Nev Lilit interview: “It has been a dream for a long time to make a whole album”
Get Hyper
Hyperit – that’s Swedish for a volcanic stone, or hypersthenite in English, if you didn’t know already – is the new album by Swedish electronic musician, composer and sound designer Siri Jennefelt aka Nev Lilit.
Blistering noise, sleek sound design, grinding industrial echoes and dubwise resonances inform the album, originally developed out of a performance lecture Jennefelt was part of alongside esteemed philosopher and Nobel Prize panellist Jonna Bornemark at in Stockholm.
Before each performance, Jennefelt would plant a lawn on stage, with dirt, sand, gravel, rocks, weeds and a body of water placed underneath. During the performance, Jennefelt would dig a hole in this lawn, delving progressively deeper and recording soundscapes in the process, with microphones attached to her tools of excavation.
Certainly not your usual album preparation! So, eager to knwo more, following her tour dates across the UK and southern Europe including shows alongside Eomac and Elvin Brandhi, we got Jennefelt to answer a few questions for Juno Daily…
Hi thanks for your time…. First of all, can you tell us where you are right now, and what kind of day you’re having… Been anywhere already or going anywhere interesting later?
Well I’m in Stockholm, packing and leaving for summertime in a few days. I’m going to Denmark, where I will be riding horses, a bike and hopefully swim a lot in the ocean.
If I weren’t away, I wouldn’t miss Norberg festival here in Sweden!
And tell us about your journey into the music you make today – what were the important steps?
What shaped me most musically was when I took my first course at EMS in Stockholm at the age of 19, and I found a freedom in EAM and experimental music creation. My years with my then band Saigon have also shaped me a lot. The fact that I have worked for the past ten years on creating music for performing arts has also shaped my way of making music, that the music I make often is created in relation to a text or a choreography.
Give us a quick precis of what you’ve released to date for the uninitiated…
Under my alias Nev Lilit I have released: ‘Donnie‘ (2017) and ‘Adorable Ruin’ (2018)
Both on the label Moloton.
Tell us about your specific music making environment… Does it have an effect on the music you make?
I have a small studio in a larger space outside of town. For me, that space is associated with a kind of concentration that I am grateful for. I don’t know if it affects the music I write, maybe there is something cave-like about it, something that can perhaps be heard in my music?
So, the album was developed out of a performance lecture you gave alongside an esteemed philosopher and Nobel Prize panellist in Stockholm… What first inspired you about it and how did that develop into a fully-fledged album?
Yes, exactly, I made the music for a lecture performance with the philosopher Jonna Bornemark. In her book “Jag är himmel och hav” (I am the heaven and the sea) which the performance was based on, I was inspired by Jonna’s thoughts about the boundaries of the body and how they dissolve during pregnancy, I brought those thoughts into the compositional work. How can you make music whose boundaries are open, mixed together, how can different sounds open up to each other? The music I made then was based on many recordings of sand, gravel and water. I then went back to those recordings and reshaped them, and from that material this record came to be.
What’s the story of the album’s evolution? What timeframe were they written over? What songs came first and what was last? Did you set out to write an album or did one form itself around certain songs?
It has been a dream for a long time to make a whole album.
The title track Hyperit is the oldest on the album and has been there for a very long time!
Then came a period, after I worked on the lecture performance, when I had time to focus, and then the other tracks came about, and the concept of the album as a whole. The track ‘Forever Apart’ is the youngest and was written at Palazzo Stabile in Piedmont, Italy, where I completed the album during a residency.
You’ve also used extensive field recordings – where did you source them?
Almost all of my field recordings come from the forest that is just around the corner from my studio.
What’s next for you in the short/medium/long term? What are you hearing that’s inspiring you? Any more live/DJ/release action we should know about?
The plan is to play live this fall. There will be a release gig in Stockholm and then hopefully some gigs in Europe. I’m listening to Caterina Barbieri’s album Myuthafoo a lot right now.