Carl Michael von Hausswolff (born 1956) is a composer, visual artist, and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. His main tools are recording devices (camera, tape deck, radar, sonar) used in an ongoing laboratory analysis of electricity, frequency, architectural space, and paranormal electronic interference. Major exhibitions add up Manifesta (1996), documenta X (1997), the Johannesburg Biennial (1997), Sound Art – Sound as Media at ICC in Tokyo (2000), the Venice Biennale (2001, 2003, and 2005), and Portikus, Frankfurt (2004). Von Hausswolff received a Prix Ars Electronica honor for Digital Music in 2002.
Von Hausswolff was born in Linköping. He is an practiced in the take action of Friedrich Jürgenson, an electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) researcher who claimed to have detected voices of the dead hidden in radio static. Von Hausswolff’s own sound works are pure, intuitive studies of electricity, frequency, and tone. Collaborators add together Erik Pauser, with whom he worked as Phauss (1981-1993), Leif Elggren, and John Duncan (artist). He furthermore collaborates in the same way as EVP speculative Michael Esposito, filmmaker Thomas Nordanstad, and next Graham Lewis (Wire) and Jean-Louis Huhta in the band OSCID.
Von Hausswolff is noted for creating unquestionable works that “charge the expose with subliminal force” using “drones, radio signals, and sonic frequencies”.
Von Hausswolff is co-monarch (with Elggren) of the conceptual art project The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (KREV): all areas of no-man’s land, territories between national boundaries on both house and sea, and digital and mental spaces. This nation has its own national anthem, flag, coat of arms, currency, citizens, and ministers.
Recent audio works include “800 000 Seconds in Harar” (Touch), “Matter Transfer” (iDeal), “The Wonderful World of Male Intuition” (Oral), “There Are No Crows Flying Around the Hancock Building” (Lampo), “Rats”, “Maggots”, and “Bugs” (all three upon Laton), “Three Overpopulated Cities …” (Sub Rosa), “A Lecture on Disturbances in Architecture” (Firework Editions), and “Ström” and “Leech” (both upon Raster-Noton).
Other visual works include “Red Pool” (Cities upon the Move, Bangkok, 1999), “Red Night” (SITE Santa Fe, 1999), “Red Code” (CCA Kitakyushu, 2001), “Red Empty” (Lampo/WhiteWalls, Chicago, 2003), and “Red Mersey” (Liverpool Biennial, 2004).
He is plus the curator and producer of the sound-installation “freq out”, shown at Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Henie-Onstad Center (Oslo), Sonambiente (Berlin), and new places.
Around the year 1986, he formed the Swedish independent label Radium 226.05 and in 1990 he formed the label Anckarström.
In 2012, Von Hausswolff was heavily criticized for allegedly using ashes of Holocaust victims from the Majdanek engagement camp in a painting. As of 12 December 2012, the Martin Bryder Gallery in Lund had pulled the painting from exhibition. In 2017, his electro-acoustic composition Still Life – Requiem, was released upon LP. The music uses lonely sounds from the above-mentioned ashes.
In 2019, von Hausswolff formed a supplementary musical collaboration like the Icelandic musician Jónsi (Sigur Rós), which they named Dark Morph. On 10 May 2019, they released their first album, also titled Dark Morph. The project “promises to examine the ramifications of ongoing environmental collapse to the oceans and its inhabitants.” The album consists mainly of ambient sounds, often simulating the sounds of animals and nature, and contains completely few actual melodies.
Carl Michael is the daddy of musician/composer Anna von Hausswolff.
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