JENNY HVAL
The Norwegian polymath continues to deliver THOUGHT-PROVOKING material across a range of mediums as her latest record Iris Silver Mist affirms.
A prolific artist, you have just released your 11th studio album. A conceptual album of sorts that guided by scent as much as sentiment. The time afforded to you (pre and post-pandemic) was spent in reconnecting the olfactory with a previous love. Can you elaborate on how it took shape and how you attempted to convert smell into sound?
The album was written and recorded after the pandemic, and I didn’t actually get into scent until after the pandemic either. But the pandemic didn’t really end with the lockdowns, it’s still in us. Perhaps the groundwork of solitude and rebooting of my senses was laid during the lockdowns? There is pandemic imagery on the album. But the loss - the feeling of music being devalued, the obsession with cigarette smoke and childhood memories and ghosts or ghost-like imagery, was there before the pandemic too. Music streaming came many years before, as well as the feeling of people not being present physically has been there ever since social media scrolled itself into our lives.
The reason scent is important for my album is because it was a kind of medicine - I needed to discover a new kind of presence when music felt so disconnected, I couldn’t write. I didn’t really have lots of time to explore it, because the pandemic was over and I was actually really busy - I just took all the time I had.
Scent wasn’t really converted to sound in my process, I was just writing freely, but because I was also smelling a lot of perfumes whenever I had time to go into a shop, I started thinking about the connection between notes and accords in perfumery and music together. A scent can be powdery, and to me, I found a lot of the sounds I was playing with powdery too - airy, with a dry texture. If anything, there was a philosophical bond formed at that time.
The power of performance was critical in the development and execution of the album. Trying to wrangle the ephemeral in solid sonic states is difficult at the best of times, but for you, was the conduit for Iris Silver Mist the connection between performance art and musical construction?
studied literature, theatre, and film for my Creative Arts degree at the University of Melbourne many years ago, and for the very first theatre subjects we read and had to create a performance of Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller. That play has stuck with me, and I’ve written about it several times. I guess for me pop music has the potential of being a more DIY form of performance art, always recontextualising what the stage is, what a human is, and what a character and story is.
made an interdisciplinary performance called I want to be a machine that we toured last year. Some of the music in that performance ended up on the album, and other songs that were written after the show became sort of critical companion pieces to the material from the show… essays on being on stage.
In what ways does your native Norway influence your music and the way you approach your craft?
My best answer is that Norway is the reason why I’m still making music. Our substantial cultural support, funding, and welfare state makes it possible to, if you are lucky, have part of an income secured from the state when you work on a project. This is not given to all, it’s absolutely not perfect and there’s work to be done on diversity etc, but I do believe that receiving financial support has been exceptionally important for my work and many others’.
Family is interwoven in the album as your mother features on ‘To Be A Rose’, was there an added ease in making this track or more pressure given that it was a joint piece of sorts?
I published a book here in Norway in April where my mother is featured throughout actually, so she only makes a couple of appearances on Iris Silver Mist but is a very important part of my thinking about the stage. The book deals with what it means to be a human on stage, so I think I’ve gone through a lot about the body and lineage as part of “who we are”.
I come from a liberal, well-functional family with loving parents, so she figures more as a universal mother figure and a woman of her generation in the book and album. A woman smoking!
The instrumentation you use throughout is unorthodox and non-traditional. When selecting the type and application of each instrument, do you select it based on the creative challenge it poses to you which in turn brings out the best in what you are aiming to produce?
I would say the instrumentation is quite traditional - drums, bass, acoustic guitar, synths… and field recordings and strange sampled instruments. Vocals of course… I think what’s less traditional would be how the instruments are played. A lot of the songs are improvised, cut together from longer pieces I imagined as “radio art”, or shorter pieces I imagined as “vignettes”. I’m a huge fan of Franco Battiato and his early albums, where he made very short, very beautiful, and very shape-shifting songs. I wanted to do something inspired by that.
When selecting instruments, I go by pure intuition. I often start with a sound, a drum loop, and then try to surprise myself. It’s like I take very uninteresting objects and put them on stage until they start shimmering.
The way you tackle the filming for some of your work is reminiscent of electronic artist Dan Deacon and how for him “the audience is the performance”. Incorporating the unusual or difficult into a wholly new work is something you do with great success. Is there a solid storyboard that you follow when creating the visual elements to your work, or conversely, the more fluid and unpredictable the better?
I have to admit I don’t really know Dan Deacon’s work so I can’t compare… but I find the visual side quite difficult to work with. I many times get ideas for it very late, when I’m already on stage performing or have finished a recording. Or even later, after a tour is over and I have brilliant ideas for it in my head.
As a multi-disciplinary artist and novelist, in what ways does being a writer help in your musical world, and in what ways does it hinder your creativity?
I think I have a place to go when I’m stuck with the music, I can spend weeks just writing words, and then eventually piece things together. I can also work with recording my voice and speaking with effects, or sing a text as editing tools. Many people would say my focus on lyrics hinder the music - listeners many times prefer vowels over consonants. I’m not OULIPO enough for that kind of experimentation. I like the sensuality of words.
Having produced albums for so many years and working alongside so many different artists, have there been moments that altered the course of your career, which were due to unusual experiences and encounters?
I feel like I haven’t really strayed very far from where I started out, so I don’t think so. But starting to improvise more when working with the Nude on Sand project (which later became Lost Girls) with Håvard Volden opened me up to new ways of thinking and writing. Working with Lasse Marhaug taught me a lot about process and intuition and sound quality. Working with Zia Anger on stage was mind-blowing and difficult at the same time.
Your live shows are always unique, and in terms of their inception, is what you bring to the stage in part due to what you weren’t seeing on stage from other performers?
Nothing except myself, my thoughts, and the music material. I really don’t think I’m that special on stage. Perhaps, if anything, I’m bringing a lot of flaws, and I play with them like an instrument.
What does music give you that nothing else does?
It gets me close to death without fear.
