Hampus Lindwall: Blizzard of Organ
Swedish organist and composer Hampus Lindwall talks about 'Brace for Impact,' his collaboration with Stephen O'Malley, and why treating the pipe organ like a huge mechanical computer opens unexpected compositional possibilities.
Today, the Spotlight shines on organist, composer, and sound artist Hampus Lindwall.
Hampus started as a guitarist who cut his teeth copying Steve Vai solos but who now sits behind a 78-stop church organ. He has been the organist at Saint-Esprit in Paris since 2005, but his latest album, Brace for Impact, throws tradition out the window. Recorded on a massive organ in Düsseldorf with guitarist Stephen O’Malley, this music draws on everything from experimental music pioneer Xenakis to heavy metal and more.
Hampus takes us through this remarkable project, sharing how a Swedish metalhead became one of the most adventurous voices in contemporary organ music.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our discussion with Terence Hannum from earlier this year, or our 2024 interview with Hainbach, or even 2023’s with Brandon Seabrook, all available on spotlightonpodcast.com.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Hampus Lindwall’s new album Brace for Impact)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Hampus Lindwall at hampuslindwall.com and follow him on Instagram and Bluesky
• Purchase Hampus Lindwall’s Brace for Impact from Ideologic Organ, Bandcamp, or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Robert Barry’s liner notes for Brace for Impact
Collaborators:
• Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O))), guitar on Brace for Impact)
• Cory Arcangel (visual artist and composer)
• Susana Santos Silva (trumpet player)
• Rolande Falcinelli (organist and composer, Lindwall’s mentor)
• Jeanne Demessieux (legendary organist at Saint-Esprit, 1933-1962)
Musical References:
• Iannis Xenakis - Metastaseis
• Steve Vai
• Yngwie Malmsteen
• Eddie Van Halen
• La Monte Young
Contemporary Organ Artists:
• Ellen Arkbro - For Organ and Brass
• Kali Malone
• Sarah Davachi
• Kara-Lis Coverdale
• FUJI|||||||||||TA
• Áine O’Dwyer
Experimental Organ Projects:
• Sollmann Sprenger (Berlin-based organ builders)
• Gamut Inc. (automated MIDI organ collective)
Churches and Venues:
• Église du Saint-Esprit, Paris
• St. Antonius Kirche, Düsseldorf (recording location for Brace for Impact)
Film References:
• Akira Kurosawa - High and Low (1963)
• Luchino Visconti
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer:** I'd love to start by talking a little bit about the new record, Brace for Impact. What is this idea of post-internet organ music? It's a great one-liner from a marketing point of view, but as I sit with the album, I can't say it's inaccurate, though I can't tell you what it means either. I'm curious whether you could talk about that phrase with me. What's the conceptual framework that this album's built around?
Hampus Lindwall: That's an interesting question because I didn't come up with this. It was Robert Barry who wrote the text for the album. I was also kind of skeptical to try to put some label on it, and especially I am not really what is considered the post-internet generation, because the post-internet generation are the people who grew up with the internet already existing. So I'm a little bit too old for that. I think he thought it was so influenced by so much internet media, internet art, and internet ways of working with algorithms and computers that it made sense. So I didn't protest, actually. I thought it was okay. I was also kind of looking forward to seeing what kind of debate this could come to later.
Lawrence: Has it stirred anything up? Have people latched onto that concept?
Hampus: No, most people just repeat the phrase, but you're the first one who really asks the question. (laughter)
Lawrence: All right. Well, I appreciate that.
Hampus: I wouldn't consider it—I mean, it's always difficult to contextualize yourself. It's like, now it's there, so let's see what happens with it.
Lawrence: I mean, to me, it's like a post-organ album. (laughter) It's almost a redefinition of what the organ can be and do.
Hampus: Yeah, that's what I wanted to do.
Lawrence: It's so exciting. Tell me a little bit about Stephen O'Malley, that collaboration, and also—it's such a powerful opening to the record, especially if somebody comes to it thinking, "Oh, it's a record of organ music." It's such a wonderful statement, and I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the relationship and the choice to open the album that way.
Hampus: I think it was a good piece to start with because, as you say, it's pretty defining that there's something new coming, that you're going to hear something pretty new. What's important to know is that I never consciously thought, "Oh, I have to renew any language," or "I have to"—it's not like research that I'm doing. It's just that this is the outcome of my whole work, my world, and my involvement with the art world and many artists that I work with, and all my own influences.
So all this music on this album, I think it's totally normal, and I think everybody should do this now because it's basically influences from what we have in our time. This piece is obviously inspired by riffs coming from time to time that give impulses, and then "Metastaseis" by Xenakis, which has this incredible opening sequence where they do long glissandos on the violin. I was interested in doing this with—actually, my initial idea many years ago, fifteen years ago, was to do this with violins basically, and then that never happened.
I was invited to compose something for a festival, and together with a colleague who was doing the other pieces, we said, "Yeah, let's go back to our childhood passions," with techno on one side because it was the nineties, and there was also all this heavy metal and stuff. So I thought, why don't I try it with guitar? Later on, when I wanted to record this, I just asked Stephen O'Malley because he lives in Paris too. He could record the guitar parts. It was kind of fun because he didn't know what it was going to be. I just asked him all the time, "Can you play from F-sharp to D-sharp glissando, and it should take fourteen seconds? Then can you take from this note to this note, and it should take nine seconds?" I had the score; it was very precise, so then I could just patch everything together in the computer.
Lawrence: That's incredible. I love that. You've opened the door a little bit to my next question, which was going to be about the influences you moved through musically through your development, whether it was some of those heavy metal guitar players—Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Eddie Van Halen—and then you mentioned Xenakis and others. I'm curious, from the outside, those are very different musical universes. From the inside, from your perspective, could you talk a little bit about any connective tissue you perceive or you've experienced through all that?
Hampus: Yeah. I grew up with a lot of music around me. My brothers were also playing instruments and music, so I always listened to many, many types of music. I was never interested in doing some hierarchy between classical music being the best or something, and then there's pop and rock that is less good or something. That was never an issue, the same with all types of culture that I consume. I have the same love for Visconti as for B movies from the seventies or cannibal movies or something. So it's like, is it good? It can be good in so many different ways. You have maybe different parameters to measure if a Bruce Lee movie is good than you have when you watch something else, or the same with music—you just have a different set of rules, how to analyze stuff. But the quality is always the most important, and that's what comes to the end of everything.
So if you're not used to—I think also if you're not used to—actually, I know that if you're not used to listening to a certain type of music, you will have little understanding of what the quality would be. If you brought up now some funk music from a country I've never heard about or something, I wouldn't be able to say if that was a very good example or very bad because I just don't know that language. So I think having grown up with many types of music around me, I've really also had the chance of being really nerdy about many things. I have been digging into many different types of music and got a pretty good feeling for what quality actually is and how it functions.
Lawrence: There's a lot in there that resonates for me, especially in my experience as a young person. I feel like for my whole life I've been surrounded by music of all types and what people might call high art and low art or popular art to classical art. I'm curious, do you have a theory, either for yourself or maybe more broadly culturally, why it seems like—I think we're roughly age equivalent; I was born in the early seventies—it seems like something happened to those of us born, say, in the early to mid-sixties until maybe the early nineties, and then I think there was a much different shift. But I'm curious if you have any thoughts about what it was that started to break down those barriers for people, where this delineation between, again, what I'll awkwardly call high and low art, seemed to matter much less and seemed to result in a lot of integrated work.
Hampus: I don't know what it comes from, but I mean, actually, Tarantino is a quite good example of this in cinema when he talks about it because he has a love for all cinema. I think—I don't know if it's a generational thing, but I think maybe it might be generational. We also grew up with, like, the end of one type of consumerism. There was also a lot of really good music around. All these bands in the eighties—it was so good.
Lawrence: Yeah. I've chalked it up to—at least from my American point of view; I don't know how it was for people growing up outside of the States—but in America when I was growing up, television was still providing a forum for a lot of—we just don't really have public intellectuals the way we used to. I think of seeing, as a child, seeing Leonard Bernstein on television making music so accessible, or seeing even talk shows like Dick Cavett. He would have people from a range of pop culture to academia and other things. It just seemed like these things got beamed into the home in this magical way. And as a young person, to be able to take it all in and not really have it presented in the context of high versus low—it was just all part of the inputs.
Hampus: That's true. I mean, we didn't have such good TV when I grew up, but my father was into tennis, so he went up and mounted one of these round antenna dishes on the roof to be able to watch some tournament. We didn't care about this, but we were so excited because we got MTV, I think, really at the beginning, actually. It was just so incredible, the quality also of everything. There was Headbangers Ball for heavy metal, there was Yo! MTV Raps. I remember the day in 1991 when they said, "Okay, now you're going to listen to the new single by Public Enemy. It's called 'Can't Truss It.'" I have these moments today, thirty years later. This is a classic, but you have this coming out of your television at your home, and they say it's just a new single. I think that was really incredible. MTV as a whole—I always try to mention this, sometimes I forget—but as a whole, this nineties MTV has been so important for me.
Lawrence: Something else that's really interesting to me about your path is your experience at the Royal College of Music and your application process. If I understand correctly, you applied for both jazz guitar and classical organ. While you were certain you'd be accepted as a guitarist, you were actually accepted as an organist. I'm curious, what do you think the jazz department missed about you? Or do you think they got it right? (laughter)
Hampus: Nah, I don't know. It's—I've always—with many competitions and many things, everything has to be on a high level, but then there's always a portion of randomness in who they take. It's kind of from day to day. My guitar teacher at the time just said, "Oh no, but it's way better to go do a classical education. It's better than the jazz department," which probably was also—I didn't think more about it then.
Lawrence: I've talked to so many artists who went through conservatory who were actually really dissuaded from pursuing any kind of jazz or improvisational study while they were in conservatory. I'm curious, how was your schooling as it related to that?
Hampus: As soon as you start to have an education and books about how to play jazz and stuff and music theory, it's kind of dead. I mean, as soon as you talk about it as—as soon as you teach it with rules, like an art form that has to be conserved, it's pretty off. I think that's also a problem when you do a classical education, that it's—I mean, also the term "conservatory" is so wrong. It should be called Research Institute for Music or something. To conserve something—when you're playing classical instruments, it's very technical and you need to have many skills that you actually have to study. Older music, early music, classical music, to contemporary music, even just to be able to perform. You have to learn so many things in composition, also, just because it's so technical. Just to write a piece of music, just the technical thing of putting a pen onto a paper with the staves to just write the music, you have to—there's a long, long way to get there, actually.
So I think it's very good. You have to study something in one way, doing it, and then you have to break free from it too. I also teach, and I'm always struggling with this because I was always thinking, "I'm not going to be so academic when I teach." But in the end, I was as academic or even more than my teachers because you can only communicate something that you can prove to the students, because it has to be proven somehow. Otherwise, it's all editorial and opinion. It's just my opinion. So I think also when in classical music, we do a lot of style studies for composition. So you write a piece in the style of Bach or a piece in the style of Mozart, et cetera, different ways of composition, both for forms and other things. But I think what this does in the end is that you study one composer that now has a set of rules that you can apply to make it sound similar to this composer, and then you actually sharpen your ears just to be able to apply this on your own music later. That's how I see it. It's like when you do key copying. Many artists—they have to do this copying for years before they get to paint. You just learn how to do shadows, or even if you don't do this later, you're just sharpening your perception.
Lawrence: That's fascinating. It's interesting you relate it to visual art as well, because I think of something I've heard about with writers. There are certain modalities where writing programs suggest that young writers type out like a Hemingway novel. I think it's similar to what you were just talking about, in that you pick up the cadence, his feel for language. You're doing it from the inside, and you start to learn either his tropes or even channel his way of thinking. It's fascinating.
Hampus: Yeah, because you can then look at it and say, "Ah, this is not—this is out of the style." I think this is very important when learning something. Also for me, I mean, in my compositions, I have to be coherent, and this is something you learn from studying other masters.
Lawrence: I see you in this interesting lineage, given who you've studied with and the position you hold. How do you reconcile sort of tradition and lineage with doing this exploratory work, this sort of forward-moving work? Or is the lineage you're in that of explorers?
Hampus: I would say yes, because the teacher who was my mentor, who I studied with from the late nineties until she died in 2006—her name was Rolande Falcinelli—she was really an incredibly innovative organist. She was also an incredible improviser, and she did some really hairy stuff. Even today, it's like—and she was incredible also in always renewing her language, relating to history. She was actually the person who got me really into, who opened doors, who widened my horizons. Because when I was studying in the conservatory, I had to work a lot, so there were a lot of hours practicing. She said, "Yeah, I think you should practice a little bit less and try to read more. You should be more interested maybe in Greek literature because it has this relation to this." And then she also had an incredible knowledge of Italian cinema, for instance.
Whenever I went to see her, we were talking more and more, and I think the last couple of times I saw her, we didn't even go to play any instrument or anything. We were just talking, discussing other concepts. I think she had this incredible encyclopedic knowledge of art history and music and literature. She did this very, really avant-garde style, both composition and improvisation, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. So I think it's in the lineage. I think I am more in the lineage with her than most of the other students who are now people who are older than me. I'm just doing contemporary music with the contemporary means that we have, like iPad. If I get an iPad, then I will see what I can do with this together with the organ, or I use algorithms in composition programs. How can I mess around with this to make something at the organ? I think that's just what everybody should do. It's the normal way of just using all the new tools.
Lawrence: Well, talk to me a little bit about algorithmic process, where that comes from for you, how you translate a modality like that onto an acoustic instrument.
Hampus: That's a difficult question. (laughter) I think since the early two thousands, it has been a great tool for composers, and at this research center in Paris, IRCAM, they started early to make software to use for assisted composition. This influenced many of my friends who were working there or teaching there or studied before in their composition. That actually influenced me, even though I was never—I was never a programmer, so I couldn't really use this in that hardcore way that they could. They code stuff, and then it comes out notes. But there was more like a vibe that was interesting to me in the beginning. Then as soon as I got an iPad with more number applications that I could use—you know how it goes—I could start using this for my own work.
Some of the pieces on the album, they have—from the dumbest thing I can tell you—I don't even know if it counts as an algorithm, but I just needed a random generator to generate like a random series of notes, of fifty-six notes. So I did this manually on the computer. That's the most stupid usage of it. The most complicated is where I use a tool called Notam, which is a composition-assisting tool where you can define a number of rules, like a scale or different chords or different rhythms. Then from what you have defined, you can paint or draw the music on the iPad.
Lawrence: Beautiful.
Hampus: That's fun. It's a great tool, actually. It's developed by a composer called Jesper Nordin, who's a Swedish composer. He built it for himself as a tool, and it now became quite successful for other people too, for all types of music. You can do pop songs or whatever with it.
Lawrence: Is there anything about the pipe organ from your perspective that makes it especially suitable for these types of—for lack of a better way to say it—these sort of computational or algorithmic thinking? Does the pipe organ lend itself to being used that way, or is it just this happens to be your instrument and the approach you've chosen? I'm really curious about that.
Hampus: I would say both. For me, it was natural just to use all these tools, so I would have done it on any instrument. But what was really a good thing is that since maybe ten or fifteen years, there are many pipe organs that have MIDI. So you can easily do things from the computer, play them from the computer, which made stuff that I couldn't play with my own hands, so to say.
Lawrence: I don't know why I never thought about the fact that there'd be a MIDI interface for a pipe organ. It just seemed so—
Hampus: It's a perfect match. You can't have it on a flute, for instance, but for an organ, it's the best because it's already so mechanical. It's just like a huge machine.
Lawrence: Yeah, I love that. There's something steampunk about that. (laughter) As I was listening to the album, every track I would say to myself, "Oh, this is my favorite one. I love this." It really builds and takes—there's definitely an arc. The track I come back to the most is "Swerve," though. That piece really stands out for me. But I wonder how did you approach—and this is a little bit of a nerdy question, and I apologize—but how did you approach the structure and the flow of the album or even the sequencing? Do you hear a story? Were you telling a story? Can you take me through, or is it just like, "This is how it feels the best, this is how it sounds the best"?
Hampus: Yeah. It's more pragmatic than this. Since it's also a vinyl, you have to count minutes on each side. So that leaves you with only a couple of different combinations. Then we thought, "Yeah, one strong, first little bit mellow after," and how you sequence stuff normally. That's how this came about. I don't even know if I did it or if Stephen O'Malley did it in the end.
Lawrence: That's incredible, actually. That's a very—I love this idea. It comes up a lot that the dominant medium in any given time ends up influencing the music and the composition. The example people use all the time is the old seven-inch single and how pop songs took that two-to-three-minute convention. So I love that that was at play here. But it's also fascinating to me that you relinquished the sequencing. Not all artists do that, you know?
Hampus: But I think when you listen to it now and everything is going one after the other, it functions really well. I think it was a natural way of putting the tracks. I couldn't imagine them in another order now.
Lawrence: Yeah, it must sound fantastic on vinyl.
Hampus: Yeah. I don't know. I would have to think—mostly, I think I listen to—yeah, I mean, both. They have different qualities. I don't have such a good vinyl player, to be honest. (laughter)
Lawrence: Well, I'll get one and I'll let you know. I'm also really intrigued about—you articulated earlier about how Stephen recorded first, and it's really interesting to me because I didn't realize his parts weren't entirely improvised. So you gave him essentially—you conducted him, or gave him a verbal score, it sounds like. Then you built your parts. Was everything written? Were the organ parts written, or did you give him his piece?
Hampus: Yeah, I wrote everything first. So when I came to record, it was just the easiest way to do this. He wanted to have timeframes and the pitch to bend, but he didn't know what type of music it was, anything. Didn't have any clue until I recorded the organ parts and put everything together.
Lawrence: Do you remember his reaction when he heard it?
Hampus: No, I didn't see him. I sent him the tracks.
Lawrence: That's incredible. That actually dovetails a little bit also into my next question, which is the nature of collaboration and some of the people you've collaborated with. You all seem to live at this edge of technology and art, whether it's in this example—you were able to leverage technology, you were able to basically transcend space and time in this collaboration. I'm curious, what do you get from these collaborations? I mean that a bit more directly in terms of what are you learning about yourself, your instrument? What insights do you come away with that you might not get by just working alone?
Hampus: Yeah, that's—when I did my first album, it was just organ compositions by my predecessor in the church, Jeanne Demessieux. It was kind of a natural thing to do this when I was appointed there. I wanted to prove myself as an organist for myself and also for others because I did so many detours. So also for people to understand what I was doing, I needed to have something quite classical also for just getting accepted. Then I was about to do another record with my teacher's music, which didn't happen. I just thought I would just go with the flow for a while, and then all these collaborations just happened fairly normally from different friends and different things.
I've learned so much from all these incredible people. I've collaborated with so many incredible musicians and artists. As you say, you learn a lot about the other person, but you learn a lot about yourself. It's when you come to another country—often you learn about the other country, but you actually learn more about your own country in contrast. I think I've been collaborating with composer and visual artist Cory Arcangel a lot. That's been a great collaboration because when you work alone, there are so many questions, especially about my own work. I can work on it for a long, long time, and then I feel like I should just scrap everything. You don't have any references. When we work together, we always have very easy going with everything. We try to be more like Fluxus artists and go with the things that we think are good. I think that's been helping me a lot also to put together this album. Some of the pieces even come out of some of our collaboration concerts.
Lawrence: So you carry that sort of inspiration from those collaborations? They're not siloed into those?
Hampus: No, definitely not. Also playing with other instruments—Susana Santos Silva, who's an incredible trumpet player, I've been playing with a lot. Just I hear what she's playing, I try to match something at the organ, and those things stay with me after. I incorporate a lot of things in the work. Otherwise, you know, also in the church I play—this is not, not everybody maybe knows this, but I play in this church in Saint-Esprit that is very active. So I play at least four masses per weekend there, Saturday and Sunday, and I have around fifteen hundred persons per weekend coming. During these masses, there are the pieces or the things we do together with the parish, the people singing, the parishioners, and that's kind of set for different periods of the year—Christmas, Easter, et cetera.
Then there are the more decorative parts where the organist is playing pieces that fit with that particular Sunday. Most organists, particularly in France, there's this tradition of improvisation because also the liturgy is quite—you don't really know how long anything will take. The communion can be—there can be more people at the communion or less. You have an older priest who walks slower, or anything. So pieces are always tricky because they're either too long or too short; it's very difficult to do. So most organists improvise, actually. There's a quite fun thing with this, that I was doing improvisation with a teacher who was studying with his teacher, who—the next teacher, the next teacher—and we don't know where it started. The tradition is so long that we don't know where they started to teach this, actually, because there are no records from before the seventeenth century, really.
Lawrence: That's really fascinating. As someone—I'm not a churchgoer in my adult life, but I can remember even as a child, I played piano growing up, and I was paying attention to the music in church. I didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I remember being so curious about sort of interlude moments. It was clear there were parts of the mass where there were songs, if you will, and then other times that seemed like variations on a melody. Again, I didn't have the vocabulary for this as a child, but I recognized that there was something different going on. Now when I go to church for a funeral or a wedding, especially during communion, it's really interesting. That's a fascinating bit of insight to understand what the organ player's experience has to be, the adaptability you have to have.
Hampus: So that's the thing. I have a small TV, so I see what's happening downstairs, and I have to see when the priest is sitting down or something is happening, or I start or something. So every weekend I'm improvising there during the mass, and that's so many hours of music. I've been doing this for twenty years in the church now, and I play all types of music, like really contemporary. I do stuff with electronics, also with my iPad. So people have also started to get really curious, actually, about new music, and they get a different way of listening from having heard so much new music. So that's also my room of experimentation, my experimentation studio a little bit during the mass. There I try to integrate all my ideas that I get from these other people that I work with.
Lawrence: Do you record your sacred music?
Hampus: No. But I've started thinking I should. I wanted to do at least something that you can have so that every five years I should record, like record one weekend or something, just to have the evolution.
Lawrence: I agree. That would be so wonderful. What do you understand, either from your tradition—you mentioned this tradition that's now sort of lost antiquity in a way, or at least the roots of it are—what do you understand from that tradition or from your own personal experience as to what the role of the organ and the music is supposed to be in the context of the mass? Why are you there? Why is it not silent?
Hampus: The organ came to church actually because of bad singing. Historically—I can't remember the details now, but it's in the eighth century, there was a prince or something who had a small organ at his home, and every time he went to mass, he thought they sang so badly and they couldn't keep the pitch and everything. This didn't change historically, but he said, "I will give you my organ to the church because it has long—you can do very long notes, long drone notes, and then you can sing in accordance to this and you will sing better." And that's the way the organ actually came to the church. Before it was pagan instruments. Then it just stayed. I mean, it's a great instrument for the building also because you can play it really loud. It's a perfect instrument for the church, actually.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's fascinating that—that's so funny because when I think about, I don't know how it is outside of America, but in America, in a lot of parishes, the people sing, I would say, reluctantly. It's not enthusiastic; it's very reserved. But the organ does function as almost a tuning whistle. It brings the congregation's voice into some semblance of tune and harmony. (laughter)
I'd like to read you a couple of quotes from Robert Barry's liner notes and ask you a couple of questions about them. He suggests that your work captures, quote, "the temporal disjuncture of rabbit-holing through endless browser windows while using the austere grandeur of baroque organ sound," end quote. That's a really specific observation about experiencing time in a digital space and that rabbit hole through browser windows. It's so funny; somebody just talked to me about that the other day. He said to me, "My superpower is wasting time." (laughter) But I'm curious how conscious it is for you in exploring that sort of fragmented, hyperlinked way of moving through information and moving through time. Is that what you're expressing here, or is that just Robert Barry saying what he's experiencing?
Hampus: I think that's what he's—I mean, I know what he hears. He hears that I've been digging really deep into two very small ideas. Every piece, it's almost only one idea. I think that's maybe this rabbit hole he's talking about, which is really this internet thing. Also, somebody talks to you about some fish species, and then you get interested in it, and then you can spend like a day on this, and it's two hours later. Yeah, I was like, well, then YouTube at three in the morning on some feature. So yeah, I would say that's—the observation is correct about this, also dealing with these technologies. It's definitely rabbit hole.
Lawrence: Yeah. Well, and similarly, I mean, I think there's sort of a very cliché way I could think about this next question, but it seems to relate—for lack of a better way to say it, the organ is having a moment. There's so much contemporary music being done, whether it's in the ambient world, modern composition. I first became aware of it maybe a decade or more now. John Zorn really embraced the organ for improvisation, which to me is—that's some really exciting music as well. So we have this ancient technology in this hypermodern context. I guess my question is why?
Hampus: Yeah. I think it's a combination of things. I mean, these are always cycles. So in five years, this moment is over, but it also spurs off this generation of—they're actually only female, all of them—starting a little bit from Sweden with Ellen Arkbro. She released a record, I think in 2000—I don't know which year it was. It was called For Organ and Brass, which is really incredible. She came to the organ not because she was interested in the organ; she came to the organ just because she was interested in the tuning, and these baroque organs had this special temperament. She was studying just intonation with La Monte Young, so she wanted to explore this and just came to the organ because the baroque organ could reproduce some of those sounds. Then this became a little bit like a trend.
So there are many others—there are several from Sweden, but also Kali Malone. It also came—this was like independently—Kara-Lis Coverdale and Sarah Davachi. They also were working in a similar way. So there are actually several different things happening. There are also these people building some kind of strange organs with particularities. For instance, there are artists doing it in Berlin—Sollmann Sprenger, who's built a more drone organ where they use—they have been doing also experimental bass pipes that are based from loudspeakers from techno clubs that can produce really low and intense bass sounds.
Then there is another group, a collective called Gamut Inc., in Berlin too, who are working only with automated organs with MIDI. Then there is Fujita from Japan who has a very ritualized way of playing the organs. I guess that's part of the culture. I think many of those things, they came out a little bit independently, and then you get a lot of followers around who have been doing other things. So there are just so many people doing really interesting things, actually, now.
Lawrence: You have this really interesting perspective, I think, because of the music you grew up with and around. You mentioned the club scene of the nineties, the rave scene, and of course this classical training, this conservatory training. So you have—I think you sit at this interesting place where you can observe essentially the cultures of innovation and the cultures of tradition. From where you sit, what do you observe about those two? Are they—my sense is that to the outsider, they seem like much different realms, but the closer you look, there is much more overlap. I wonder what resonates for you across those cultures? Do you view it as a spectrum, or—I'm curious.
Hampus: Yeah, there's definitely a general fascination for the organ, for the instrument, from all these different groups. Then sometimes, you know, these experimental pipes and so—maybe they have more in common with electronic music. This neo-minimalism has more in common with pop or old minimalism, and it's a reiteration of this type of music. I don't know if they're so related to each other, actually, but the music is related just because of the instrument, of course. But not necessarily in how it's composed. But it's a great group of people, actually, and everybody's friends, which is really fun.
Lawrence: Do you have like an organ convention or something that you go to? (laughter)
Hampus: There is one in Amsterdam, actually, every year. But generally, everybody now from these spheres is very interested in what everybody else is doing. So there's a lot of dialogue, actually, between everyone.
Lawrence: Yeah, I would imagine. Tell me a little bit about the next iteration of your collaboration with Stephen. My understanding from what I read in preparation is—well, tell me what High and Low is and tell me how it builds on what you've already done together.
Hampus: Yeah. I wanted to mention it since we were talking about this in the beginning, about high and low culture. We got an invitation to a commission for a new piece for organ and guitar. Then I just thought of this Kurosawa movie, High and Low, which is about a rich businessman who gets his son kidnapped, and it turns out that the kidnapper took the wrong kid, so he kidnapped his butler's kid instead. Then the whole movie is about this dialogue between high and low in terms of this rich person and the butler and the kidnapper, et cetera.
When we got the invitation, I said we should just think about this movie and maybe get inspired from this. I think "high and low" also corresponds so well—they have, for many reasons, actually—the organ is high up, the guitar is—we stand downstairs and play. We have the idea of high culture and low culture. There are the pitch things that we can play with in the piece as well. So it embodied all our concepts for this piece. That's how this title came about, and it premieres this fall, September 30.
Lawrence: Oh yeah, exciting. But the last question I have for you is, for someone who comes across your work for the first time, what do you hope they come away with in terms of understanding the pipe organ and sort of what it is and what it can be? Are you an advocate for the pipe organ as a contemporary instrument?
Hampus: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, if you come across this music and you like it, then I think there are big chances that this person is going to dig deeper into the organ and the organ music. Of course, then I think the next step is that I hope people will discover more other music. So I think all the music that I love, I hope somebody will read an interview when I talk about—we talked today about Xenakis or Steve Vai—and that this can influence people to go and listen to more music and discover more things and just get a broader perspective of music.
Hampus Lindwall
Hampus Lindwall is an organist, improviser, composer, and sound artist whose work bridges contemporary music, experimental sound art, and electronic practices. A former student of Rolande Falcinelli, he has been organiste titulaire at the Church of Saint-Esprit in Paris since 2005—a position once held by Jeanne Demessieux—and taught improvisation at IMEP in Namur from 2018 to 2023.
Lindwall is internationally active as a performer and collaborator. He has premiered works by Cory Arcangel, Tarek Atoui, Noriko Baba, Raphaël Cendo, Phill Niblock, Mark Fell, Mauro Lanza, Stephen O’Malley, and many others, and performs regularly across Europe, North America, and China. His recordings appear on labels such as Ideologic Organ, Blank Forms, SUPERPANG, Matière-Mémoire, Clean Feed, and Ligia Digital.
His 2025 album Brace for Impact (Ideologic Organ), recorded on a monumental organ in Düsseldorf with guest guitarist Stephen O’Malley, was described by The Quietus as “drawing influence from everything from Xenakis to metal to rave,” and by Boomkat as “post-internet organ music… informed by algorithmic processes.”
Born in Stockholm in 1976, Lindwall began as a guitarist in rock, metal, and jazz bands before turning to the organ. He studied in Stockholm, then in Paris and Lyon, and was awarded first prizes at the Saarbrücken and Strasbourg improvisation competitions. His work merges historic instruments with experimental composition, digital processes, and a deep engagement with sound as both material and concept.
