Nine Songs: Susanne Sundfør

You don’t have to ask a seer to know how much darkness hope can withstand; our daily doomscrolls are evidence enough. But if you did – consult a mystic, that is – you might find yourself going down a rabbit hole of radical, spiritual love. At least that’s what happened, in a nutshell, to Norwegian artist Susanne Sundfør, and it all started with a book. Specifically, the bestseller Femina by British art historian Janina Ramirez, published in 2022. Drawn in by the cover image, which replicated Hildegard von Bingen’s egg-shaped vision of the universe, painted roughly 900 years ago, Sundfør says she was immediately inspired. “It ticked all the boxes of what I find interesting,” she recalls, describing how Ramirez tells the stories of medieval women lost from or written out of the cultural canon, all but forgotten. “And that’s where I came across Julian of Norwich.” Widely credited with being the earliest known woman author to write a surviving book in the English language, Julian of Norwich was a 14th century religious recluse who, at the age of 30, received a series of visions – the “revelations of divine love” from which Sundfør’s new album takes its name – after seven days of anguis...