Jenny Hval Blends Scent and Sound on Fascinating Album » PopMatters
Jenny Hval’s newest album, Iris Silver Mist, was conceived by the artist as an olfactory expertise. Closely knowledgeable by scent, Hval first obtained a whiff of the central thought for Iris Silver Mist whereas touring again in 2022. Named after a perfume designed by French perfumer Serge Lutens, Hval’s album emits the identical cool, layered aura as Lutens’ scent. A phantasmagoric, lilting LP, Iris Silver Mist performs like a perfumed fever dream.
In her newest work, Hval pushes her long-standing fascination with embodiment (notably female embodiment) and thrusts it into the immaterial realm of scent. Narratively fragmented and thematically elusive, Hval’s album takes on many atmospheric qualities of scent to seize the ineffable. Identified for her work surrounding the idea of “the physique”—its viscera, its sensations, its politics—Hval steps outdoors herself into one thing much less concrete for her newest work.
When requested in regards to the challenges of changing the indelible sensations of scent into music, Hval advised us, “For a while, perfume was only a passion for me, one which gave me very visceral experiences and concepts, however that I didn’t fairly perceive how [it] may match into my work. In any case, I’ve no expertise within the discipline; I’ve not studied chemistry or botany and even smelled many of the previous classics.
“However I used to be studying rather a lot about elements and fragrance composition, for my very own leisure, and realized increasingly more that I may relate to the expertise of a scent by means of my expertise with sound, music composition, and writing. So I did an experiment the place I simply tried on a fragrance in a store or from a pattern earlier than writing,” she continues. “I don’t know precisely how that translated, but it surely made me get right into a routine of writing that I haven’t actually had since earlier than the pandemic. I used to be fairly burnt out for some time and didn’t write a lot.”
Hval says that whereas writing Iris Silver Mist, she discovered herself “drawn to scents with sure textures … dry, powdery, earthy”, all appropriately tactile descriptions accompanying a piece so intersecting in its conception. Rooted in Hval’s very visceral relationship to scent, the album feels each private and common. Private in Hval’s personal recollections related to various scents, however common within the inexplicable reminiscence affiliation scent creates for us all.
In keeping with the singer’s admission, she’s no skilled in scent however stays capable of translate ephemeral emotional sensations. Odor can encourage in an virtually alarmingly particular manner. Being that scent and style are so carefully associated, we requested Hval if style, like scent, ever influenced the inventive course of for Iris Silver Mist.
Hval explains, “A part of the explanation I obtained so obsessive about scent… was that I can scent every little thing. I’ve coeliac and have to be on an especially strict weight-reduction plan once I tour to keep away from getting sick, so style is just not one thing I can interact in freely. There’s at all times warning for me when placing something new or thrilling in my mouth, and never as a lot pleasure as I would really like. However scent—I’m not allergic to smelling, so I can scent every little thing, unrestrained. Identical to I can take heed to all types of sounds.”
Describing a kind of sensory rerouting, amplifying one sense (scent) within the close to absence of one other (style), Jenny Hval’s work is commonly simply as influenced by absence as it’s by presence. “You’ll be able to’t have one with out the opposite.” Hval tells us, “At the least you may’t work with artwork with out each. To be current on stage is to depart sure private issues behind.”
When creating Iris Silver Mist, Hval labored on an experimental piece of literary nonfiction known as Scenemennesket, a mix of memoir, essay, and cultural criticism exploring the oscillating divides between individual and performer. Roughly translating to “The Stage Individual” in English, Hval stated engaged on Scenemennesket (sadly not but out there in English) and Iris Silver Mist concurrently helped her dig deeper into the central ideas of the LP. They shaped a kind of creative symbiosis by engaged on the initiatives concurrently.
The Norwegian artist explains, “What made it simpler to work on a written textual content and an album directly was creating a 3rd format; an interdisciplinary live performance efficiency, which my band and I did in 2024. Many of the album was already written by then, however I wished to see what would occur if we toured it earlier than recording it, and in addition prolonged it into scenography and even scent. The efficiency was known as I need to be a machine and was additionally type of an essay; a stage essay about performing, recording, and writing music.
“It was rather more political than the album, as a result of it had much more spoken textual content that I didn’t really feel just like the album known as for… if I discovered something from that course of, it’s that you simply don’t make any art work to be the One Remaining Product That Accommodates All the things. Identical to the purpose for an artist is unquestionably not To Be the One Remaining Artist That Says All the things and to Everybody. Identical to the purpose for a human can’t be optimizing your self. An optimized self is not a self.”
Hval’s final album, Traditional Objects, shares the same preoccupation with reminiscence as Iris Silver Mist. However, the place Iris Silver Mist takes on a extra summary high quality, Traditional Objects is rather more grounded in introspection and an examination of the self. In Traditional Objects, Hval appears to be like inward to grasp, whereas in Iris Silver Mist, she appears to be like out. In Iris Silver Mist, Hval treats reminiscence not as mere recollection however as an immersive expertise. Traditional Objects feels just like the singer reminiscing at twilight earlier than the haze of nighttime and desires descend from Iris Silver Mist.
In Iris Silver Mist, tracks blur and mix like recollections, conflating the road between singular songs and the broader album, virtually making one indistinguishable from the opposite. Simply as within the extra encompassing venture of Iris Silver Mist and Scenemennesket in tandem, the artist’s work couldn’t stay throughout the confines of a solitary medium.
When requested what knowledgeable the venture’s nebulous nature, Hval notes, “This was how I wrote the music. After I began writing, I made a decision to make a mixtape, or a sense of a late-night radio present, so I wrote all of the tracks (and lots of that aren’t on the album) in a single doc, every starting contained in the earlier observe and ending with a brand new track popping out. A sonic centipede.” Resisting the siren track of the only, Iris Silver Mist calls for to be skilled wholly, its fragmented components unable to convey the load of the entire.
Hval’s music has a really cerebral, virtually haunting high quality, making it possible unsuitable for a broader business viewers. Nonetheless, followers of the style will certainly admire the LP’s experimental strategy. Whereas Iris Silver Mist may not be showing at your summer season barbecues and pool events, it will make for a superbly moody backing observe for an avant-garde movie or new-wave gallery exhibition.
The place hooks and catchy choruses usually reside, Hval offers one thing rather more subdued: layered ambiance, spoken-word supply of lyrics, and a genre-bending assortment of songs. Iris Silver Mist subverts the conventions even Hval herself has labored below prior. Vaporous, dispersed, and summary, Hval’s album virtually feels just like the fraternal twin to her novel Paradise Rot.
Although initially revealed in Norwegian almost a decade prior, Hval’s novel Paradise Rot wasn’t launched in English till 2018. An atmospheric, sapphic, and cerebral chronicling of the confounding relationship between a Norwegian pupil finding out in England and her perplexing roommate, Paradise Rot noticed one thing of a renaissance of its personal after it was embraced by the then-burgeoning “BookTok” group (TikTok content material creators targeted on books and studying). Although Paradise Rot assumes a extra claustrophobic, deteriorating tone than Iris Silver Mist, each meditate on the porous boundaries between self and atmosphere, notion and which means, and transformation in opposition to obliteration.
When discussing the marked distinction in reception between the novel’s 2009 launch in Norway versus its more moderen English launch, the author stated, “… in Norway it obtained principally unhealthy critiques. I used to be advised my music was higher. I used to be advised nothing occurred. I felt like I used to be judged by expectations of type. When the English translation got here out a few years later, I used to be barely embarrassed as a result of I wrote it so way back, however I had additionally been capable of enhance it a bit whereas working with Verso, which was an incredible expertise. The reception was very completely different. A lot much less tabloid. It was only a completely different time and a unique, extra focused viewers. I ended up actually having fun with it, even when I’d not have written that guide at the moment.”
Like Paradise Rot, Hval’s newest album looks like a visceral expertise. Whereas discussing the distinctive liminal area efficiency creates, Hval advised us, “After I carry out, I really feel like I’m in-between the dwelling and the useless, and extra importantly, that dwelling and dying are twins with equal price and equal magnetism. They even put on the identical scent.”
A haunting summation of the report’s ethos, Hval exams the bounds of language and type all through the album. Her work, musical or in any other case, has traditionally resided in liminal areas the place the excellence between style and medium, spoken phrase and track, fiction and actuality dissolve totally. With Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval pulls us into that in-between place to pound at its partitions and take a look at its bounds.
