The Eclectic Light Programme – Interview : Rebekka Karijord (15/12/2012)

REBEKKA KARIJORD’s stunning new album WE BECOME OURSELVES is out now, via Control Freak Kitten Records . Tickets for her only Irish concert are on sale – January 18 ^th The Workman’s Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin 2 – www.ticketmaster.ie

She was in Ireland to promote the album and upcoming gig and took time to have a chat with me…

The album has just been announced as one of MOJO magazine’s top ten albums of the year and was their world music album for November.  The Irish Independent gave the album 4 out of 5 stars saying “Karijord explores the personal and universal in a highly compelling way” while Image Magazine described the release as a “stunningly unique record from a fierce artist”.

‘Use My Body While It’s Still Young’, one of the album’s standout tracks and the first single, is built around a primal storm of drums, while KARIJORD’s vocals are typically potent and yet unafraid to display subtle, bewildering hints of vulnerability in both her delivery and lyrics.  A startling song that showcases the magic of an extraordinary album, its video is equally impressive, the polarity within its text reflected by the presence of Siv Ander, a 75 year old ballet dancer capable of expressing both power and fragility at once. Also featured is the organ that dominates the album’s cover art, built by Swedish artist and designer Gustaf Von Arbin.

Norwegian born, but now based in Stockholm, KARIJORD has an unusual story, her first flirtations with music motivated by her parents, two teenage sweethearts who spent much of their early years together travelling Europe in a Volkswagen bus, her father busking, her mother selling the beaded bracelets she made. After they separated when KARIJORD was three, she lost contact with her father, who tragically became a drug addict for 25 years, but when she was a teenager she discovered a notebook of his lyrics in her mother’s attic. Inspired by the contents, which revealed his love for both his former wife and daughter, she tracked him down in Bergen, where a painful reunion led him to hand over two plastic bags filled with his writings.

“I got to know him through his lyrics,” she says now, “and a correspondence started where we sent each other tapes and songs. I started to write melodies to his lyrics, and, finally, I wrote my own songs and recorded my own demos.”

She’s not looked back since. WE BECOME OURSELVES is KARIJORD’s second album to receive an international release but her first in Ireland, and follows European tours with Ane Brun and widespread use of earlier recordings in various British and American TV shows. Furthermore, ‘Wear It Like A Crown’, a track from her previous album, 2009’s The Noble Art of Letting Go, so inspired Swedish circus company Cirkus Cirkör that they based an entire show around the song.

WE BECOME OURSELVES hints at a wide range of influences that include the likes of Cat Power, PJ Harvey, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Moondog, Robert Wyatt and, indeed, a significant amount of instrumental music that most likely account for its imaginative arrangements. It is, however, a record of unique personality, filled with organs, boys and men’s choirs, piano, guitar, drums and KARIJORD ’s fierce, striking vocal delivery.

“I wanted to make a love album first, circling around my relationship to men,” she explains. “I wanted it to be a romantic, huge, physical and powerful record, yet stripped and raw, with its flaws on its sleeve. I wanted to make an album about ‘life and death’: heartfelt and serious.”