Northern Lights

Highasakite are their own Northern Light, picking up international traction thanks to their 2013 breakout hit Since Last Wednesday and a little bit of love from one Justin Vernon, who wrote on Twitter, following a live show at Øya Festival, “Beautiful music from Highasakite… holy shit this was a crazy band! I loved it!” A glowing review if there ever was one, and surely enough reason for Australians to come out in force for their two shows Down Under.

“We played on the same stage at a festival and he just watched our show and tweeted about it,” explains the band’s lead singer and creative force Ingrid Helene  Håvik. “That was really nice and flattering of him.”

Håvik mumbles and stumbles, potentially uncomfortable with the press expectations that come with releasing a global debut and heading to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time.

Their name is nicked from Elton John’s Rocket Man (“She packed my bags last night pre-flight, zero hour 9am, and I’m gonna be high as a kite by then”), which Håvik says she was listening to a lot at the time the band formed, although she is not a big Elton John fan: “We just really needed a name.”

When The Music talks to Håvik, it is early morning in Norway.  Håvik mumbles and stumbles, potentially uncomfortable with the press expectations that come with releasing a global debut and heading to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time. Her heavily accented English, although sometimes stilted, is no barrier in music, and seems to come almost naturally to her – as does their lavish pop sensibility.  Even though Håvik studied at jazz school, her vocal aesthetic drifts toward the pop end of the spectrum.

“It was just how I wrote the songs,” Håvik says. “It just came natural to me. I really didn’t fit into the jazz music stuff.”

As a child Håvik played the violin, and her mother was a singing teacher, which meant a house full of song. Then came the “jazz music stuff”: “When I went to high school I just really liked listening to jazz, especially Norwegian jazz with Norwegian vocalists that I was really inspired by, who were really different from everything else.”

But it’s the “jazz music stuff” that brought the five musicians together in the first place: Håvik, Håvik’s now-ex-boyfriend Trond Bersu on drums, Øystein Skar on synths, Marte Eberson on synths, and Kristoffer Lo on guitar, percussion and flugabone (a trombone with wet vents). Håvik is matter-of-fact about their evolution from a three- to a five-piece. She attributes the decision to release Silent Treatment as their international debut to this evolution.

“When we finished Silent Treatment, it was two years ago; we’d worked with the Norwegian one and we were kind of done with that music, and we were three making the first one, and now we’re five in the band, so we’re finished with that music and we want to go forward as a five-piece band. We met each other at different schools like music academies and Folk Colleges around the country, and everyone knew each other from different places. It was me, the drummer, and Øystein, the keyboard player, and it was kind of hard to just be three people because we wanted a bigger sound and it was a lot of hard work. So we just had to be five.”

Håvik and Bersu met at Trondheim Jazz Conservatory and formed the band, before moving to Oslo and bringing in Skar, then Eberson and Lo. Many artists would take the plunge further, to the UK or the US (as so many of our own do!), but although  Håvik would “really like to do that”, she admits candidly that, as her boyfriend works in Oslo, she “can’t move away from him”. “It’s just something that people do very often, I think to move to Oslo, where it’s the biggest city – generally a small city kind of lacks opportunity; [we moved for] a little bit more opportunity.”

Håvik says that the songs on Silent Treatment are not drawn from her personal experiences, that she doesn’t really know whether the cohesiveness of the album was deliberate. She does recall that she was listening to a lot of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Vernon’s second record under the moniker: “I just remember listening to that album on repeat. I just went into the studio with a really good producer [Kåre Chr], and started making it bit by bit. I don’t really know how I would describe it, I think I would describe the sound as really big and orchestral almost. Just a lot of details.

“I think we just went that way because it just went that way. We were just making stuff and putting on more and more stuff and then all of a sudden it just sounded like that. It’s just an in-the-process kind of thing.”

That layering of sound, thanks to the use of different types of synthesisers, acoustic piano, acoustic drums, and electronic drums, means that the album has been described as “atmospheric”, drawing upon the beautiful yet wild Norwegian landscape.

“I don’t know, maybe that’s easier for you to say because I live here all the time, and everything I do is probably a product of Norway, the country I live in, so I don’t really think about that because my environment is part of who I am.”

Another part of who Håvik is, obviously, it doesn’t need to be said, is that she is a woman, playing in a band with another woman, Eberson. Has this presented any difficulties for the emerging group?

“I try to not think like that, I just always forget about it. I think it’s really hard for Marte [Eberson] in the band because she’s an instrumentalist and it’s a more man-driven profession to be playing an instrument, but as a vocalist I have a lot of female co-workers and I have more female vocalist friends than I have male, so we don’t really get that pressure as much as the instrumentalist females. People are more skeptical to their ability as a musician I think.

“It just sucks when it happens, that’s all. When you get a pithy comment from a mean guy it really sucks. She’s just a really talented musician and I think that speaks for itself so you don’t have to do anything, you just have to prove everyone wrong.”

There are murmurs that following their debut Australian sojourn this month that Highasakite will on our shores again in February 2015; they’ve let it slip in interviews, which of course set the meter running on the Laneway line-up rumours. Considering the epic scope of their live sets, including the thumbs-up from Vernon, and Lo playing the guitar with a violin bow, we can only hope they return.

At the end of it all, Håvik could never have expected to end up in this position, taking her band to the other side of the world. She just hoped it would happen. “It’s just going to be a whole new side of the world. I’ve never been in the Underworld! [laughs]”