The Swedish dream pop outifit Immanu El has a new album out this Friday. Here’s a sneak peek + a quick Q&A with the band.
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Can you tell us something about what you wanted to express with your new single Omega?
– Like the rest of the album, Omega is about awakenings; how a personal vision may give you a new perspective on mortality and eternity. With other words, it’s quite existential.
Hibernation is your fourth album. How do you reckon you have progressed musically since you started?
– We’ve had this band for so many years now… Like the shift from being school kids to grown up men, there’s probably been a natural development in terms of our music as well. You hear that quite clearly on Hibernation, it has more depth and is more thoroughly dealt with than our previous work.
– We wanted to do something more than just taking it from the rehearsal space into the studio, so we’ve spent quite some time on finding more innovative soundscapes; tried out new synths, tried singing and using instruments in new ways. There are also some samples we’ve been experimenting with. At the same time, I think we’ve managed to keep our own melodic expression. Johan Eckeborn was responsible for the production and he did an excellent job.
Are there any particular events that have influenced your new album?
– We built the music around concepts such as hibernation and awakenings. Interesting topics, but it’s our journey together that’s made the biggest imprint on the music. We’ve done quite a lot of touring over the last few years. I think we needed to go back and find ourselves in order to go forward. Then we were in a lawsuit for a couple of years, which took a lot of energy.
Was it shaped by the surroundings around Florence where you recorded it?
– We didn’t spend that much time in Florence, but on this courtyard on the top of a hill somewhere close to a village called Marcialla. It’s a grand and beautiful landscape that really gave us the peace and silence to focus on what we wanted to do in the studio. But at the same time, there’s a time schedule you need to adapt to, so it becomes an act of balancing between experimenting with new ideas and influences and to record the songs in time.
In which ways do you think music, fashion and art merge into each other?
– Music, fashion and art have always been in a symbiosis with one another. That becomes especially tangible in various subcultures where they are completely interdependent. Historically, there are of course some extremely clear examples of this. But I also believe that they work together in a natural way for most of us; they’re natural parts of how we see our cultural identity regardless of any labels. I’ve honestly never thought about how fashion or art might inspire us in our creativity. But it’s amazing to work with photographic images to give the musical experience more depth, which our collaboration with Jeff Pinilla for our latest music video is a great example of.
Upcoming live shows:
24.11.2016 SWE – Stockholm – Mono
30.11.2016 SWE – Gothenburg – Folk
17.02.2017 PL – Pozan – Pod Minogą
18.02.2017 PL – Warsaw – Hydrozagadka
19.02.2017 DE – Dresden – Groovestation
20.02.2017 DE – Berlin – Kantine Berghain
21.02.2017 DE – Hamburg – Knust
22.02.2017 DE – Cologne – Artheater
23.02.2017 DE – Munich – Orangehouse
24.02.2017 CH – Aarau – KIFF
02.06-04.06.2017 DE – OBS Festival
Credits: Interview by Jonatan Södergren