In 2020 Anna Högberg put her widely celebrated band Anna Högberg Attack on hold, retraining as a nurse whilst continuing a solo practice and playing in other groups. With Ensamseglaren she makes a spectacular return with her own ensemble — this time a double sextet — performing an album length suite of new music written in dedication to her late father — the titular ‘ensamseglaren’ pictured on the LP cover as a young boy.
(ensam in Swedish can mean both alone and lonely, seglaren = the sailor).
Shot through with renewed energy and a brutally affective emotional punch, Högberg’s formal experimentation opens up vibrant possibilities for the assembled musicians to let loose with some of their wildest and most ecstatic playing on record.
Högberg’s contention with grief leans into collective joy as method of mourning — the big band as extended family; where bonds are made through a shared experience of being together. Where everyone gets to be themselves without expectations of who they should be or what they can do. It’s a radical commitment to care — of her self and others — that animates and unifies this suite of music’s radical dynamics and variations in colour: from whisper-quiet textural intensity to harrowing distortion and double drum chaos; raucous and solemn song.
Throughout history, humans have had different images of the transition between life and death. Imagine standing on the seashore on a summer evening and seeing a beautiful vessel being prepared for departure. The sails are hoisted. The evening breeze comes, the sails fill and the boat glides out onto the open sea. You follow it with your eyes as it heads towards the sunset. It gets smaller and smaller, until it finally disappears as a tiny dot on the horizon. Then you hear someone next to you say, ‘Now they have left us.’
Left us for what? The fact that they got smaller and smaller and finally disappeared is only how we see it. In reality, they are just as big and beautiful as when they were here, lying on the beach by our side.
Just as you hear that voice say ‘Now they have left us’, there may be someone on another beach who sees them appear on the horizon, someone waiting to welcome them when they reaches their new port.
Fönstret, 2025