A Night at The Opera

Unlike the 100 Club in the 1970s however - where the floor was undoubtedly soaked in beer, the walls stained by cigarettes, and where mohawks and nihilism were the order of the day - the Konservatoriets is a stunning concert hall. The audience are a mixture of young Danish hipsters and classical music aficionados wearing beautiful evening dresses and dapper suits.

Having been home to the Danish Broadcasting Company in the mid-20th century, it’s now home to The Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra and it’s where the ensemble play an annual series of collaborations with contemporary artists called the 60 Minutes Festival.

If there were ever a band born to play with an orchestra, it’s Lowly. The songs on their debut EP for Bella Union, 2015’s Sink Way Into Me, were catchy, layered and emotional but, above all, they sounded like no one else.

Heba is even better. I am astonished by its simultaneous vastness and intimacy, it’s one of the best debut albums we’ve heard in an age – maybe because it doesn’t sound like a debut at all, it’s so fully formed and assured.

With Heba, Lowly’s five members, (singer and guitarist Nanna Schannong, singer Soffie Viemose, drummer Steffen Lundtoft, keyboard player Kasper Staub and bassist/keyboard player Thomas Lund), found a chemistry that was greater than the sum of their not inconsiderable individual parts.

Arriving at the venue, we make our way to the auditorium where Lowly are about to soundcheck. As we say our hello’s they tell us they’re a mixture of excitement and nervousness. I take a seat in the stalls to watch and when they’re joined by the orchestra, it’s plain to see they’ve nothing to worry about.

The nuances of The Copenhagen Philharmonic’s playing, aligned with Lowly’s musical elegance and sophistication prompt everyone in the venue to stop what they’re doing and listen to what’s happening onstage. And that was just the soundcheck.

The show itself is a triumph. Heba’s songs are wonderfully complemented by the orchestra, and watching the five members of Lowly play live was to witness a band consumed by their music.

The orchestration they created on Heba with synthesisers, guitar, bass and drums tonight has 25 classical musicians interpreting it. So we get the melody of “Still Life” picked out on a beautifully ghostly glockenspiel, the melancholy of “Deer Eyes” embellished by brass and the wonder that is “No Hands” adorned with strings. Their songs, which are incredibly relatable – “Deer Eyes” has a line “Have you ever felt so lonely, you could map it on your body?” that Morrissey in his prime would have coveted – mix the angelic voices of Viemose and Schannong with their collective sense of melody and Lundtoft’s spectacular drumming.

When they walk to the front of the stage to take their bows they seem genuinely humbled at their standing ovation, but the audience is dumbstruck at what they’ve just seen.

After the show, before a chat with Bella Union’s founder Simon Raymonde, I wandered backstage and talked with the members of the orchestra (who were all on high at what they’d just been part of) when someone familiar-looking walks into the dressing room and starts playing the piano.

Assuming it to be one of the orchestra and not wishing to intrude, I headed back into the auditorium to admire the venue Lowly had just made their own. Later I discover that the pianist was, in fact, Father John Misty - another member of the Bella Union family. It was that kind of night, where a world-famous musician came to watch his label-mates and rather than be the centre of attention, humbly played some piano instead.

I sit down with Raymonde and we discuss what he thought of the performance.

“I knew I was going to love it - I love strings and orchestras - but it worked so well, not a note out of place. I do find them a particularly emotional band and Soffie’s voice just kills me. They’re amazing now and this is their first record. Every time I hear a song I think ‘What’s the next one going to be like?’ If they’re this good already, then one can only shudder at what they could achieve.”

Discussing the vagaries of the record industry he cites Beach House, another Bella Union-signed act, as an example of how a band can grow in the current musical climate.

“You’ve got to have that perseverance, which is what Lowly have, because they have to do what they do, they have to make that music. It just sounds like them and that’s what’s so amazing. How can a band who haven’t even put an album out do a sixty-minute concert with a twenty-five piece orchestra? I’m amazed but not super-surprised. I’ve seen them up close and know how they work, they’re very determined, they’re really young and they never intended on being in a band together, which is also lovely; they could go anywhere they want to.”

The following day I meet Viemose, Lund and Schannong at Viemose’s flat in Copenhagen (Staub and Lundtoft had prior engagements and politely made their apologies after the show the night before). They’re incredibly accommodating hosts and make a pot of tea the minute we walk in the door. If they’re fatigued from the previous evening’s performance, they don’t show it; rather they seem exhilarated by what that achieved.

Viemose’s flat is adorned with shelves full of novels and poetry; there are paintings and photographs on the walls and a record player with a row of vinyl underneath it, which includes a Nico album, as well as copies of Heba. There’s a Bob Dylan album playing on the turntable, which Viemose turns off as we sit down to talk. It feels like the perfect home for an artist.

We start by talking about Raymonde’s observation from the night before, about how Lowly’s formation was a happy accident. They were all pursuing individual musical paths at the Aarhus Academy when fate intervened and Academy students were tasked with forming groups and performing together.

Viemose chuckles when discussing their origin story. “There was a project week where you’re forced to make music without a teacher and then the next week you perform it. Usually, people do covers of Bob Dylan or something and then play them. Nanna and Thomas asked me, Steffen and Kasper if we could join them. We didn’t really know each other that well, I actually had another offer; I was doing the Bob Dylan cover band thing, I kind of felt excited about that…” Which perhaps explains the Dylan album that was playing when we arrived at her flat.

Schannong, sounding surprised at this part of their story asks Viemose why she changed her mind. “I felt that there was something good going on. The first day you made “Daydreamers”, we played it and it was just crazy. The rest of the school kind of hated us! Not in a serious way, but we were annoying, we were insanely in love with each other.”

As well as “Daydreamers” they also wrote a song called “Forward”, which had a profound effect on Viemose. “It was a song that I sang in a totally different way, I’d never sounded like that before. We had a rehearsal that I recorded and I remember listening to it on a train ride from Copenhagen to Aarhus and it was insane. I could feel it in my body, there was something very physical that happened to me that I didn’t know I could feel. I’d never played music that loud before. I did lot of electronic, minimalistic stuff, so it was insane to be playing in a band like that, it was a really big thing.”

Lund remembers the exact date - 2 January 2014 – that Lowly decided to regroup and see if they were as good as they remembered. “We played a bit and decided to record the songs just for the fun of it, because we knew they were good.” Staub then set up a concert supporting Traams in Aarhus. For Viemose, it was a eureka moment. “We were so honoured to meet those guys. Their Facebook page was called ‘Traamsband’, so I was like ‘we have to be Lowlyband’, we owe them everything. When we played they were so thrilled by what we did and said ‘OK, that works’, it was such a surprise.” Schannong says they sat in the bar with Traams all evening and realised they were on to something. “I really had the feeling that ‘OK, this real band really likes us and they’re telling us we’re a real band.’”

Traams gave them a list of albums to listen to, which Viemose still has a picture of on her phone, including Wire’s Pink Flag and Chairs Missing, Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets, Slint’s Spiderland, Fugazi’s The Argument, Television’s Marquee Moon and “The Cocteau Twins, all of their albums.”

Viemose describes the night as “the turning point; they just saw us as a band.” Schannong agrees: “You’re totally right and also the whole international view, we’d all been Danish artists trying to break through in Denmark, it was so crazy when they said ‘You should play in England, your music would fit perfectly there.’ It really opened our view on what we could do with our music.”

All five members of Lowly have very distinct musical tastes, which Viemose believes goes some way to explaining why their music sounds the way it does. “We have different musical backgrounds and we just started creating a sound very fast without getting to know each other, or adapting or bending our tastes, so it became a melting pot of weirdness and individuals. We haven’t been rehearsing in a garage for ten years, it is that weird, but luckily it works.”

Schannong continues “It’s kind of weird that we agree on Lowly, we have such different taste in music, but when it comes to Lowly we really agree on what’s awesome and what’s not, we never argue about the music.”

“It’s not like I don’t like your taste in music,” Viemose tells Schannong. “You have all that rock noise stuff, like The Velvet Underground that I didn’t listen to that much before and I have a very electronic background and power ballads and stuff.” Lund jokes if Celine Dion is her thing, which she bats back with “Not really! Toni Braxton is my thing and the 90s, I like that.”

As with the way they formed, their signing to Bella Union was also fortuitous. Raymonde played them on his radio show which prompted Lowly to invite him to see them live. After their show at the Spot festival in Denmark in 2015 Raymonde sent them a message on Twitter saying ‘you guys are welcome to join the family any day.’

Viemose says “We signed to them in twelve hours. He’s like that, he’s very spontaneous - when he feels something, he knows it.” Schannong echoes the sentiment and says how much they value Raymonde’s opinion. “He reacts so strongly to music that moves him. We know we’re doing something right when he writes ‘I have tears in my eyes right now…’, then it’s a good song.”

Talk of being emotionally moved by music brings the conversation to the previous evening’s concert, which was one of the most affecting performances I’ve ever seen.

The Copenhagen Philharmonic had two more established bands on the festival bill and Viemose describes their decision to perform with Lowly as “definitely a leap of faith, they were so sure of the other two acts, When Saints Go Machine and Mew. They sold them both out as double concerts, so we were kind of the joker.” The orchestra’s arrangers listened to Heba however “and they could really hear all the layers in it”, before she adds one of the understatements of the year, “it’s a pretty good record for an orchestra.”

The orchestral arrangements were put together as a collective endeavour by Lund and Staub and their friends from the Aarhus Academy, Sebastian Zawadzki and Christian Balvig where they built the scores via Dropbox.

Lund describes the method as an organic one. “We all started on different songs and then you could just put things on top. We wrote until we didn’t have any more ideas, it was a really nice way to do it.” They looked at the melodies on Heba and thought about which orchestral instruments would work best. ”All of the instruments had separate scores; most of them are just chords but played in different ways. Some of it was ‘it would be nice to have this melody on this part’ and then you write it, so it could be horns playing and you think ‘OK, that might work’. It was funny with “Prepare The Lake”, Kasper had written something that was intensely fast, what the violins had to play was almost not possible, but they did it.”

Schannong laughs when she recalls the difference between Lowly’s and Zawadzki and Balvig’s software. “Christian and Sebastian were real pros and the MIDI sounds they had were a lot more expensive than ours, so sometimes when Thomas was presenting something it sounded a bit different and then when Christian played it, it sounded like an amazing, very expensive film score. It was very funny.”

Whilst the planning for the concert took four months, Viemose reveals that they only rehearsed with orchestra for three days before the show, which was also the first time the members of the Copenhagen Philharmonic saw the score.

“We learned that classical musicians, if they play on something and there’s a mistake they say ‘Make this better next time we play it’, or ‘Remember this feeling here…’ They don’t rehearse it, they just move on to the next song. We were like, ‘We could play it maybe three times?’ but they write it in the score, so that next time they know how to do it.” She laughs before saying that “it kind of freaked us out a little bit.” Schannong explains the difference compared to their own shows. “We want to do it until we feel good about it, but you just have to do your stuff and be very good and make sure you practice. It’s really impressive; they’re so skilled, they can look at the scores and just play it while looking at the conductor at the same time.”

The different approach that the orchestra took getting used to though, Viemose explains “The first day they were playing it, but there wasn’t the emotion in it and that freaked me out a little bit, it sounded alright, but it wasn’t great. On the second day, I was really stressed because it was so intense and it still wasn’t perfect and we just had three days to do it.” Schannong had been told that the first rehearsal wouldn’t be perfect “they don’t do it that well until the concert, where they really get into it.” The moment everything truly clicked was when they played together at the concert. Viemose has a palpable sense of relief in her voice when she tells me ”It was funny to experience, something changed and then they played differently, the conductor was different, they were much more emotional.”

One thing that really stood out on the night was that Lowly played some new arrangements of the songs. Viemose says “It’s very much like us to do something weird, it shouldn’t be easy…” Schannong echoes this with “Yes, ‘we’re playing the entire album and playing it in a different way’!” What do they think the rearrangements will mean for the songs going forward, the new elements sounded like integral parts of the songs, such as on “No Hands” for example. Viemose deadpans that “It’s just the fact that we might play “No Hands.” They tell me they’d only played the song once before, but it didn’t quite work.

On “No Hands” there were sections that just featured the orchestra and Viemose says it gave her the time to absorb and marvel at their playing. “That was the moment when I really felt the orchestra the most and got a way into it, it’s the first time it’s been that emotional.

When we rehearsed the conductor was very concentrated and I was thinking ‘He’s not moving that much’ but at the concert he was dancing, it was so nice and in that song I was so lucky that I could just turn around and look at everything.” Schannong says she was also blown away by the version with the orchestra. “I had an amazing experience with “No Hands", it was really great when Soffie started jumping around, I got chills and I was thinking ‘Yes, just jump around!’ and there was this amazing outro on it.”

Given that twenty-five orchestral musicians had learned their songs, what was it like when Lowly met them? Viemose says “It was a little bit weird, you would like to go over and say ‘Hey, my name is…’ to all of them, but it’s a very different workflow that they have as musicians and you have to be on your toes.” Lund adds it would have been nice to “sit and talk and have a coffee, but they’re on the clock. They need fifteen minutes before the rehearsals start to tune their instruments and get their fingers warm and then they play until four and they’re off.”

Viemose thinks that the orchestra’s preparations necessitate the different approach. “There’s the physical stuff, like with the horns, they’re very professional and they kind of save themselves. If they’re going to play for a whole day they won’t give it their all because it’s going to hurt their body, so that the concert is an elite performance.”

Viemose compares the evening to their second appearance at The Spot festival. “We played in this big concert hall, it was an insane concert, but afterwards I was… ‘I have no idea how that was’, I didn’t feel anything, but then I met people who started crying just talking about it and I got really emotional, it’s the same with last night. I need to hear from people how it was and then I can understand what we do.” She thinks it’s the same with Heba, Viemose or Schannong tell me that they haven’t listened to it since it was recorded - when they checked SoundCloud to see how many plays it had, they did so with the sound turned down.

“No, I don’t listen to it, when people tell me about “No Hands”, it’s just a song to me, but the fact that people really take it in, that makes me emotional, that’s so important to me. It’s really the reaction and it’s such a privilege that we are giving something to people and they are reacting to it.” Perhaps all my talking about the song prompts a change of heart as later that evening Viemose sends me a message saying, “Just listened to “No Hands” for the first time in almost 10 months. It was a good feeling :)”

We come back to her earlier point about being physically moved by music. “Sometimes it moves me if you can feel it, if it’s really loud and intense and we’re dancing and jumping and screaming and everybody’s in it, then it moves me. When we recorded it, I just felt fine.”

She explains that the writing process is more visceral than recording. “When we’ve just written a song, I feel awesome. There’s something in the songs when we’ve just made them, or if we’ve just written something where it’s ‘this is exactly how I’m feeling', that’s fantastic, but if we play it a lot it gets into this other form. I don’t want to sound completely detached from it, but it’s a funny thing.”

They recorded Heba in fifteen days and Schannong says “We had this list of songs to record and it was ‘on this day we do this and on this day we do this…’ where things were ‘OK, now it sounds good, let’s move on.’ We kept on going until everyone said ‘I think we have it now’. It was very pragmatic.”

The evening with the Copenhagen Philharmonic was also pragmatic in terms of organisation, but ultimately about the emotion of playing live. Schannong reflects on how she was feeling before they went on stage. “I was really nervous, for the first two songs my hands were shaking, it was crazy, I had to play this guitar figure and it was so difficult. I was really worried about all the silent passages, every time I pressed a pedal I was thinking ‘I’m making noise!’”

Viemose recalls the moment she had to ask Schannong a question before they walked onstage the night before. “You had to say the lyrics of “Still Life” to me because I thought I couldn’t remember them. I was just ‘Did I just make this lyric up?’ Is the first word ‘embrace’? That’s the worst thing - when you’re singing and your brain is ‘What’s the next word?’ and then it comes out before you start freaking out. Especially on “Not So Great After All”, because it’s only one word at a time, “Healing… Water…” I’m just hoping that my mouth is going to do something. I was really nervous too, but I take it and use it in an aggressive way.”

Schannong says “I think it was the whole excitement and nervousness and the fact that you really have to listen to the orchestra, because usually we have this rhythm when Steffen is playing and we know where we are, but you really have to focus and use the energy and concentrate on what the orchestra is playing and where they are.”

Viemose adds “On “Words” it felt like there was a click track, because all I could hear was Kasper’s synth. It’s a pretty insane arrangement and if you fuck it up it’s really hard to get it back. So I said “Turn up Kasper’s synth so it’s the only thing I can hear.” It was weird singing just to synths, knowing that there was also a whole band and orchestra playing.”

Whilst Lowly would love to repeat the experience of playing with the Copenhagen Philharmonic, they think it may be a one-off, for timing, as well as financial reasons. Whilst they’ve done what they set out to do, there’s a bittersweet-ness in Viemose’s voice about their shared experience with the orchestra and a touching respect for the bond they developed. “I think that now we’ve gone through that with them, there’s a different kind of bond between us, there’s a connection there.” Lund says “it was so nice to talk to them afterwards, because I think it was really difficult to know how they feel about the music, but afterwards they were all so happy.”

One loose end they didn’t tie up was the appearance of Father John Misty backstage. Viemose says “It was kind of like a ghost! Everybody was talking about him being somewhere, but we didn’t get to say hello. I didn’t see him, I just heard the rumour, so I was like ‘Fuck!’, but it’s such a weird thing to talk about because you also just want to say ‘It’s just him you know…” Lund adds with a shrug “then we found out afterwards that he’d been sitting in our backstage room playing the piano.”

Given that they rearranged some of the songs, I’m curious about their writing process. Lund explains that, (as with the way he, Staub, Balvig and Zawadzki created the orchestral arrangements via Dropbox), Lowly also use it to share new music they’ve written and to decide if it’s something they want to work on. Viemose describes these files as “a finished sketch that we bring into a rehearsal and then we build on it. Kasper is really fast at harmonising and is a melodic wizard, but if there’s an obvious melody in the chords sometimes I try to force myself away from it.”

“I try and think ‘How would Kate Bush sing this?’ or go really against what my body wants to do, Kasper does the same with chord changes, if it would be logical to have a minor then he tries to do a major chord.” The role of drummer Lundtoft is also key, Viemose describes his contribution as “creating all the songs and really colouring where we’re going with it. He’s not caught in it having to be comfortable, he really wants to surprise himself.”

They debuted a brilliant new song called “Go For a Walk” at the concert and they’re already thinking about recording album number two, where they want the sessions to be more free-flowing and less time constricted. Schannong says “I would really love if we could record some things and then get inspired by the production and then react to it and write something inspired by the things that we have created.”

I tell them it makes me think of how the songs were played with the orchestra, where they found different nuances and the songs become more organic? Viemose says “that’s definitely it, that would be really nice. When Frank Ocean’s Blonde came out, I felt like that’s how you should make an album, it has so many dynamics in it. I really want to make an album like that, where it feels like stuff has been left until its ready, because of time and patience.”

Schannong agrees with the word patience. “It’s a really good word, because it feels he sometimes stepped out of the ideas and then entered the songs again in a way.” They make it clear that they’re really happy with Heba but Schannong says “We didn’t get the perspective of entering something again, but hopefully it’s (album number two) not going to sound like Frank Ocean!”

As we wrap up the conversation, we return to the night before. Viemose says she’s still taking in what happened. “I think I’m maybe in a bit of shock. I was really overwhelmed, but I was also a little bit weirded out by the whole thing, because it was so big.”

Schannong says the evening has made her reappraise Heba’s songs. “I really had the feeling in the days before Heba was released that people were looking forward to it and that was really nice, because they had time to build it up in such a good way, but I really think that this concert has changed the way I want to play the songs in the following concerts. I think it’s been very important for us to play it. I really understood some of the songs a lot better and I got ideas on how the emotions of the songs could be. Kasper felt the same, that this week has been very important for us and for these songs. I’m really looking forward to opening the songs up again; it feels like we’re doing that.”

Schannong says that even though they’d been planning the concert for a long time, the morning after it was done she’d forgotten that it had actually happened. “It’s been entering my mind for so many months; I was walking around this morning thinking ‘When are we playing?’ and it was ‘Ah, we did it…’ There were so many people saying ‘wasn’t it awesome’ and ‘wasn’t it the craziest experience?’ And it was a very, very good experience but I think I have to let it grow on me. Because we also released Heba on the same day, it kind of feels like it will last a bit longer. I have a feeling that they’re very closely connected in some way, so it’s kind of starting now, it’s like the beginning of things.”

A week after the concert, I send Lowly an email to see how they felt about it with the benefit of hindsight. The response from Viemose sums up the night wonderfully. She writes about how proud she was of what they did, that it was “a lot to take in and a lot of attention to get, which I am not always so comfortable with. But I think it was an incredible night.” She returns to the idea of giving something back to the audience and orchestra and the special feeling of their songs connecting with people. Her final sentence is a beautiful summary of where Lowly have come from, what they achieved that night at the Konservatoriets Koncertsal and where they’re headed from here.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what Nanna said, that our music is sort of opened up afresh with this concert and the release of Heba, because someone took it seriously and took it for art. Sometimes you need other people’s reactions towards what you’re doing to understand what it is. I felt that I understood it a little bit better that evening.”