Words by Jim Ottewill

As a freewheeling musician, composer and experimental music maker, Norwegian artist Anja Lauvdal has pushed against the confines of conventional styles and genres for most of the past decade.

Many of these endeavours have been through collaborations and performances with others as a pianist and synth-wrangler. But her debut solo album, From a Story Now Lost, a collection of fluttering ambient instrumentals, puts Anja front and centre of her musical story. 

“It wasn’t something I always wanted to make,” Anja says of her debut record. “I’ve always loved playing with other people and collaborating as I am a very social person and that’s my relationship with my music. But I suddenly felt dragged in different directions - this release was a way of gathering my thoughts together.”

Anja has scooped up these ideas and then sprinkled them liberally over ten tracks produced in close kinetic collaboration with American Laurel Halo. Released on Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, the record is full of jittery emotion and abstract evocative moods, hinging around Anja’s love for improvisation.

“There is a big improvised scene here which I really love,” she says. “It’s a very open, yet close-knit community. We are a small country but I think people bring a lot of themselves to improvisation. This scene is very alive and something I’m proud to be a part of.”

Anja’s music is certainly rooted in a sense of place and attuned to what goes on in the world around her. Brought up in Norway, her music-making mission initially sparked into life via her father.

“I come from a musical family and listened to a lot of records initially through my parents and friends,” she states. “I started playing the piano very early on. I really wanted to play like my father as he could play by ear and had mastered an array of different songs.”

Anja is from Flekkefjord which coincidentally is also where Joakim Haugland, the brains behind Smalltown Supersound is also from. Such proximity led to Anja being exposed to many of the electronic music, jazz and eclectic musical releases the label was known for during the nineties and early 2000s. Anja’s collaboration with Norwegian drummer Joakim Heibø, All My Clothes, was released on the label in April 2022 and described as more than 40 minutes of ‘spontaneous compositions and melancholic ecstasy’. This new partnership with the imprint, underlined by ‘From a Story Now Lost’, also being released by them, is Anja’s musical pathway coming full circle.

“Since Joakim was from our town, me and my brother knew about his music and we listened to those free jazz records he released,” Anja remembers. “Although we didn’t understand what was going on with them, we did know they were very different. Those were some of my key, early inspirations.”

Anja subsequently moved away to music school where she met a classical piano teacher who was keener on her improvising rather than dabbling in traditional forms. Another important influence was Heida Mobeck, a tuba player and collaborator who spurred her on to uncover new ways of working and opened up her creative process to greater innovation.

“I’ve always been excited by exploring my creative voice in different musical settings, trying to let curiosity lead and improvise as much as I can,” Anja states. “More and more, I’ve tried to focus on this, to appreciate it and how, by being in a state of freely improvising, I can use it as a way of composing.” 

Anja’s credits and collaborations have led her to perform with and enhance music by a wild array of artists, bands and ensembles. As a pianist and electronic musician, she’s played as part of more than 10 groups, including Your Headlights Are On and Spacemusic Ensemble as well as working alongside Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval both in the studio and on the stage. Unafraid of exploring fringe sonics and untapped sounds, her first album From a Story Now Lost marks a bold transition for Anja.

“I felt like I needed to do something new and look at my music in a different light,” she says of the album’s origins. “It just so happened to come at the same time as the pandemic but I found playing without an audience definitely weird, to begin with.”

As an improvisational musician, Anja has spent many years performing in an open collaborative space, responding to the room and the energy of other players and onlookers. Moving into solo territory marked a sea change in her process.

“I’ve always worked with the audience as collaborators on my music,” she explains. “With this album, it felt necessary to not be aware of anything, just go into the flow from a different location. I wanted to avoid speaking with anyone and discover what happens when you just speak aloud in a room to yourself.”

The record came together bit by bit with Anja initially recording hours of various instruments using her collection of synths and pianos. She would intersperse these melodies with a variety of samples to establish different moods and forms, then share with her human springboard, producer Laurel Halo.

“We would talk about the process and sound,” she recalls of their collaboration. “Then she asked me if I had ever improvised with my own improvisations. It was a real eye-opener for me and made everything shift in a new direction."

Samples and synths have always been a passion for Anja, an extension of her experiments which came naturally to her from playing the piano. She would compose from the sonic connections she forged with these tools. 

“I’ve always sampled from other sources,” she states. “By changing how I work to pull my own sounds apart, it suddenly became one of my main ways of working. Then it became much more personal to me. It was very cool as it made me look at my music with more focus, to unpick what was right in front of me.”

The back and forth between Anja and Laurel Halo lies at the foundation of the record and on paper and on record sounds like a fitting collaboration. Both operate in hazy, genre-splicing aural worlds veering from the ambient to more jarring electronics. The pair met via Smalltown Supersound with a creative synergy subsequently flaring between them.

“It was a really cool connection,” Anja says. “I had been listening to her music a little, and been working mainly inside freeform and improvised worlds and acoustic music. She comes from a different musical place in a way but it was so easy to connect with her. The process of making this album was super rewarding.”

As Anja says, the pair pushed each other into new and “interesting dimensions”, with Laurel adding counter melodies and harmonies to the ideas. This helped flesh them out into warm-blooded musical creatures.  

“‘Fantasie for Agathe Backer Grøndahl’ was one of the most surprising tracks,” Anja explains. “I had a 12-second part that I put into a sequencer, then improvised again on that. That structure and the way it sounds fragmented is really interesting to me.”

The track takes its name from the 19th-century composer with a frayed sound supposedly reminiscent of the way Agathe’s music has been passed down through the ages. ‘Clara’, another song from the album, is inspired by German composer Clara Schumann. 

“I was reading a lot about these super-talented women working in music,” says Anja. “When Clara went on tour she would take her piano and go on a horse and carriage, she would have a piano tech with her who put it together for every show. For me, the mood of the whole album is indelibly connected to these overlooked composers.” From piecing the record together, Anja believes that one of the most important processes she’s learned about her way of working is to be as present as possible. Adopting this mindset enables her to compose in the moment.

“It’s been very rewarding this past year to live and breathe inside a musical flow, to trust myself and the creative process,” she advises. “You’re not necessarily somewhere you’ve been before and that forces you to react in a different way. I found it a super satisfying way of composing.”

‘From a Story Now Lost’ is out now on Smalltown Supersound.