vocals, and she continues the trend on her latest, Blood From a Stone (Nettwerk Records), which utilizes everything from school desks to seagull screams, clogs to train doors to finish out the ethereal soundscape.

“Music really didn’t start out on an electric guitar. So for me, to search beyond the conventional instruments we normally use and find sounds that are interesting to fill out the music is very appealing,” she says, noting that there is a very strict casting call on what makes the final cut. “What’s really important to me is that the sound not be there just because it’s strange, but rather to find the function behind the sound.”

On Blood From a Stone in particular, Hukkelberg points to her most interesting “found sound”: banging a metal stick inside a freezer — a fitting addition considering the singer spent seven months recording the album in a similarly cold and barren place near the Polar Circle. She explains her unorthodox choice of studio space, saying, “I’ve started this tradition to go away when I’m composing. For the last record, I went to Berlin…and while it was good, being there made my music less loud than I had hoped, since I was in a big city with a lot of impressions. But on this record, I went to the north of Norway — which was a great place for really screaming and making noisy music, which fit with the rock direction I wanted.”

Hukkelberg, who just turned 30 this past April, notes that she first started learning how to sing and play guitar when she was three years old — but it wasn’t until she began singing in metal bands that something clicked. “I’ve been inspired by being a singer in metal bands and rock bands and I wanted to use what I learned in this record now,” she says of her time fronting bands like the Norwegian outfit, Funeral. “I still love really strange music, like doom metal. I don’t listen to it often, but when I do, it leaves me with something special.”

Perhaps what was most impressive about those early days was the burgeoning of a serious music writer. “When I was a rock singer, I wrote a lot of songs. I started to really make music and compose,” Hukkelberg admits, “and it was the first time I dared to show other people my music and my lyrics.”

As Hukkelberg began writing, an interesting development was her strict decision to do so in English rather than in her native language of Norwegian. “A lot of countries are very affected by English and American culture and language. If you’re Norwegian, it’s just a little country, and it’s impossible not to relate to the English language. You learn it in school and you hear it in TV and film. And also the groups and singers I was a fan of, they had English lyrics,” she says. “But now I have a tradition in every record I make: one of the songs has to be in Norwegian so I can challenge myself in that language, as well.”

More importantly, Hukkelberg’s rationale for writing in English goes back to her desire to explore sound function. “It’s really important to me to reach out to the audience; in the English language, everybody can understand you. If I sang in Norwegian, it would be really difficult to have an international career, and I’m really dependent upon that, because I can’t do my type of music only in Norway,” she explains. “It’s important to me to have a large working fan base, and the only way to do that is to be able to speak to them in a language they can understand.” Though Hukkelberg may still be fixated on freezers, language is the most important sound she’s found yet.

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