Band der Woche: Spader Kung

Spader Kung – das sind Matilda Grähs, Anna Welinder und Klara Viriden aus Malmö. Musikalisch bewegt sich das Trio zwischen Punk, Post-Punk und einer eindringlichen, düsteren Emotionalität. Ausgangspunkt ist oft das Unausgesprochene – mit ihrer Musik erforschen die drei Künstlerinnen „die dunkelsten Winkel ihrer Gedanken und Herzen, um daraus einen Song zu machen“.

Foto: © Johan Rönnow

Im Interview sprechen die drei  über ihre Anfänge als Band,  die musikalischen Einflüsse und die besondere Rolle, die ihre Heimatstadt Malmö in ihrem Sound spielt.

Who is behind Spader Kung? What made you decide to start the project?
Anna Welinder, Klara Viridén and Matilda Grähs. We had always wanted to start some kind of band but never got around to doing so. Then suddenly the stars aligned and the band kind of came to life by itself, after Anna had met a German drummer (not Klara!) at a nightclub, who convinced her to come and jam with her.

Can you tell us a few things about the connection between you three and your journey into music?
A common denominator for all of us is that none of us had any previous experience playing in bands before starting Spader Kung, or playing our instruments for that matter (except Matilda, she could play some guitar before we started the band). When we were scouting for a drummer, Matilda met Klara and asked her “Do you play the drums?” and Klara said “No”. Then Matilda asked “Do you want to play the drums?”and she said “Yes”. Maybe you can say that that’s the core principle of the whole band: it’s more important to WANT to do something, than to do it perfectly – you can always learn along the way. We also have a similar taste in music, which is very important when you write your music together like we do.

If you had to describe your music in terms of not music, what would you say?
Steel-flesh, face fuck baby sweetheart darling with a longing heart, a caged animal gnawing on ist own limbs out of pure desperation, or just out of boredom, or something like that.

What are you looking for in music? What are the boundaries that you look to explore with music?
It’s hard to give a short and cohesive answer to what we are looking for and looking to explore, since all three of us write the songs and all of us have our own (sometimes hidden) motivations. However, the relation between audience and performer, stage versus crowd, to see and to be seen, or watched and perceived – that’s one of our biggest motivations. We love playing live more than anything else, feeling the energy of the crowd, and that’s probably one of the main reasons we keep doing music, to be honest.

What is sound to you?
Anna: I heard someone say that music is the most direct form of art, because it affects you directly without having to pass through the intellectual parts of your brain first. When you hear a chord being played or a note being sung in a song, you don’t think “what does this mean?”, you just feel something, instantly. And to me, that’s what makes sound, and music, some kind of almost supernatural phenomenon. Or maybe just the most natural thing? It’s this thing that we just know instinctively, without having to intellectualize, and that’s really fascinating. 

What are your first musical memories? When did you first fall in love with sound? How have your early musical influences shaped your current music project?
Anna: One of my earliest musical memories is from when I was a kid and spent the weekends at my dad’s house. He was a huge Rolling Stones fan and for some reason he had this weird little routine of putting on a Rolling Stones CD on really loud volume when we were going to sleep. Then he closed the bedroom door, and I remember falling asleep to the sound of drums banging from the other room. Overall my dad played a big role in how I learned to perceive music and the wide spectrum of feelings music can evoke, whether that meant falling asleep to the Rolling Stones, dancing to Little Richard or crying to „Everybody hurts“ by REM. I think that has influenced how I write music to this day – I want people to feel something.
Matilda: I grew up with mostly classic rock’n’roll and punk like AC/DC, Motörhead, The Clash, Imperiet. I think I can still remember every song on the albums in the pile of CDs next to the stereo in our kitchen that my dad listened to while doing the dishes. But finding punk as a kid, punk as all it can be such as music and politics, an alternative way of life, an attractive attitude towards life and most of all: contra culture and fuck you. Patti Smith and Horses are important too, women in rock and the actual possibility of an alternative way of life than routines routines routines boredom and alienation. A secret dream-starter that got to be with Spader Kung.
Klara: We didn’t really listen that much to music in my home growing up. I remember my older sister used to love falling asleep to heavy metal and that freaked me out. My dad played a lot of jazz on his piano but I never really cared. I’d say my first strong memory of music was getting to try the drums at a music school’s open house. I really loved it but the classes filled up super fast and I was offered to play the saxophone instead. Then I got stuck playing that for four years until I tried playing guitar at school and understood how nice it felt to play an instrument that you actually like the sound of. Playing guitar led me to bands such as The Cure and Swedish punk-band Masshysteri, which I became obsessed with. But at the same time I also discovered bands like The Magnetic Fields and loved them. I think it comes down to lyrics for me a lot of the time, and melodies that pierce the heart. I try to carry that with me into Spader Kung.

How do your surroundings impact your art?
We all live in Malmö and it has probably impacted our music in many ways. Malmö is not the most beautiful city – it’s flat and grey and extremely windy, with no real nature to be found (except for the sea) and lots of big industrial areas. Our sound is a lot like our surroundings, quite cold and harsh maybe? We used to measure how good our songs are by how good they feel to listen to while you walk down a dark windy road late at night – that says a lot about our music and how it’s influenced by our surroundings.

What themes are you currently drawn to in your work?
Our theme is and has always been one and the same: to explore the darkest corners of our brains and hearts, find something really sad/ugly/disturbing and make a song out of it. Our sound may have evolved over time, but the themes in the songs remain mostly the same. What makes us happy isn’t really that interesting to write about and perform.

A few months ago, you released your new album. How does the birth of a new composition happen for you? How does your compositional process work?
Usually someone in the band comes up with a piece of text and maybe some chords or an idea of how the music could sound, then we work on the composition together from there. While working on our latest album our producer Henryk Lipp was involved in the musical part of the composition quite a lot, which was both challenging and rewarding – challenging because we are not used to having to take someone else’s opinions on our music into consideration, and rewarding because Henryk gave us great ideas and pushed us in directions we probably never would have thought of otherwise.

What artistic influences, outside of music, have had a significant influence on how you approach your art?
We take a lot of inspiration from stories of all kinds – sometimes even children’s books (haha).

How would you describe the world you are trying to create during your performances?
It’s about escalating a feeling, the lyrics, or existence itself, and forcing the audience to internalize the emotions that belong to the song. If that’s not possible – scare them. Just to feel a single real little feeling once in a while, a feeling that doesn’t come from the head but has its roots deep in the gut, the fleshy heart.

What’s next for you? What are you most looking forward to?
We’re always looking forward to playing live, so hopefully that’s what’s next – a lot of gigs! We have some gigs planned in Sweden over the next couple of months, but our ambition is to start touring the rest of Europe in the near future. Don’t hesitate to book us! We are very nice people!!!

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