Hej Marika Hackman!

Brittiska Marika Hackman beskriver själv sin musik som grungy abstrakt folk med ett lekfullt mörker.På fredag spelar hon på Pustervikoch Djungeltrumman hörde av sig för att snacka väsentligheter i form av musik, politik och feminism.

2014-10-09 15:16 2014-10-09 15:16
Publicerad Senast uppdaterad

Tell me a little bit about your debut album We slept at last!

– Where to start… it's a collection of 12 new songs, ten of which were written in spring this year. I worked on them in the studio with Charlie Andrew, who I’ve made three previous Ep:s with, so it felt like a continuation of a process which we have been refining over the last year or so.

And it is a lot of genres?

– The album covers a range of genres, theres a few grungey tracks, and some which are completely stripped back to just vocal and acoustic guitar. The songs felt more honest and more mature to me, so I didn’t want to throw too much at them in terms of production, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. I can’t wait for people to hear it, I’m intrigued to see what the reaction is…

What happens to your music when you play live?

– It depends on if i’m playing solo or not. If i’ve got my band with me then the songs stay quite true to the recorded versions, although we still like to play around with them a bit. When I play solo I’m playing the songs exactly how they were when I wrote them, before i took them into the studio. I enjoy playing them like that as it feels very raw, and much more intimate with the audience. Playing with a band is a lot of fun though.

I've heard that you like stories like The Yellow Wallpaper and like to quote feminist stories, would you say that your music is political?

– I don’t think it's consciously political. My songs are just a release for whatever anxieties are going on in my mind. Sometimes that relates to my attitudes towards society and wherever it is we’re headed – cinnamon, for instance, is about people just plugging in and turning off, following the crowd and not thinking for themselves… and cannibal is dealing with our relentless greed and consumeristic ways.. cutting off your nose so you can eat it being a very dramatic and gory example.

What is the most important political issue to you?

– I’m not particularly politically minded, but I have been asked a lot recently about how women are perceived in the music industry. I feel like the industry wants to keep women as girls who sing pretty songs, or sex objects who shake their asses and call it female empowerment.

What is your own eperience of that, have people tried to put a label on you? – I was very quickly pigeonholed as being ‘twee-folk’ which is something I would never in a million years describe myself as. I don’t think I would’ve been labelled as such if i was a man. I feel that in the creative world a man will be described as ‘tortured, inspired and a genius’ whereas the adjectives used for women tend to be more along the lines of ‘mad, desperate or fragile’. Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation and I’m only scratching the surface of this subject but I do find it fascinating.

What line or lyric of your own are you most proud of?

– "Coughing up a love that tastes like spring, green and starved of oxygen". It's a lyric from a song from We Slept at Last, called Let me in.

Hanna Rasmuson

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