From the Valley to the Stars, Sarah Assbring's new album as El Perro del Mar, sounds like a book of hours set to music. Inspired by the concept of heaven as well as by centuries-old liturgical texts, her lyrics are minimal but carefully arranged, and she illuminates them with gilded borders of organ, tambourine, keyboards, and choirs. Self-recorded and self-produced, From the Valley reveals a larger palette of sounds and captures more complex gradations of delicate emotion than her 2006 breakthrough, El Perro del Mar, even if it loses most (but not all) of that album's charming 1960s pop sensibility. Shortly before she embarked on a short tour with fellow Swede Lykke Li, I had the opportunity to talk to Assbring via e-mail about getting her vision down on tape.
Pitchfork: Can you explain the significance of the pseudonym El Perro del Mar?
SA: It refers to a time and place in my life when I was very lost and spent a holiday in Spain. I hadn't seen good things for a long time when a stray dog suddenly walked up to me on the beach. There was a connection there that I caught in its eyes. I had had this feeling of feeling like a dog, all hopeless and tired. I saw that in the dog too, but I also saw something else, something untouchable and precious; and that's when it came back to me. I texted my boyfriend after the rendezvous with the dog, and he replied back, "Oh, so you've met El perro del mar" And I thought, "Yes, I guess I have." Shortly after that I started writing music again.
I think of it as something very precious and fragile, something I need to take good care of. That's how I felt about it the first time the name came up and that's how I still feel. I think its significance is important in that very sense because it's a constant reminder of how I need to feel about the music that I make. In exactly the same way I feel I have to be sincere to myself, I need to be to sincere to El Perro del Mar. Also, it carries such precious associations that it almost feels like I have this amulet of good fortune with me all the time.
Pitchfork: What was it like opening for TV on the Radio?
SA: They got in touch with me after having heard my music, and since we're both fans of each other's music, we just wanted to do whatever we could together. And so when the opportunity to join them on their tour in Spain came up last summer, I couldn't turn it down.
I met up with them in Madrid and instantly fell for the whole band. They're such wonderful people all of them and on stage they're all-consuming, you can't take your eyes off them. We had plans of doing something together on stage, but there wasn't enough time to prepare for it. Unfortunately.
Pitchfork: You have said that this album is about the concept of heaven. How did this theme occur to you?
SA: It was something that dawned on me pretty early in the process of working on something new. I knew a couple of things I wanted to do; I wanted to make an album, I wanted it to be thematic, and I wanted it to be difficult to define. In my personal life I had been caught up in thoughts of death and afterlife, which led to ideas of the eternal but also ideas of the small things in life, the things that really do matter in the end. I was looking for comfort and hope and I kept looking to the sky-- at first I did think it had to do with religion, but I soon realized it was just a very human, very basic, and timeless thing to do-- you know, how the eternal in the heavens is the eternal in us. The writing of the album revolved around ideas such as those.
Pitchfork: Can you tell me a little about how it plays out thematically on the album?
SA: I think of the songs and the soundscape of the album as partly taking place amongst the clouds as well as somewhere on a meadow in a Swedish forest (hence the cover art). The songs speak at times from a universal point of view, as if maybe the stars were to comfort us in times of despair, but also from the point of view of the small man searching for meaning in a world too big and chaotic to grasp. Just as it has always been, I guess.
Pitchfork: How did this motif direct the music?
SA: I wanted the lyrics to reflect that kind of universality and timelessness that fascinated me so much. I consciously used words that perhaps aren't commonly used in pop music, words that you'd rather associate directly to religion. To me that kind of formal language (I'm talking about old texts to psalms, hymns and choral pieces here) is so fascinating just because at a first glance it might appear as too general, something that doesn't really mean anything to you personally, but then when looking closer and put together with music, you see that it does, it strikes you and it hits something very deep within you-- in the same way that it's hit people for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Pitchfork: Can you give me an example of that kind of formal language?
SA: Words like ‘jubilee' and the very euphoric sensation that I get when thinking of a jubilation for life or love is to me directly linked to religious tradition and custom. There's the song "Glory to the World" too, which I think of as a very simplistic hymn, like if it was written in the seventeenth century for a parish to sing together with the chorus in a small church in a small village somewhere. When I was writing the songs, I was very consciously trying to mix those two worlds, the pop and the liturgical music worlds.
Pitchfork: Is this something that you've had an ongoing interest in, or did you do research on it?
SA: I've always listened to liturgical music a lot. I've been singing in different church choirs and every time I've done that, I've found myself so completely struck by the timeless impact of the music and the words. It's such an overwhelming thing to be a part of. When I started working on the album, I knew I wanted to bring that kind of sensation into my own music. It felt very natural and obvious to me since all the arrows of ideas and inspiration I was having at the time were pointing in that very direction.
Pitchfork: You created the album in your home studio. Was it as solitary an experience as it sounds? Maybe it's the cover art, but it makes me think of a monk sequestering himself from the world for spiritual introspection.
SA: Well yes, it was very much like that. The studio is actually not in my home though. It's in the other part of the city where I live, and it's set in a cellar without windows and so working there is very much about closing out the outside world and just moving about your business within those four walls.
But to a certain point though, when the songs were written and the basic structure was done, I let other musicians into the studio to record with me. So it wasn't an all isolated thing (which the first album in every sense of the word was).
Pitchfork: What did you learn making the previous album that you brought to this one?
SA: I learned to accept flaws and mistakes and instead see them as pieces of evidence that music is and has to be an organic living form. Technically speaking, I only used analogue instruments and recording devices on this record. That, to me, was of big difference and importance.
Pitchfork: I guess I would have thought the previous album was recorded on analogue. What effect did that equipment have on the sound?
SA: This is all technical things that perhaps mean more to me than the listener, but I'm a firm believer that it does make a big difference in the end. Yes, the first album was analogue to a large extent, but I did rely a lot on digital sequencing such like click devices as well as midi and sampled orchestra sounds. This time I wanted to rid myself of all of that and only record analogue instruments in an honest and free atmosphere. And since I'm always working alone, it proved to be hard work. It took a lot of discipline and patience. But I felt it had to be worth it.
Pitchfork: As both a musician and a technician, you not only come up with the overarching artistic vision, but then you have to find a way to execute it in the studio. How do you balance those two aspects of your job?
SA: I love going in and out of all those different roles working in the studio. But it means I need to have everything in my head all at the same time. An instant idea can easily and quickly get blurred by technical issues and then it's all about acting fast. I guess you just need to be creative and come up with ways to realize your vision.
Pitchfork: How did you get the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the Gothenburg Symphonic Choir involved?
SA: I'd worked part-time at the Gothenburg Orchestra Hall for quite some time and the people in the orchestra as well the choir had become friends throughout my time there. It was my plan to have some of them join in and I was very happy to see it happen.
Pitchfork: What did you do at the Orchestra Hall?
I worked in the reception desk, so I wasn't musically involved but I had that outsider point-of-view, which gave me a strong desire to listen and learn more, I guess. It also gave me a broader idea of music and the music business-- when returning home from a tour myself I always found it such a relief going to the Orchestra Hall and being a part of a completely different part of the music world.
Pitchfork: Did their involvement allow you to be more ambitious in your writing?
SA: With the musicians from the Orchestra being involved on this album, I had to be a lot more prepared this time. I had to write score parts as best I could, I had to conduct them, and so on. With classically trained musicians you have to have a whole other way of communicating, too. You need to be very clear in every aspect, from what to play and how to play it-- down to every little small nuance. I learned a lot from that experience.
Pitchfork: This album seems less tied to pop history than the previous one, losing a lot of the 60s elements of the previous one. Was this a conscious decision, or a reaction to the theme?
SA: This album is very much a reaction to the previous one, if not all consciously then unconsciously so. Doing what I did on the previous album once more would not have contributed anything to me personally, and the theme itself on the new album made it so clear in what world of sound and what time in history I had placed myself in that thinking about genres wasn't really interesting to me.
Pitchfork: It sounds like genres and styles are very fluid to you, and can be mixed very easily to remarkably different effect. There are many common elements between the two albums, but From the Valley still sounds very distinctive.
SA: I just knew I wanted to place this album in a completely different world of ideas and harmonies compared to the first one. My ideas and the conceptual framework around it were very much revolving around existential questions. I looked for inspiration in things such as literature from the early twentieth century and further back in history, in breathlessly beautiful paintings by artists like El Greco and from museums and churches in general. I was just encapsuled in a whole other time and place on this album, and since it wasn't primarily a musical world that fascinated me, I wasn't very into thinking about specific genres.
Pitchfork: What is your songwriting process like? Many of these songs sound like they're based on the repetition of only a few lines.
SA: It usually starts off with a harmonic pattern, as if the harmony itself has colors or moods. From those colors I usually get very vivid ideas of actual lyrics. Other times it's the other way around; I get harmonic ideas or spectral glimpses of colors from a phrase or a sentence. The repetition form is just something that the music decides for itself. It's just the way that I write music. I've always been into the classic form of the blues or just in the way that folk music works, and it's always been, regardless of origin, based on repetition.
Pitchfork: Would you say that this is a happier or more hopeful record?
SA: To me this album is definitely more happy and more hopeful. It's a coming-to-terms-with-things kind of album. It couldn't have been in any other way. I had to write that album.
Pitchfork: Do you have any tour plans set? Any chance of American dates?
SA: I'm doing a Scandinavian tour in April together with my friend Lykke Li. The tour will continue to the U.S. in May and I can promise it will be something very special and beautiful. I'm really looking forward to it.
Pitchfork: In addition to those dates with Lykke Li, you've toured with Jens Lekman and played with Jenny Wilson, all of whom you refer to as friends. The music scene in Sweden seems very close-knit, almost with a small-town feel.
SA: I guess it is a little bit like that, yes. But then, Sweden is a small country and the network of musicians and artists is even smaller. The independent scene in Sweden is very much based on the friendship and mutual admiration and appreciation. It's a very precious and loving thing.
