Iris & Hedvig: The watcher and the mind (Single, 2014)

Tell us about yourselves, how did you meet and what did you do before the start of Iris & Hedvig?

Iris: I studied at art school for two years but eventually got restless and decided to move to Christiania. I used to frequently hang out at this smokey jazz club, which inspired me tremendously.

Hedvig: I was backpacking in India for quite some time, I worked at this organic plantage up in the mountains, that’s probably where I wrote my first songs. Eventually I ended up going back to Gothenburg and started at music school, which is where I met Iris.

How long have you been making music together?

Iris: Since 2011? It must be. We spent a year together in Berlin, staying in this super cold apartment with no heat whatsoever. We had to run the stove at full blast with open doors to keep warm and boil water in pots to shower in. One day we found this old run-down ghost house where we ended up camping for a couple of weeks. Apart from a toilet the only other thing in the house was this old exercise bicycle from the 80’s. Anyway, this was where we started doing music together, nothing like the stuff they were teaching us at music school.

Hedvig: Iris met a boy and stayed on for a while in Berlin, she was living with some really cool Irish musicians in a collective, and I moved back to Gothenburg. I wasn’t doing music for a while and started taking lessons in croquis, but when Iris finally moved back, we realised how much we had missed each other and moved in together. Living really simply, just writing music again.

What and who inspires you?

Iris: Dancing. I love dancing.

Hedvig: Yeah, we used to experiment with lucid dreams and astral projection. We both use a lot of personal material when we write, almost like bits out of our diaries, or like a dream journal maybe?

Iris: Definitely, also literature, I love everything from William Shakespeare to Astrid Lindgren or Tolkien. Other things that inspire us are Alphonse Mucha, Ellen Rogers, Tove Jansson, Swedish forests, John Bauer, Gustav Klimt, Ebbe Schön, Astronomy, Shamanism, Salvador Dali.

What are your plans for the future?

Hedvig: We just got signed by Loud Attic Records, which we are super excited about, we’ve been in the studio for a while now recording and will be releasing our first single on the 31st of March. After that, we’ll see… We obviously want to do gigs and will keep releasing good stuff!