The last time that we featured Tuvaband (Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser) she was making an appearance at the Reeperbahn Festival (September 2020), where she was nominated for the Anchor Award. At that show she debuted songs from a forthcoming album, ‘Growing Pains & Pleasures’,which will be released on 21st May.
Her previous album, the Norwegian Grammy-nominated ‘While I entered the Void’ was concerned with isolation, about cutting herself off from society and the effect that process had on her. In contrast, Growing Pains & Pleasures is about finding her way back. She says, with considerable understatement, “When you’re in isolation you don’t meet many people”…“and there are few impressions from the outside world. So, coming out of isolation can be an overwhelming experience - in ways both good and bad. A lot of the songs have feelings of fear; an irrational and vague, but constant fear”.
(Just to clarify that remark lockdowns and restrictions have generally been less onerous in Norway than in the UK but as this is written the country is going into another lockdown as like the UK it is dealing with a mutant virus, in the Oslo area).
The first single and opening song of the album, ‘Growing Pains’ is a starting point for the album’s story line and is about trying to hold onto the past, initially rejecting personal change and of surroundings.
Tuvaband’s strapline is ‘Music for your funeral?’ You can interpret that in several ways. For example that it is so good you’d want it to be played at the appropriate moment. I doubt that was her intention but there is something funereal for sure about her music. It transcends ‘ethereal’ and takes it to another level. That little whispering voice she uses, along with a high-pitched croak here, the unusual metre and the eerie, atmospheric, shifting sounds she produces would suit a Final Destination movie, as Death stalks the doomed characters through the Hall of Mirrors at a fairground.
Always worth listening to.