The Little Match Girl is a collaborative work by Anna Von Hausswolff and Matti Bye, two Swedish musicians acclaimed in their own right. As Hydra’s Dream they adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s short story of the same name into a musical narrative that explores the profoundly sad tale of The Little Match Girl in nine improvised pieces, touching on fragile, illusory pop, austere synth atmospherics and drowsy minimalism. Hydra’s Dream employ a fusion of the ancient and modern, similar in textures at times to Hypnotic Underworld by Japanese psychedelic travellers Ghost.
Her hands were almost dead with cold.
Following Andersen’s tale, the nine tracks each evoke a particular aspect of the girl’s journey. The basic story, first published in 1845, is that a poor young Copenhagen girl who sells matches in the street to make money for her father hides in a freezing alcove on New Year’s Eve for fear of returning home to be beaten for not making enough money back. To keep herself warm she strikes her matches individually and witnesses a series of hallucinations as hypothermia takes hold, including that of her dead grandmother, who the girl sees as beckoning her somewhere where her cold and fear will be no more.
Andersen believed it was ultimately a life-affirming ending as the girl was finally delivered from a life of degradation and suffering. Both Von Hausswolff, an admirer of Earth and Burzum, and Bye, an accomplished composer for film, are keenly aware of this, and moments of devastating beauty, most often due to Von Hausswolff’s vocals, emerge amid the more anxious and darker dominant sounds. The second song ‘The Little Match Girl’ begins with disorientated synths and a wandering piano, while Von Hausswolff’s shallow and wordless breathing perfectly evokes the incomprehension and desperation of the match girl.
“Hypothermia and death are the only two comfort zones we experience in this story.”
‘The Joys of a New Year’ corresponds to one of the match girl’s hallucinations in Andersen’s story, where she sees (through a cold stone wall) a New Year’s feast with a glorious plump goose, which jumps off the table and offers itself to the girl. A slow march which swells and rises seems to be indicating an overcoming of some sort, but then a harsher dissonant effect undercuts it and draws the song to an end, hauling the vision back to the grim reality experienced.
But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the old year.
The choice to create an improvised musical narrative based on a short story, a form in which every word or absence of language must be revisited continually to create the required emotional or stylistic effect, may seem a counter-intuitive one, but it centres the music on the character of the Little Match Girl rather than the techniques of the written story.
The events which she experiences are spontaneous. The repetitions within the improvised songs show the insistent cycles of thought which characterise a panicked and eventually deranged state of mind. The girl still acts though, on instinct, improvising her only chance of respite from her tragic existence.
