Words by Sammy Maine

I just moved into a new apartment, and I’m finding it hard to sleep. The other day, I found myself awake at 4am, again, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, wishing the dark skies of the in-between to stay just a little longer. Frustrated, I decide to get out of bed, throw on my coat and take a walk down to the local park. As the pavement descends, the first glimpses of the sun create a kind of light that mimics the jet-lagged state of fluorescent bulbs at a foreign airport. The air seems still, and no one else is awake: an interstice of existence. A dream state but not quite. For Norwegian duo Smerz, this is where the canvas of their creations begins to take shape – the in-between, the shifting of the not quite. 

Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt released their debut full-length album Believer last year. The merging of classical compositions, trance, R&B, pop and hip-hop form the structure of Smerz, or rather, the non-structure. There’s a fluidity to their output that mimics the fog of fragmentary memory when one thought leads to another and you find yourself thinking “how the hell did I get here?” But with Smerz, it’s not about the destination. It’s the seamless transition from one state to another, a journey through moods, textures and selves.

When we meet on Zoom, it’s around 10pm for them and 5pm for me. There’s bright light filtering through my kitchen window, while Stoltenberg, high-grade headphones atop her ears, sits in a dimly-lit studio lined with instruments. Motzfeldt appears in a sparse, high-ceiling room, with a warm lamp just behind her. Considering the transitory tendencies of Smerz’s compositions, it seems fitting to be meeting in different timezones, and different states of mind. 

They’ve just returned from a trip to America, performing Believer for the first time for US audiences, and although they admit their body clocks are still a little off, their eyes beam as they reflect on the experience. “It reminds us that the album is very much alive,” says Stoltenberg, with Motzfeldt adding, “playing it live has been such a continuation of that musical world, or like an expansion for us. I think of it like sonography, or that the atmosphere has now become a part of the album when I hear it.”

Finishing each other’s sentences is something that is distinctly noticeable throughout our chat, as Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt help each other with English translations and seem to form their ideas as a unit. It’s not that there isn’t room to breathe individually, it’s more that there’s a kind of telepathic bond that comes with discovering the world together. The songwriters originally met at high school in Oslo, noticing each other in class and running with the same crowd. It wasn’t until they attended music school in Copenhagen together, that they began to form the bond I’m witnessing today. Neither of them had made music before and were equally terrified of showing their own work. When the time came to compose, and with no experience playing the guitar or piano, their friends offered them a pirated version of Ableton: the first steps into the world of Smerz.

“We’ve always worked together so we've developed together,” says Motzfeldt. “A very important thing when you are collaborating with someone is to have the ability to make something that you're not sure of yourself. We just know each other's musical sides completely.” Stoltenberg agrees, pointing to their similar aesthetics and references: reading a lot of the same books and listening to a lot of the same music. “It is a common language,” she says. 

Motzfeldt’s parents sang in a touring choir when she was a child, and while she often wasn’t able to stay for the full rehearsals or performances, her curiosity allowed her to take part in the vocal warm-up sessions. “I remember that feeling of singing for the first time,” she says. “I felt very grown-up.” Later on in young adulthood, Motzfeldt trained with an opera singer who she says gave her the foundation to really propel her voice to new heights. “You can learn so much from their technique. Once you get the hang of that, you have the freedom to create whatever you want on top of it, it’s incredible.”

As a baby, Stoltenberg says she was a screamer. To calm her down, her mother – a ballet dancer – would often play soft classical music and move around the room, extending her arms and legs in such a mesmerising way, that Stoltenberg would eventually stop crying. Inspired by her mother and the serenity that came with her movements, Stoltenberg also began to dance ballet as she grew up. “You have this set of songs that you use for your warm-up where the movements and music are very intertwined – the movements really look like the music and the music really sounds like the movements,” she says. 

These early interactions with music, melody and movement permeate Smerz’s creative output. On Believer, the tender “Versace Strings” mimics the tiny toes of a tentative yet enthusiastic dancer: the soft strings an elongated arm, the staccato a series of twists and turns. The serene “4 temaer” seamlessly blends gentle classical piano with strange, erratic electronic flourishes that bloom to form the opening of the industrial, kaleidoscopic “Hester” – an aimless walk swiftly turning into an urgent run. If the past few years have amplified anything, it’s our need to connect to others, and when there isn’t an option for that, Believer reminds us of the selves within our bodies, and our ability to connect with them through continual, ever-changing curious movement.

In 2020, Smerz collaborated with choreographer Ole Martin Meland to create “Øy” – a performance of experimental music and contemporary dance. Martin’s work centres around the physical response to existential questions, and the peculiar physicality of Smerz’s soundscapes makes them the perfect partners for a piece such as this. Embracing inspirations from horror and romance, muscles and guitars, chamber music and posh culture, Smerz explain that the starting point in creating the soundtrack was almost identical to how they usually begin their process. 

“I feel like we had a very important breakthrough when we realised that it's very useful to be a bit brain dead the first, maybe five minutes, or it could also be the first hour to get something going,” Motzfeldt says. “You don't need to feel that inspired maybe.” She adds that this feeling of something being “a bit out of your hands,” can allow a burst of inspiration, rather than trying to make something perfect off the bat. Like her lessons with the opera singer, it’s about creating a foundation, a malleable canvas, so that surprises can arise. The pair worked in parallel with the dancers, setting up CDJs and playing with different genres to see how their bodies would react. “The emotional aspect of the music becomes so different with the dancers, you don't have control over that,” says Stoltenberg. “We wanted to avoid an emotion being too dominating or too exaggerated. It was a lot about pulling back without making it impersonal.”

When Stoltenberg used to dance, she says working with the same material but soundtracked to different music was one of the most interesting ways to explore the work. “Even though you do the same thing, you feel like you do something completely different and suddenly you feel like it clicks,” she says. “So for this, we split that material into small parts and small layers, and improvised together with them.”

This approach seems in line with the careful, patchwork piecing-together of Believer. That while they blend genres and bridge a gap between multiple worlds, there’s something meticulous about the editing process. Smerz work mainly in Ableton, and Stoltenberg is eager to tell me about the vocal microphones they’ve just invested in. She also points to her grandmother’s piano behind her – “it needs tuning” – while Motzfeldt is often found playing the violin during their live shows. Splitting improvised vocal takes and “brain dead” instrumental exploration is something that comes naturally for them – where they may take one piece from one track and combine it with another. 

“The important part of this process is to be able to capture the good stuff,” says Stoltenberg, as Motzfeldt adds: “It’s a bit like collaborating with someone, a third part coming in.” Motzfeldt stresses the importance of being a good listener when crafting songs in this way, and likens it to “hacking your intuition.” “Intuition is good, but I feel like it has two parts: when I play the violin, I always go into the same melodic structures that I've played all my life, so it’s almost more like a physical or mechanical intuition. If you can hack that intuition and get to the other part, which is your aesthetic intuition, you can start to produce something really interesting.” “And the good thing about those kinds of techniques,” continues Stoltenberg, “is when you mix stuff up, you manage to surprise yourself because you wouldn't do that naturally on that particular song.”

After releasing Believer, Smerz has had a chance to reflect on the themes and aesthetics of the album. They describe it as having three different worlds: the world they were in while making it, the world of its visuals and a world of live performances. “All the references and inspiration for this album are all over the place,” says Stoltenberg, but when I mention a continual use of white costumes in their music videos, Motzfeldt points to a feeling of timelessness, of the in-between. “We wanted this sense of transference between spaces and places,” she says. “You get one sound from one place, and then you get another from this element of another world. Using white means you have to fill in the colours yourself.”

The moon was also a present symbol throughout Believer, appearing on the album cover and in the video for the title track. Motzfeldt says the moon and its phases represented a type of growing up or womanhood, a “seeing your life from the outside somehow.” “You have some expectations when growing up and you find yourself asking if these expectations can be met or if you want to meet them,” she says. “The moon represents something that is a bit restless and I feel like we’ve reached a new place now, that is calmer.”

On that one-of-many, groggy-eyed sunrise morning walks, Smerz’s fervent interrogation of creativity and growth is a warm reminder that while things can shift and change, we can shift and change with them. We can make mistakes and interrupt our intuition. We can search for the good parts and cut and paste them onto something entirely new. We can stretch across worlds and find something of ourselves in the gaps. And as we take those first steps into a new phase, we can take the blank canvas and fill it with colour. “You will always shift and you will always look somewhere else,” says Stoltenberg. “And by doing that, you will always be able to find something beautiful.”