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"Or we could stay right here/Stuck in our bodies and stuck in these fears"
Marika Hackman’s music is about bodies. The sounds relay a physical experience and the way we inhabit the earthly realm—bones, skin, and blood—but just when the mortal elements seem established, things take a macabre, spooky turn. At the heart of her songs is this emphasis on melancholia, it's not a sound or genre that defines her works, but a feeling. The swing between spook and spine, the interplay of anatomy and phantasm—it's these extremes that define the English singer's debut mini-album That Iron Taste, released earlier this year.
Hackman, 21, makes mostly acoustic music that draws on medieval musical structures and centers on the lyrical—yet she’s hesitant to call herself a folk artist. The constant pressure to pigeon-hole and define artists, particularly women who play guitar, irks her.
“People use the word 'folk' a bit too much, it’s always a slightly lazy term,” she said. “It’s assigned to lots of artists just because they started playing an acoustic guitar. I feel like my music is rooted more in the folk in that medieval sense. It’s kind of a very old music. I find that, especially with female singer songwriters, you get pigeon-holed very quickly. So I’m trying very hard to make my own identity and show everyone what I’m about. ”
Maybe there’s a reason that people want to use the distinction of folk with Marika, moreso than with other artists. Her odd themes—the natural world, a song about cannibalism, meandering, choral-based missives—fit most easily into the rural odds-and-ends music of the country.
Partially refined by the production efforts of Charlie Andrew (of Alt-J fame), the songs are still rough around the edges, purposefully strange and unraveled. The openness of acoustic guitars and other stringed instruments allows for this kind of rough-hewn quality—in a way, the guitar has always been an instrument of experimentation and rebellion, an instrument of individuality.
“I’ve always kind of written music, just because I felt like it,” she said. “Even when I was really little, six or seven, I’d sit at the piano and make up little things. I started off on the piano but playing the guitar felt a lot more natural and a lot more organic when it came to songwriting—because I didn’t really have to think about it so much. I’m not a guitarist. I’m more of just a songwriter really, that’s just kind of how I get it out. I know that there’s lots of things I probably do on the guitar that proper guitarists would be freaking out about.”
Despite her focus on acoustic elements and an ancient, wayward approach to music-making, Marika is unafraid to mix new elements into her sound. Her spiraling, imagist-leaning lyrics feel like they were found in an attic or tucked away in an old trunk, but there’s still hints of synthesizer on the tracks, handclaps and other keyboard noises—even a strangely played mandolin and a tiny sitar made their into the the mix.
“I had this little keyboard that I bought in a little junkshop which had a lot of the noises on it,” she explained. “There are some drums in there, there’s a piano, some bass, some plucking on mandolin. There’s also this strange sitar instrument that was really small that we used to make the droning sound on the background of ‘Cannibal.’ We put a little reverb on it.”
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Tapping into these ancient sounds seems completely natural for the English singer, who said she’s sick of the trance and synth-pop that has spread from the club scene into cultural ubiquity. Hackman sees the similar surge in folk acts as counter to this digital invasion.
“I think people must be just getting fed up with this manufactured synth-pop,” Marika said. “I’m sure it’s nice for people to sit down and listen to something that someone’s put a bit of themselves into and that is actually written on an emotional basis and isn’t just going to write some hooks and sell millions of albums.”
Emotional, personal music attracts Hackman, and in turn, pours out of her. In her songwriting, self-mutilation seems less than violent, supple phrases about daffodils under human skin aren’t horrific—like any subversive poet she weaves disparate elements together in alarming ways. But the top-note is always melancholy, not any specific sadness, but the atmosphere of it.
“The songs I’m drawn to are the ones, if you strip them back, that have similar thoughts—a melancholy vibe that for some reason attracts me. Quite dark and sometimes a bit playful, I think as far as a genre it’s hard to pin one down.”
After finishing up a short headlining tour, Hackman is back to holing up in her room, writing new songs and planning another EP for later this year—produced once again by Charlie Andrew.
“I knew from listening to that [Alt-J] record—I personally love that record—I could tell what kind of mind he had. Because the production on that is pretty incredible! I knew that he’d be able to bring something a bit different to my music that I really wanted to create as well.”
Certain songs on That Iron Taste do feel built out, skeletons that have assumed flesh—quite literally in some cases. “Retina Television,” for instance, is based solely on Marika humming and tapping parts of her body—there are no traditional instruments. Others seem to be fairly perfunctory bedroom folk—but the balance between simplicity and adornment comes off well.
“I’ll just be sitting in my room and playing and sometimes the idea for a song will form,” she said. “Recording, we stripped the songs back, then sort of built them up again with all these instruments and played around with the. I think that’s what it comes down to—the fact that I’m still doing it exactly how I would at home if I was just recording a demo or something, but with different instruments and better production.”
After the second EP is completed later this year, plans are for a full-length to come out sometime in 2014. Stream the full mini-album below to get a feel for her sound; it feels like the future of folk, whether that label is worn-thin or not.
"I definitely have one of my feet firmly rooted in folk music, but I want to take it somewhere different," she said. Perhaps her organic focus will bring new blood to the weathered genre.
