El Perro del Mar is the work of Swedish songstress Sarah Assbring. Across three LPs (2006's El Perro del Mar, 2008's From the Valley to the Stars, and 2009's Love is Not Pop) Assbring has authored a series of staggeringly sad, intensely beautiful tunes that repeat their simple lyrics like religious mantras. Love is Not Pop found Assbring collaborating with Rasmus Hagg of Gothenburg electro moodists Studio; the first time she'd ever worked with someone else.
Interview: 8 September 2009
Your music deals in universals, but seems intensely personal. Do you think listeners can get a sense of who you are as a human-being from it?
“Absolutely. If it wasn’t like that, I would consider my music lacking. Because, the most important thing for me is to speak from my heart, and to be honest to myself. What I say in my lyrics is like a concentrated version of who I am.”
There was a radical change between your first album [El Perro del Mar], which was about sadness, and your second, [From the Valley to the Stars] which was about happiness. If your music reflects who you are, was that how you were feeling when making each LP?
“Definitely. When I look back on these three records, they’re like diaries of my life. The first album came out of recovering from a hard time, dealing with sadness and loneliness. The second album dealt with existential questions about life and death, and came from embracing simple happiness and accepting death. I wanted to make a piece of art around those thoughts; and I spent a lot of time, in this isolated capsule where I felt like I was one with nature, thinking and daydreaming about those very romantic ideas. And then, after that, when my relationship that I had been in for a decade ended, I found myself being aware only of the present moment, dealing with the fact that it was ending. That is the reality of [Love is Not Pop]: not being able to save a relationship that’s falling apart. There was no time to look at the stars or think about the beauty of a flower or anything dreamy like that. It was a matter of being clear, and being brutally honest with myself, and my partner. But doing it through music, which is always the way that I do things.”
After working for so long in isolation, were you keen to collaborate with someone else on this album?
“I felt that everything was changing in my reality, in my personal life, so I wanted to change in my work, too. I think in a period when you’re involuntarily facing changes, you find yourself making conscious and unconscious changes alongside of that. So, I suddenly found it very important to collaborate with someone. I felt like I’d reached as far as I could by working alone, recording alone, producing alone. To be able to do something new I had to bring in someone else. A lot of things around this album had to do with changes: having to change, wanting to change, and embracing change.”
How did it feel relinquishing the control you’d always had over your music?
“The feeling in itself was strange, because up until that point I’d always been very sure that I wanted to be in control. But at that point in my life what was most exciting was letting go of control. I felt like the idea of being in control was, itself, an illusion.”
What did you learn through working with someone else?
“A lot of things. One thing which is really important: you have to face up to your ideas, and be really sure about them, and be really clear in communicating them. With someone else, you find yourself always feeling vulnerable: ‘Is this a good idea? A bad idea? Is this in bad taste?’ You always have to put yourself in a place where your ideas aren’t always accepted; which is not the case when you’re working alone, safe in your isolation. It felt so new and exciting: to have to fight for my own ideas. And, beyond that, there were so many things Rasmus taught me about pop; about making songs and producing. We worked so closely together, and were constantly throwing ideas around, so you’d learn things all the time. It was a very personal, very fruitful situation to be in.”
Will you take the things you’ve learnt and go back to working by yourself?
“I really feel like this experience has given me the possibility to do whatever I want to do. I can still continue working on my own, but I know now that I can work with other people without going insane, or driving other people insane. I really was scared of working with someone else, because I really was afraid that the initial vision would get lost in the collaboration. That’s always been my fear. But I was really proved wrong with this album. So, now I feel like continuing to work with someone else, maybe even continuing working with Rasmus. I felt like we could do so much more together, like we really just got started with this album.”
How did it feel having to explain your ideas to someone else, as opposed to just chasing them yourself?
“That’s the tricky thing with working with somebody. It all has to do with speaking the same language, and with something as abstract as music, you can say something and think that you mean the same thing as someone else, but you really may not. It’s like colors: we all have a different idea of what green is like, and it’s the same thing with music. So, working with someone else, it’s down to pure luck; whether you’ve chosen the right person or the wrong person. Rasmus and I didn’t know each other whether we started working, but we immediately felt like we were speaking the same musical language.”
What was it about Rasmus, or Studio’s music, that suggested to you that you’d work well together?
“I think, with Studio, what I’ve been attracted to most is the mystery around it, which makes it almost impossible to kind of dissect. That’s what I’m usually drawn to when it comes to music, or any type of artistic thing. I can’t see where this begins, or what’s the initial idea behind it, because it’s all so complex, and there are so many layers. The only thing you want to do is to listen to it, and get totally lost in it. Studio just draws me in with their grooves, their mysterious grooves; where there’s a darkness, a certain unspoken melancholy that’s just there, present in this otherwise sunny music. That’s the magic of Studio.”
