Interview with Rebecka Edlund
Talking with the Swedish singer about filtering surroundings, engaging one's audience as an improviser, and the uncomfortable intimacy of the human voice.
Rebecka Edlund is a London-based Swedish singer, lyricist, and composer with a soft spot for the ocean, anecdotes, and rusty orange. Her music is a concoction of jazz and folk traditions, whale song, bird whistles, and other peculiar sounds, exploring freely improvised storytelling and contemporary songwriting. Her debut album, Något om en björk (Something about a birch tree), was nominated by Lira as one of the best folk jazz albums of 2022. Edlund curates The Downstairs Living Room Series at Vortex Jazz Club and performs at renowned venues around Europe. Recent musical escapades include Edlund's voice-viola-cello trio Once A Fig and her project 'Virgin Forest', featuring Laura Jurd and Elliot Galvin. Edlund is the vocalist in cutting-edge contemporary ensembles such as Olivia Murphy's Jazz Orchestra and Asha Parkinson's Kalpadruma Collective.
Eli Thayer: You grew up in Sweden, right? What was your musical childhood like?
Rebecka Edlund: I grew up in a family that wasn’t particularly musical. I say that with hesitation because they all are musical without really knowing it. They’re all creative, and they’re performers in their own way. And my mum does sing, and my dad has a beautiful voice, but they never really studied music. My mum played a bit of violin, but it wasn’t a ‘musical household’ in that sense. They all enjoy music, so there was usually something going in the background, but it was mostly like pop or prog rock. My dad is a big metal, hard rock fan. They don’t listen to any instrumental music at all, so everything was voice-based. So there was music, but it wasn’t particularly adventurous -- unless you think of hard rock as adventurous, which I guess you could!
Since forever, I’ve always loved performing. When I was a child I wanted to stand up in my pushchair and sing and talk to the people that passed by. That was really welcomed and encouraged. So I came into music from a storytelling and performance angle. I was writing little plays and songs for the point of performing it. Music has almost always been a way of communication. A lot of people talk about music like, “I do it for myself”. And yes, I do do it for myself, because I love it. I’ve always thought of it as a medium for communication rather than something that I wanted to keep to myself in my room.
From my family I got the value in performing and communicating. My grandma was the only one in my family who was really interested in culture. She noticed this in me and was quite excited by the thought. She used to take me to the theatre, and to musicals, and was really encouraging that part. She saw that I had a knack for it and enjoyed it, so she signed me up for an audition for Mary Poppins at the Gothenburg Opera House. She didn’t tell my parents and just drove me off, saying, “Oh, we’re just going to play in the park.” Then one day, after a few of these auditions, my parents got a letter saying, “Congratulations, your daughter is going to play the role of Jane Banks.” That meant I didn’t go to school for about a year. I was about nine then, and suddenly working as part of this production was completely life-changing for me. It felt like something switched in my brain, where performing went from the thing I loved the most to the only thing I could possibly imagine myself doing. Since then, performing and communicating with people through music has been the one thing that I’ve wanted to do in life.
Genre-wise, it started out very broadly, with my dad listening to heavy metal, to my mom putting on pop classics on the radio, to listening to all sorts of songwriting and discovering that with friends. In Sweden, there’s also a huge folk music culture. In the whole of Scandinavia the folk tradition is still very present, in a way that I think is quite rare in western countries. It’s precious to have that strong connection to your roots. That was always there in a way, from my mom singing folk songs to me to help me fall asleep. As soon as I started studying music, a huge part of that education was folk music.
I did the musical when I was nine and ten, and at the age of eleven or twelve I started studying music at school. Folk music really entered my life then, and I became excited about the sound of it: the deeply earthy, melancholic, pure, melodic sound of Swedish folk music. So throughout my teenage years it was still very much a combination of these different genres. I studied classical singing for a while, and I played piano and guitar, and there were even a couple of years where I played double bass and percussion. That was always because I couldn’t choose; everything seemed as exciting to me.
I finished the Swedish equivalent of A-levels, and then I went to a school that is specific to the northern countries. We have this stage in-between university, where you go away to a little village in the countryside, live there, and study music 24/7. You don’t have any grades, so it’s very much self-exploratory. You’re just there, playing with people, discovering what you love. I really did find what I wanted to do, which is amazing. This whole time, the one constant had been the writing. I’d always been writing music, and that felt like the one thing that I was good at. Throughout my teenage years I didn’t think that much of my voice. So when I went to the folkhögskola I studied composition because that felt like the thing for me. I spent two years in a beautiful town called Falun, which is the heart of folk music in that area.
I really fell in love with the sound of jazz, because there was a jazz course at that school as well. Actually, more than the sound of jazz it was the feeling of improvising. I’d been improvising while playing folk music as well, but it felt different. I was intrigued by the sonority of it, and the colors. After studying composition, I fell in love with jazz -- as well as a jazz guitarist, which made it easier. There was a gateway to it. Then it became obvious to me that my next step would be to study jazz. I’ve always been a huge nerd, so music theory has always been exciting to me. Although there is obviously a theory aspect to folk music, it’s not as heavily rooted in a theoretical base. With jazz, you can discover so much about the genre from just studying theory. To some extent you need it. So it made sense to study jazz and theory, and that led me to London.
ET: You mentioned that you improvised before getting involved with jazz. How was it different?
RE: When you play folk music, you very often use specific formats. You play over a tune, and it’s AABA or whatever, which is similar to a lot of jazz standards. Bringing an open mind and improvisation into that format comes very naturally. You can play around with it, put in ornaments, make it your own. That is a type of improvisation.
There’s also, in traditional Swedish singing, something called kulning, or herding calls. You’re using a specific singing technique: it’s very loud, it’s high-pitched, and it carries over lakes and mountains. I studied that for a couple of years. As part of that tradition, you’re playing around with different tonalities and you have different modes. It’s called vallåtsmodus. You’re improvising on different modes, and you can use quarter tones, switch around major and minor thirds…
When I was exploring that type of singing I did a lot of improvising. It could be over a drone, or solo, or as a segment in a tune. I remember the very first jazz standard that I ever improvised on. I’d come along to a jam session, and I’d brought my mic. I was really keen to join in. At some point I went up and asked to sing a song. They said, “We were just about to play ‘Girl from Ipanema’, do you know it?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure”. I know her! We go way back. So they started playing, and I didn’t know the tune at all. In my head I knew how to improvise, you know? So I started herding calling over ‘Girl from Ipanema’, which I’m so happy is not on any recording anywhere.
ET: I would love to hear that.
RE: I hope not! It sure made some sort of impression; they were looking at me like, “What just happened?” But it was a way in. It gave me confidence, feeling like this is something that isn’t completely foreign to me, even though the harmonic progressions and the language of jazz were completely foreign at that time. But I didn’t feel afraid of it. Improvising over standards and soloing in a jazz context can be quite intimidating, which I sort of discovered later after I got used to it and learned more about the framework of a jam session, the different rules. There were points where it felt intimidating before I got my head around it, but initially it was just an exploration -- it was playful -- and it felt like something that was already familiar to me because I’d improvised in that more open, freer space.
ET: You improvise with different vocal techniques -- birdsong, whale sounds, etc. Where did that influence come in?
RE: Those sounds have been part of my color palette for quite a long time, but I didn’t see it as a musical tool. It was just various sounds that I enjoyed making. It could be just that growing up close to forests and spending lots of time walking in nature, it was more of a party trick to whistle to the birds and try to copy what they were doing. It was a fun way of exploring my voice. In folk music, those sounds work quite well. Folk music sounds like it’s coming from nature, so mimicking sounds that were also from nature made sense. It wasn’t until I moved to London that I made that connection and it became part of my music-making. The sounds have been there for quite a long time and just came straight from the source.
Moving to London was so exciting, because I started to understand and explore freely improvised music and what that meant to me. Listening to other vocalists was really eye-opening. The person who has influenced me a lot the past few years is Lauren Kinsella. It was funny -- I didn’t have any lessons with her the first couple years I was studying, and I didn’t know who she was at all, and people kept saying to me, “You sound like Lauren”, and asking me if I studied with her. Clearly I had to find out who she was, so I started listening to her and felt this instant connection with her music. I was lucky enough to have lessons with her at Trinity [Laban Conservatoire], which was completely life-changing. Finding all of these different quirky sounds that we can make with our voice, and to be able to control it and use it in the same way as you use a lydian augmented scale over a chord -- I can use this vocal fry,
over a tune. It became tools, rather than just funny sounds.
I studied with Lauren and Brigitte Beraha, both incredible vocalists, learning to use different sonorities and open sounds in my voice. Lauren recommended that I check out Lauren Newton, who is an incredible vocalist and improviser and has been kind of pioneering the free voice. I’ve never met her or seen her live, but I tried to look at every single thing on the internet that I could find. That was really inspiring as well.
The way that music was taught to me when I was little, music meant something that was beautiful, something pleasant. So it felt almost like a relief, like this whole new room that opened within me, to realize that music doesn’t have to be ‘beautiful’. It can be thought-provoking, or it can be anything. In the same way as when you’re watching a movie, you might at some point feel like you want to cry. You might feel worried, sad, stressed. You might feel afraid, or heartbroken. And in most movies, at the end, you end up feeling like you’ve been through something memorable -- if it’s a good movie. It was an important and exciting revelation that music could be more than just beautiful sounds. We have so many quirky, ugly, provocative sounds that we can make with our voices. I think that so much in society is beauty-focused -- not just sonically, but in everything that we do and everything that we are. We are peppered with these ideas that things need to be good looking. It’s so ingrained in us. To just allow ourselves to be ugly and gritty is such a relief. And using that in music made the beautiful moments more beautiful. They stick out, and the meaning of ‘beautiful’ changes. It makes beautiful into a different thing.
ET: That leads me into a couple of things. It used to be that vocal free improvisation tended to make me uncomfortable. I’ve been steeped in weird instrumental music for a long time, but it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve made a conscious effort to expose myself to more vocal improvisation. Before, I would hear and see it and there would be a visceral reaction in my brain saying that this is not something I am comfortable watching. It’s only as I’ve exposed myself to more of it, as happens, that I’ve become more accustomed to it. As someone who grew up singing and improvising, is that something that you relate to?
RE: Ah, this is so interesting. I’m seeing this rabbit hole that we could go into.
ET: Let’s do it!
RE: I think a lot of people can relate to that, simply because most people can relate to having a voice. Most people can’t relate to playing the euphonium.
ET: I can, actually. I played the euphonium for years.
RE: I love the euphonium. Did you really?
ET: I did, in middle school.
RE: I don’t even know why I took that as an example -- I mean, most people can’t relate to playing trumpet, let alone euphonium. I can’t believe you happened to be one of the zero point zero percent of the population that can.
Anyway, rewind. Most people can relate to having a voice. Most people can’t relate to playing trumpet, or saxophone, or even piano. So watching someone perform and improvise on an instrument that you have no relationship to whatsoever, even if you play music and improvise yourself, is always going to be less intimate than watching someone perform with their voice. This might be my subjective view, but I do believe it quite strongly. When you learn how to play, let’s say, guitar, you start from zero. It’s a completely new experience. When you start singing, you’ve had years and years of practice before you started to consider it as singing practice. But you’ve practiced being a vocalist since you came into this world -- for many people that’s the first thing that they do. So everything that we’ve done up until that point matters. Our language matters. Our social contexts matter. Our social connections matter. Our accent matters. And the way that we were taught how to speak! If you had parents that wanted you to be very quiet, and you had to be calm and not raise your voice, that’s going to have an impact on how you sound. Same as if you were in a household that was really loud where you were allowed to scream and raise your voice. So when we start to learn to sing, it comes with this heavy load of history.
When we hear someone singing or improvising vocally, we not only hear what they’re doing in that very moment -- we get a glimpse into who they’ve been and what they’ve done since they were born. When you start really looking into your vocal functions, that, to me, is mind-blowing. Learning how to sing is not necessarily about learning how to use your voice. It’s about learning to control your voice, and to be aware of what you already know and are used to.
For many people, when you get deep into your larynx and start exploring the functions of your voice, you start realizing not only what you can’t do but what you already can do. That can be connected to the history of your life. If someone’s been through a trauma, for example, that often affects their voice. It could be a tension in their body, and that’s going to change the way that your larynx is moving. It’s an extremely intimate part of our body and everyday life. So watching someone expose themself by using their voice in a free way -- especially through a free improvisation -- it has to be an intimate, and sometimes overwhelming, experience. I think because our voices bridge the gap between what’s absolutely, only our own -- our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, the building blocks of who you are -- and the way that we are perceived. There’s body language and facial expression in that as well, but the voice plays an essential part in that translation between what’s inside and what comes out.
For me, when I’m improvising with my voice -- and especially when it’s free improvisation -- that inner part of me is moving and almost completely morphing into what I appear to be. And my voice is just in the center of that. So rather than it being two different sides, inside and outside, what I’m aiming to do is make that into the same. Often if I’m watching back a recording and I can see myself improvising, it can surprise and almost fascinate me, because I have no awareness whatsoever of what I look like. Because as soon as I start thinking about that, door’s closed. That sort of brings us onto something else, and maybe we can talk about that later.
I think that was the very long answer to your question, which is that yes, it is and should be intimate, and perhaps even overwhelming, if you truly understand the meaning of vocal improvisation. So actually, I think that you saying it made you uncomfortable says a lot of good things. Whether that was conscious or not, you could feel that there was an exposure and an intimate experience that was going on. That can be pretty scary.
ET: What you’re saying reminds me of how people say that the saxophone is the closest instrument to the human voice. It gives you so much range of expression in an almost vocal manner. You can scream through the saxophone; you can get these breathy, airy sounds out of it.
RE: Absolutely. It’s definitely the closest you can get. I mean, all horns are an extension of your voice, in that you’re passing through the vocal tract. I’m doing some teaching at Trinity, and I did this exercise with some of the students where we have a fragment of lyrics. For the horn players, the exercise was to play the lyrics as if they were saying it, using the same rhythmic structure that they would if they were singing it. So let’s say, “It’s you or no one for me / I’m sure of this each time we kiss”. We used that bit, and they can improvise a melody that goes with that line. Actual words aren’t coming out, but they’re using the words to create a melody. As a listener, especially one who knows the words, hearing
and knowing that that’s what they’re using hits a certain spot for me. It feels like they’re improvising as a vocalist because they’re using the words as their grid, as their framework. It just proves that the closer you get to your voice, the more intimate it feels, and perhaps that there’s more of an emotional load.
ET: Advice I’ve heard from multiple jazz teachers is that even as an instrumentalist, one of the first things you should do when learning a tune is to learn the lyrics. It’s going to help you shape the way that you interpret that melody, and give it a more singable, natural quality.
RE: Absolutely, and you can tell if an instrumentalist knows the words.
ET: You talked about getting to that point where you realized that music doesn’t have to be beautiful, that it can be difficult and ugly. From Derek Bailey, other improvisers of that generation, and a lot of twentieth-century classical artists, there was this push away from making music for an audience and toward doing it to stretch their limits and see what was possible. This sounded to me like what you were getting into, but you also mentioned earlier that the big thing that drives you toward music is performing and having that audience. How do you reconcile those positions?
RE: You’re sort of coming into the center of what it is that I’m hoping to do. A lot of free improvisation feels like a way to challenge the listener, and of course there is an audience for that, and not everyone feels driven away by it. But if we’re talking about a wider audience, it’s a niche genre. My ambition is to bring that challenging element of it into a context where people can relate to and be intrigued by it without being pushed away. First of all, the voice is such a useful tool in that because of all the reasons we’ve said. It’s relatable. And I think for most people, watching someone perform with their voice, rather than watching someone playing an instrument, is already more accessible. So that’s number one. Singing is a good way of getting into it.
Second of all is using lyrics, using words, because it gives the listener something to hold on to that definitely means something to them. If I say ‘salmon’, for most people that will mean something. If I say,
that will probably mean something, but it will be less concrete. So to use,
that is suddenly a whole thing. And if I were to just say,
and do that for ten minutes, a lot of people would lose interest because it would be completely gibberish. It wouldn’t mean anything to them. But if I talked about the salmon, and the trees, and the foil, and how we wrap the foil around the trees to let the salmon fall through the breeze, suddenly there are words that mean something. Because people love storytelling. That’s how we’ve entertained ourselves throughout history. People have always looked for stories, and our main tool in storytelling has always been words, whether that’s in a song, or a play, or a movie, a podcast. We love words. We love listening to words, and tasting words, trying them out and envisioning them. So let’s say that’s number two: using words.
Number three is audience interaction, to just be present in the space. This is something that I’ve always been so excited about exploring: just looking at someone and not being afraid of that eye contact, of having openness and sharing. Coming back to what we were talking about before about it being a way of communicating, I think a lot of freely improvised music, free jazz, or challenging contemporary classical music tends to be quite introverted. It tends to be eyes closed. Maybe you’re even turned away from the audience, into the bandstand. It’s quite a compact, exclusive experience. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing. I think for a lot of people it’s almost an important part of that genre. It sets the scene, and makes it feel quite serious and intellectual. But I’ve never been as drawn to that side of it as I’ve been to the open, welcoming, and communicative side of it.
You came to the Once a Fig gig. I don’t know if you’d agree with me, but when I perform it’s something that I definitely try to do. I try to look at the audience, and speak to the audience, make friends with them. I find that when you make that connection, people are more interested to stick around and hear me out. And then I can include all the strange sounds, weird gestures, and strange facial expressions, because they’re like, “Oh, but she’s trying to speak to me. It’s not just that they’re doing their own thing that I don’t understand.”
ET: That is something I found compelling in your performance. I’m interested in that intersection between songwriting and improvising, and you’ve mentioned storytelling a couple times. As you said, when you perform you integrate all these different things. You’re singing a song and telling a story, but you also accompany it with the gestures and use sounds to enhance the story. Have you seen other storytellers or songwriters who take that approach?
RE: I think so. No, definitely. A lot of songwriters put a lot of emphasis and weight into the story. To tell a story in a good way, you need a bit of that. It’s almost hard to imagine someone telling a story in an enchanting, spellbinding way without using facial expression, eyes, or any sort of gestures. I think you need that. I’m imagining someone being a motionless body, with just a voice. No, I think you need that.
There are some incredible Swedish folk singers that I’ve always admired, and in storytelling they use a lot of the presence and the motion, as well as really taking care of the story, articulation, and singing aspects of it. I’ve never seen her live, but Joni Mitchell is one of the greatest storytellers and songwriters that’s ever walked this earth. I didn’t actually get into her music until fairly recently. It’s almost like she’s been this treasure chest that I’ve been waiting to open, because I think I always knew that when I got into her I was going to have to spend every single day of a very long time getting into her music. I was sort of treading the edge because I knew I needed to give it proper space and time. So it wasn’t until maybe two years ago when I really started to listen to her music, and that’s affected my writing a lot. She’s always been there, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. Studying folk music there was so much I wanted to explore, and starting to study jazz at Trinity… I needed to prioritize certain genres.
But it’s funny, talking about this made me think that I haven’t actually listened to that many songwriters who are communicating with the audience and also improvising freely with all of these strange sounds. I mean, Lauren Kinsella is obviously one of them. She can sing a song beautifully. I’d love to see more of that.
ET: Staying on the theme of storytelling, I was listening to your album with Oknytt.
RE: It means a sort of feisty forest creature in Swedish and Nordic folklore.
ET: In the notes of that record, you wrote: “Wonders of the big world from the perspective of the seemingly small individuals in it.” You go on to list several of those small characters. What draws you to these smaller focuses?
RE: I love that you’ve written that down. That was my way of trying to encapsulate what those songs are about. For the same reason as I am so drawn to these small, quirky, odd, and perhaps undiscovered little sounds, for the same reason I find the little, unseen, undiscovered corners, the nooks and crannies of our lives, so fascinating. At the same time, a lot of what I’m writing about is on bigger subjects. I might be writing about climate crisis, but I’m doing it from the perspective of a porpoise. One little, specific porpoise that is lost in the ocean and gets caught by a fishing trawler. It’s partly because it excites me and feels precious to me in the same way that these sounds do. But also because it gives a sort of uniqueness to the songs themselves, and it almost makes it easier to write given the nicheness of the subject. I’m sure that someone who studied medieval history can relate to that. If you’re doing something that’s niche and fairly original, you stick out, in a good way. I think especially as an artist in this day and age, when it’s so easy to release music and exist on an online platform, you need to find your own way of doing that in a way that feels valuable. For me to write these stories, it keeps me excited, and I hope that someone out there will be excited as well.
With that said, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with writing a story about something that’s more conventional or has been written about before. I think it’s just for my own excitement. I like to find something that’s new, and a bit odd. In the same way that I dress, and the way I speak, it just excites me.
ET: You describe Oknytt as “Nordic forest jazz”, right?
RE: Yeah, sort of forest-y folk jazz is the way I’ve described it. It’s interesting to talk about that project now, because it feels like me maybe five years ago. I’m so happy that I released that music because it captures where I was then. I guess I released it in 2022, so it was only a couple years ago. I think it’s exciting to feel how much my writing and my vocal ventures have evolved since then. I still love to talk about it because it’s such a huge part of where I was then and where I’m coming from.
That’s a band with three Swedish musicians, and I think one reason why I wanted to work with them is that they are all fluent in the languages of both jazz and Scandinavian folk music. They’re all dear friends to me. It was my first band that I put together with my own music. We started in 2019, and I’d written almost all of the songs already. So you can see how they feel quite far away now, from before I’d started studying jazz and before I’d started exploring freely improvised stuff. But you can still hear some free improvisation on that record, so I’d already started that exploration.
It’s a band that I love to play with. We still do some gigs here and there but we’re all very spread out. The drummer is from the very north of Sweden, the bassist is in Stockholm, the guitarist is in Barcelona, and I’m in London. They’re still some of my closest friends, and I love to play with them and do it now and then. And hopefully in the future I might write some more music for that project. I feel like that album may be slightly behind where I am now.
At the moment I’m writing music for a new album that will be released under my name. That album, even though it was all my music, it was released under the band’s name. At that point I didn’t feel ready to have something out under my own name, but now I feel like I am. I’m going to record my first album in my own name in May, and I’m very excited about that. It will be with some musicians that I’ve played with recently, and some music that is more singer-songwriter-y, plus free improvisation. That’s where my mind is at the moment. It’s with Laura Jurd on trumpet, Elliot Galvin on piano, and three folk musicians who are very dear to me: Cori [Smith] and Phoebe [Harty] from Once a Fig, and a fiddle player called Owen Spafford, and a bass clarinetist called Alex Lyon. And the same drummer [Isidor Abdelkader] from Oknytt, he’s coming over to play some stuff on it. Plus a bassist who’s yet to be confirmed -- I have my fingers crossed for someone, but I’m not gonna speak too soon.
ET: I’m not the first to observe this but, jazz has this way of infiltrating and absorbing all other genres. Have you found that jazz and Swedish folk naturally blend together?
RE: Yes, in every single way. You might not be the first one to have made that observation, but it is a very good observation, and it’s very true. I think it’s an observation that is worth making over and over again. Jazz is such a colorful language: it encapsulates so many different sounds and has this sort of open-endedness to it. It’s always felt so natural to me to invite the Nordic sonorities into that. It has been done before. Ever since jazz made its way up into Sweden, Swedish and Nordic musicians have always made that crossover. One of the best-selling Swedish records, Jazz på svenska, is doing exactly that. The title means “Jazz in Swedish”. It’s a pianist called Jan Johansson and a bassist called Georg Riedel. I recommend it. It brings this deeply-rooted, misty, melancholic, mossy, sunlight-through-pine-needle-ceiling sound into the colorful, explorative aspects of jazz. I think it just goes hand-in-hand.
I feel quite excited about it being part of the history of me, and my family, and where I’m from. It feels important to bring that further, and to not lose that. In the same way as it’s important to nourish different accents and traditions without it being in a stagnant and conservative way. We can take out the best, most quirky, and original details of ourselves, of our bodies, of our voices, of our surroundings, of our history, of our traditions, and we can take that with us into our music.
ET: You said that you grew up in Gothenburg?
RE: I grew up on the outskirts of Gothenburg. I feel very grateful and fortunate to have spent my childhood and most of my teenage years in a house with my family, very close to the sea with green surroundings. It was the outskirts of Sweden’s second-largest town, but it’s still so integrated with nature. I suppose the English people would probably call it a forest. I can’t really say that, because a forest, for a Swedish person, means a large area of trees. But there were bits of wood around, and it was a two-minute walk down to the sea. I think having that connection to nature from a very young age has had an impact on me, and probably always will. It was the best of both worlds, in a way, to have the sea and the nature and also be in a city where I could study music from a young age, and go to the theatre and see musicals.
ET: You sort of anticipated my next question. Growing up in nature and getting those sonic influences explains a lot of where your knack for birdsong and other nature sounds come from. You’ve been in London for five years now, right?
RE: Yes, five years. Wow, it’s kind of a long time! It feels crazy to say that.
ET: How have you found that the soundscape is different here? Do you think that that difference has influenced the sounds that you make and the way that you improvise?
RE: Oh, it’s so interesting. Definitely influenced it, yeah. When I improvise, whether that is as a part of a song or completely free, I always have this vivid, clear landscape in my mind. Either it’s already set up because of what the song is about; or it’s something that is being created in my mind because of my state of being at the time, or the place that I’m in, or what the musicians around me are playing, or how I got to the venue, or what emotional response I am getting from the audience. Whatever the reason might be, there’s always this very vivid landscape in my mind. Living in London for five years has definitely given that landscape so many more shapes, colors, and sounds. Before I moved here I would never have been able to envision myself on the underground, on a train traveling through this vast city. Those sounds were not part of my palette.
I’ve recently been really diving into Joni Mitchell, and in the same way that that’s affected my sound, I spent five years on the DLR going back and forth into the city. Also having spoken English every single day for five years has given me new sounds and new ways of using my lips, tongue, and cheeks. Just ‘cause it’s a different language. Having friends that are from the north of England has also given me their accents and their sounds, trying to copy that and make it part of my tools. Having Laura Kinsella as a teacher, she’s from [Rebecka switches into an Irish accent] Ireland. Being able to speak in a slightly more Irish accent -- I’m not saying I’m particularly good, but I can try -- I think having that experience of different accents and different people around me has shaped the way I speak. [Reverts back to normal] I’m not saying I’m particularly good at accents, but different sounds can influence, and suddenly I can hear myself saying [aur] instead of [ah] in an improvisation just because it’s in the sound language. Slightly different shades.
ET: Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?
RE: I guess one thing we could get into -- and this is a whole nother thing that could take days to dissect -- is the very specific mindset that I’ve practiced getting into when I improvise. I’d love to talk to other vocalists about this, because I’m sure that everyone has their own version. When improvising with words, I find that if I start overthinking, or analyzing or putting judgement into what I’m doing, it completely blocks it for me. It was an interesting change when I came to the UK. Before then I had used words to improvise freely, but in Swedish, so it took a little while to unlock that part of my brain in English. It felt like, especially in the first year-and-a-half of living here, I was still like, “I want to get it right. I want the pronunciation and the grammar to be right.” That’s not important in freely improvised music, but it still felt like a blockage in my mind.
Five years later, I’m still looking at you being like, “Is this the right word?” I’m still doubting myself now and then, but I’ve been able to set that aside when I’m improvising. And if I end up pronouncing a word wrong, I just make use of that. Let’s say I said an ‘S’ sound instead of a ‘Z’ sound. I can be like, “Okay, let’s head in that direction and make a point out of that.”
I can use that sound and make it into the feature of that moment, rather than going, “Oh shit, I made a mistake.”
I find it very interesting to talk to other improvisers about this inner visual space that I've explored and sat with for a long time. It’s almost like meditation, like a truly mind-opening experience for me. I can understand things and realize things about myself and where I am on that day by just improvising freely for a few minutes. ‘Cause things come out that I haven’t even been aware of. Things that might worry me or have been on my mind unconsciously just come out when I enter that space.
This really is a rabbit hole, so I’m going to have to stop myself. But it’s something that feels very similar to a stream of consciousness; that’s what it is to me. To be able to vocalize a stream of consciousness in front of an audience together with other people is one of the most liberating experiences that I’ve had in my life. Which is why it’s so exciting to me.
ET: This might not be something that you want to think about, but: do you find, when you’re performing in that stream-of-consciousness state, that there are certain things that can snap you out of it? Certain things that cause you to suddenly become self-conscious?
RE: It’s a valid question, and the answer is absolutely. It can be anything, like something that actually happens in the room. Let’s say I spot someone in the audience that I didn’t expect to be there. Literally anything that brings me back into self-consciousness. Maybe I look at one of the band members, and think, “Are they enjoying it? Am I taking up too much space?” Or I suddenly remember something that I said in a conversation that was a bit awkward or that I feel embarrassed about. Literally anything that enters my mind can shake that space that I’m in.
But it’s happened enough times for me to know what to do when it happens. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that it never really works to try to ignore it, but rather to embrace it. Like, “Okay, this person is in the audience. I didn’t expect that. It makes me self-conscious, and perhaps nervous, and keen for it to be good.” Instead of trying to ignore that they are there, being like, “That person is in my head now. What does that mean? What can come out of that? In what way can I include this person in the space that I’ve created, without it being obvious to anyone else?” Rather than trying to erase it, trying to distill it and filter it so that it can come out.
Further listening, from Rebecka:
Here are "some incredible Swedish folk singers that I’ve always admired":
Contemporary kulning queen and folk empress.
[7:45-13:30]
This is a great example of "vallåtsmodus", it's a medley of "vallvisor". Vallvisor is the songs that were sung on the "fäbod" (the farm/pastures), mostly written and sung by the women (since they were the ones working on the fäbod).
Here are some more examples of the Swedish herding calls:
Karin Edvardsson Johansson - ‘Kulning III’
(This is the first bit of kulning I ever transcribed and is on THE kulning album)
Lena Willemark - ‘Sväs Märtas kulning/Fårlock’
Ulrika Bodén & Sofia Sandén - ‘Kulning morgon’, ‘Kulning kväll’
Rebecka Edlund is performing on 6th February at CLF Art Lounge with Testaments, 22nd February at Pizza Express Jazz Club with Kalpadruma, and 1st March at Green Note with Once a Fig.
Great interview. Love the audio clips!