Imaginary Stockholm
Stina Nordenstam’s Dynamite
Dynamite is an album that disappeared. I don’t think I have ever had a friend who owned a copy. I didn’t even know of its existence when it was first released either. I had been obsessively playing her previous album, And She Closed Her Eyes, and had even programmed my stereo to play the CD each morning to wake me up, when my girlfriend at the time found Dynamite on sale for a low price and bought it for me as a gift. And She Closed Her Eyes was such a pretty, gentle album, with acoustic guitars, trumpets and harmonies. And thinking back now to my initial reaction when I played Dynamite for the first time, I guess I can understand that it was always going to have an uphill struggle into people’s hearts. It is a bleak and strange body of work. But is beautiful too. And I want to convince you that it has been criminally overlooked.
Stina Nordenstam also disappeared. She released only a handful of projects and hasn’t been seen in the music industry since 2004. She started out as a kind of jazz singer, but instead of the direct, robust and soulful vocal style this would usually suggest, Nordenstam sings extremely quietly. Her Swedish accent is often noticeable, and from her second album she almost stops projecting her voice entirely. It is possible her speaking voice may even be louder than her singing voice. And although I think that the voices of female singers all too often are described in this way, I will admit there is something undeniably child-like and innocent about her most famous single, Little Star. More often though, her voice has a bell-like quality, and she often sings with a cold, almost disinterested intonation.
Where the previous album had drawn on jazz and folk sounds, Dynamite opens with only an electric guitar. Then Stina’s voice comes in: Under your command, did I not do well? Was not my record fine? Under your command, wouldn’t I have walked straight through hell? And did I ever look down? Like many of the songs on this record, the text of Under Your Command can be read in several ways. Initially it seems to be a reproach to an ex-lover: I did everything that I could possibly be expected to do, she seems to say, and still this was not enough. But instead of an accusation, the apathetic vocal delivery turns her list of attributes into hopeless litany. She seems to have no expectation of convincing this person to change their mind about the end of the relationship. And then, many of the qualities she describes make me wonder whether this could genuinely be the voice of a soldier reminding their commanding officer of the inhumanities they practiced while they were under the authority of the military. Did I leave any trace? Was I not great telling lies? Was I not true to the cause? Did I not swallow my pride? Maybe this is not a normal break-up song. Perhaps the narrator of this song has been the other woman, conducting a secret affair that has now come to an end, a theme Nordenstam explicitly explores on a later album. As she continues to recite her rhetorical questions, the music opens out into a more complex soundscape comprised of a loud bass, stratchy distorted guitars and what sounds like two metal pipes being hit together. Nordenstam sings a wordless melodic line and her voice moves through the mix covered in a disturbing flanger effect. These first few minutes set the stage on which the rest of this album unfolds.
The title track sounds similar. Cold but close. Stina is a sad and quiet voice backed with spare, up-front instrumentation, but now a string section has been added. The lyrics seem also to be a continuation of the story, and we start to get a possible answer to what the first song was about: A thing you said once made me wonder / What can go away as fast as love? After an unexpected orchestral break and a short moment of silence, we find the narrator of the song walking slowly in circles in the other person’s house, threatening to literally or figuratively blow up their home.
It would be difficult to overstate how good the writing on this album is. In my opinion, these songs could have been printed as poems and would already have been powerful. But now here we are on track three, and Stina is playing a riff that sounds like it belongs on a heavy mental record, and she has given it an arrangement that sounds something like Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, two years before that album was made. In fact, much of Dynamite would be extremely heavy, and even resemble doom rock at times, were it not for the fact that the guitars maintain a thin, spacey quality and the drums are often mixed extremely far back, made to sound like machinery or gun shots.
I really think that the gun shot allusion might be deliberate, because themes of violence and death appear repeatedly throughout Dynamite. It wasn’t until years after I first heard it that I discovered the song Mary Bell is about an abused girl who murdered two other young children in England in the 1960s. Here Nordenstam deliberately uses the child-like element of her voice to create what sounds like children singing nursery songs in the background between verses about Mary Bell’s own fear and anxiety. Nordenstam seems to want to soothe Bell’s fear and horror, reminding her of the protection night provides. Another song, The Man with The Gun, has Stina not only visualising death as a man with a weapon, but apparently welcoming him. She has been waiting for death. She has somehow expected him to come earlier. Maybe she even feels some relief now that he has finally arrived. The closing lines of this song are perhaps the most haunting on the record: This is going to hurt me / I do know why you’ve come / But I’ve got this feeling / That it’s already been done.
It is of course impossible to know, but it is also difficult not to theorise that something must have happened, either in Stina Nordenstam’s life or her inner world, to make this album necessary. Something that almost destroyed her, but instead caused her to create these songs. The more I have experienced in my own life, the more I have retrospectively come to understand about the bleakest and most difficult periods I have lived through, the more incredible I consider these songs to be. They are full of badly wounded characters wishing for peace. And failing this, hoping for revenge. They have been with me all this time. Almost 20 years. To me, this album sounds like an unfinished process of healing.
I remember reading that much of the recording of this record was done in Stina Nordenstam’s apartment in Stockholm. As a result, Stockholm has taken on mythical qualities in my mind. When I first listened to Dynamite in the late 1990s I hardly knew where Sweden was. Now I have been living in Scandinavia for 7 years, and I have still never been to Stockholm. I have long had fantasies about meeting Nordenstam and making music with her. I know this will almost certainly never happen. But sometimes I think the greater disappointment would be visiting the city where this album was made, and finding no trace of its atmosphere, no echo of the environment the songs create. This is surely no reason to avoid a city though, and so for years I have wanted to make a kind of pilgrimage to Stockholm in honour of Nordenstam, and especially in honour of this album. Even if I find no trace of Dynamite in the streets of the city, I will know Stina’s apartment is hidden down a side-street somewhere. Her home is there, and it is just as I picture it. And she is there too, just as I have always imagined her, playing her distorted electric guitar in her bedroom and singing quietly into a microphone.
