Anna von Hausswolff stepped away from her usual pipe organ to record this shimmering ballad that features in the film Sound Of Falling.

This beautiful song by Anna von Hausswolff is played as a recurring emotional motif in the extraordinary film Sound Of Falling. A woozy, lovelorn ballad, it’s a departure for the artist, whose music is more associated with the drone-heavy pipe organ.

It’s a more conventional affair, built around the guitars of Karl Vento and Joel Fabiansson, with the ethereal vocals of Anna and her older sister Maria drenched in shimmering reverb.

Stranger is the only contemporary song to feature on the soundtrack of Mascha Schilinski’s film Sound Of Falling, which uses experimental sound design in an experimental way akin to last year’s Zone Of Interest.

The song’s melancholy mood echoes the ghostly sadness of its theme: the trauma experienced by four generations of women and girls in the same German farmhouse over the course of the last century. 

It originally appeared as the last track on her 2015 album The Miraculous, acting as a kind of coda to the more funereal gothic atmosphere of the other songs.

The album was recorded in a Swedish concert hall using the Acusticum Pipe Organ, one of Europe’s largest with 9,000 pipes, incorporating several instruments: glockenspiel, vibraphone, celeste, percussion – and pipes partially submerged in water that cause high-pitched shrieking sounds.

The von Hausswolff sisters Anna and Maria, daughters of a celebrated Swedish experimental sound artist, have recorded together before, including a Swans album, and Maria has a separate career as a successful film director and cinematographer.

Anna often performs in churches and has occasionally been dogged by protests from fundamentalist Catholic groups complaining that her music is “satanic.”