I was terrified that I was going to misquote some of your lyrics to you, so while covering my bases on that I noticed that you’re active on Genius.

Well I haven’t visited it yet – it was posted for me.

Was someone else entirely controlling the contributions?

No, no – it was an interview that I did, with Sasha Frere-Jones, which was an excellent conversation because he’s an amazing journalist. Then it was posted, and I guess I was not able to actually follow it up because I was on tour. Did that now crash your question? I’m not a Genius nerd, I didn’t even know what it was until I was approached for an interview. I’m not that up-to-date, unfortunately, but I do very much enjoy Genius.

No worries – the only follow-up was asking your thoughts on artists being given a loudspeaker to explicitly inform their fans about meanings, references, etc.

I don’t think it’s meant like that. As a writer, and someone who’s done academic work, I just think it’s like footnotes. Sometimes it’s even necessary, depending on how you present your work. I mean something online is never going to be your work anyway. It’s just a little tiny glimpse, but it can be very relevant. Sometimes it is very relevant, what’s on there, and very educational. Sometimes it really expands and invites people into understanding poetic qualities of words, and of singing, and of phrasing. I don’t necessarily think it’s about explaining things to fans, I think that’s doing it a bit of a disservice. It’s more than that, or at least it can be.

What do you mean by “nothing online will be your own work?

I didn’t make my album as an online piece. If my work was internet art – a blog, or a conceptual art piece – if it was completely presented that way, then it would be. As long as I’m making albums, you can never really touch what’s on the album. It’s its own work.

Does that carry over into a preference for live or recorded music when listening or performing?

I’ve thought about this a lot because people are filming during shows, and I really don’t think that you are – I mean when you’re filming something that’s a third thing. It’s not recorded album work, it’s not live performance. It’s a recording of your own existence in that time and space. It’s like “I was here, see? So I think it’s more of a contemporary self-identification thing. There’s so much device-made documentation that it actually is all about the viewer, or the listener. That’s very liberating on one hand, I mean I love watching the stuff on YouTube. On the other hand, it’s not really… it’s someone else’s work at that point.

And then you’re putting online and entering this marketplace of nearly identical videos from 15 people around you at the show. The only difference becomes the nature of the performance of recording.

Yeah. I think it’s a performance of immortality, or the wish for immortality by the person that’s recording it, which is beautiful and sad, and empty, and full of meaning [laughs]. We talk about this a lot in terms of filming liver performance because we’ve been studying, in my band, some of the videos of stuff we’ve done on the previous tour, the European tour that we were on. There’s some great stuff out there, but it’s full of a lot of private stuff that’s not us. You know when you film something you don’t just get the live performance; you get the glasses of the guy standing next to you, up close. It’s kind of great. You can never use a camera like you can sense things with your eyes, so you don’t have that vision, that 180-degree field. You just have this. We talk about it a lot.

I was wondering about some of your prior work under different names. To you, what’s the importance of identifying a certain moniker with a certain style or time?

The only difference is that I was sick of the name [Rockettothesky]. The name was the name of a song that I wrote when I was 19, one of the first things that I recorded. I think that having that stuck to me, this very first moment, is kind of like naming yourself “virgin – it feels weird after a while. It feels like you’re trying to crawl back to something that you can’t come back to. Also, after a while it became kind of cutesy to me – I was like “why, why did I put it all in one word, and why is it so phallic? It’s really just the same project. It’s just been one flow of work.

Collaborations are maybe the one thing that’s different – I wouldn’t think of my work with Susanna as part of the same project but I would definitely see it as something that was very inspirational because it was recorded in 2009 and then my next album, my first under my own name, was very inspired by it. It was a solo project, and then I decided to go with my name because I started writing. When you do writing stuff, your name is always going to be there, so it started to become confusing. Sometimes I would use my name, and I’d have to think about it a lot – “do I use my name? Am I an artist now? I also quite like using my name because I don’t quite have an attachment to it. It’s given to me by others, not something that means anything specifically so it can be a transparent thing rather than me trying to frame what I’m doing. My name is an unusual Norwegian name, but it doesn’t carry much identity.

So you’re not giving up any context from which one might assume things about your work before they actually look into it. Having done that, I was curious about a line on your second album you repeat – “live bare and barely across Innocence is Kinky. Does it hold any special significance for you or did I just happen to pick it up?

I think that line is interesting – I’m just trying to see it in context now in my head. I haven’t had the words in my mouth for a long time. It’s from Renée Falconetti, and I think I was very obsessed with stripping down the human being into its almost non-existence, and I was working with the movie a lot, the Joan of Arc film by Carl Theodor Dreyer. As a film director he was very much stripping down everything, to the point where he didn’t want shadows in his films. Like in that Joan of Arc film, he’s trying to strip everything down to its bare bones. Her head is shaved when she’s imprisoned, and he did something with lights and painted backgrounds to make shadows disappear. Maybe because of purity, maybe it came from a Puritan upbringing, which is a Scandinavian thing. So the idea of the bare human, also stripped of its rights, I roll it into the context of the pornographic image and how we look at each other. How we look at young women specifically, and it all came together in the combination of the gaze and religious purity. I was also very into homo sacer, the concept by Girogio Agamben, a book I’ve read and really loved but could not explain to you. It’s all about stripping down the human from its rights as a citizen to be a non-citizen, which I feel is very much a part of how we use imagery and media.

I noticed in the album credits that you work with a lot of Norwegian collaborators. Is that just a marriage of travel convenience or would you consider yourself part of a broader Norwegian scene or collective?

This is interesting because I think the scene that I feel connected to is not pop music necessarily but of much more improvised music and also noise now. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a completely underground scene in Oslo, but it’s centered around people who work very independently and have strong connections to the art world, seeing far beyond pop music and the music industry. I’m quite politically motivated as well. I do see myself as part of at least a longing for a community that is local, but it’s also very international because any kind of community that’s musician-based and artist-based will bring in a lot of people and influences. Most of the people I work with are more internationally-oriented; musicians who travel a lot and have taken a lot of influence from other places. Like Lasse Marhaug – he’s incredibly inspired, and produced this new album. He’s played and travelled all over the world with his harsh noise music. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Japanese music scenes and all sorts of other places.

Are you particularly concerned with how the listener might feel during different parts of your album? Do you think that discomfort, for example, plays a role in your music?

I don’t think like that. I’m extremely happy with the parts in my music where I can connect with something emotional. I think I need to take some steps around comfort in order to get to these places where I can feel like I can touch people in some way, because I feel touched by – not necessarily “oh, that was beautiful, that thing I just made – that seems very inward-looking and masturbation-focused. It’s not so much like that, although if artists didn’t think like that at all there would not be art. I think for me it’s about getting to places that have a true connection to emotion, like channeling emotions that you could not have reached if you didn’t go the long way around and create something where you had to say a couple of crazy things, or do things that seem very unusual. Unusual steps, or missed steps, lead to very human openings.

Part of being human is not about presenting beauty, but presenting something that it just intimate, weird, partly endearing but also kind of gross. That’s what we are, but that’s what we’re afraid of as well. That’s what triggers the discomfort – that we see things that mirror ourselves in ways we’re not used to seeing. It’s like if you see yourself in a photo and you didn’t think you were in the picture so you’re doing something funny, or exposing some kind of weird part of your body that you’re not used to seeing, and then you feel weird about it later. You realize “I am that. I think my music is about all of those things, but then also moments of just really trying to understand emotion, and trying to channel it, and trying to make big things out of very small parts. I really love simple, beautiful melodies. I think simple, beautiful melodies are highly underestimated in experimental music – they can really exist in all kinds of frameworks. Some people avoid that stuff categorically, or speak about them as if they have these kind of philosophical qualities that reminds me of how philosophers love to speak of something that was feminine, which I hate. I’m all about confronting people with something really beautiful. When you’re at a show and something’s really beautiful and you want to cry, that’s making you very vulnerable, which in turn can be uncomfortable. It makes you feel something.

Do those ideas about photographs inform your album art choices at all?

I’ve actually never been involved in the album art. I’ve not been interested in that. Actually, I guess that’s a lie because the first Rockettothesky album was a selfie. I just cut it off so that you just see under my eyes but not the eyes. That was just because I didn’t know how to do it – I was just making it myself. After that I’ve been very much concerned with collaborating with people and letting them do what they want. I haven’t been very interested in controlling that – I want other people to see things in my music and present to me things that I wouldn’t have been able to see.

It’s interesting – I suppose it’s not a secret but most people’s assumption would be that you were overseeing the art or appearing on the cover, so in a vacuum we get these wild theories about meanings, connections, and so on.

Absolutely, and I love that. The more information is out there that is out of control, the funnier it is when I say this stuff – when I say that I’ve never been interested in the cover art. I mean I was interested in it when it was made, and I’m interested in having conversations about the music conceptually. But I love working with people I respect and whose work I love, and I really want them to do whatever they want. That’s how I think about what we’re doing on stage now too, even though we’ve worked together for a long time now. We’ve had lots of conversations and adjustments and whatnot, but I brought them in so they could be themselves. I’m not a leader of any kind; I’m doing this one thing, and I really like it when that thing I do is made out of control by others.

Can you talk a little bit about how your performances usually go?

When I said performance piece, that was me talking about the duration of the show. It is a set of songs, it’s a concert, but the way we play it is not like a normal band on stage. We do a lot of things that you just have to see. We used to use video a lot, and then we all of a sudden realized that we didn’t need it. Now we work with costumes and make a real mess. And making one mess out of the whole performance, kind of tainting it. Also tainting the rock club stage with something that usually isn’t seen there. It isn’t as great every night, it depends on how the room feels. Sometimes it’s interesting but not as good as the night before because we just have to depend on what the room is telling us. But the girls on stage with me are doing various movements, almost like visual art stuff – classifying it is kind of making it seem like an art piece and I think it’s just an experience. People come away from it more like having experienced something and having seen a bunch of stuff that people have done rather than an installation. It’s very direct. I also want people to think what they want, but we’re not so interested in classifying it.