Jenny Hval’s newest album, Iris Silver Mist, was conceived by the artist as an olfactory expertise. Closely knowledgeable by scent, Hval first bought 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. Recognized 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 concerning the challenges of changing the indelible sensations of scent into music, Hval informed 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In any case, I’ve no expertise within the discipline; I’ve not studied chemistry or botany and even smelled many of the outdated classics.
“However I used to be studying loads about elements and fragrance composition, for my very own leisure, and realized extra and extra that I may relate to the expertise of a scent by way 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, however it 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 non-public reminiscences related to various scents, however common within the inexplicable reminiscence affiliation scent creates for us all.
In accordance with the singer’s admission, she’s no skilled in scent however stays capable of translate ephemeral emotional sensations. Scent can encourage in an nearly alarmingly particular means. Being that scent and style are so carefully associated, we requested Hval if style, like scent, ever influenced the artistic course of for Iris Silver Mist.
Hval explains, “A part of the rationale I bought so obsessive about scent… was that I can scent all the pieces. I’ve coeliac and have to be on a particularly strict weight loss program once I tour to keep away from getting sick, so style will not be 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 not as a lot pleasure as I would love. However scent—I’m not allergic to smelling, so I can scent all the pieces, 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 usually simply as influenced by absence as it’s by presence. “You possibly can’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 go away sure private issues behind.”
When creating Iris Silver Mist, Hval labored on an experimental piece of literary nonfiction referred to as Scenemennesket, a mix of memoir, essay, and cultural criticism exploring the oscillating divides between individual and performer. Roughly translating to “The Stage Particular person” in English, Hval stated working 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 fashioned a kind of inventive symbiosis by working on the tasks concurrently.
The Norwegian artist explains, “What made it simpler to work on a written textual content and an album without delay was creating a 3rd format; an interdisciplinary live performance efficiency, which my band and I did in 2024. A lot of the album was already written by then, however I needed to see what would occur if we toured it earlier than recording it, and additionally prolonged it into scenography and even scent. The efficiency was referred to as I wish to be a machine and was additionally type of an essay; a stage essay about performing, recording, and writing music.
“It was far 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 referred to as for… if I realized something from that course of, it’s that you simply don’t make any paintings to be the One Closing Product That Accommodates The whole lot. Identical to the intention for an artist is unquestionably not To Be the One Closing Artist That Says The whole lot and to Everybody. Identical to the intention for a human can’t be optimizing your self. An optimized self is now not a self.”
Hval’s final album, Traditional Objects, shares an analogous preoccupation with reminiscence as Iris Silver Mist. However, the place Iris Silver Mist takes on a extra summary high quality, Traditional Objects is far more grounded in introspection and an examination of the self. In Traditional Objects, Hval appears to be like inward to know, 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 reminiscences, conflating the road between singular songs and the broader album, nearly making one indistinguishable from the opposite. Simply as within the extra encompassing undertaking of Iris Silver Mist and Scenemennesket in tandem, the artist’s work couldn’t stay inside the confines of a solitary medium.
When requested what knowledgeable the undertaking’s nebulous nature, Hval notes, “This was how I wrote the music. Once 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 many that aren’t on the album) in a single doc, every starting contained in the earlier observe and ending with a brand new tune popping out. A sonic centipede.” Resisting the siren tune of the one, Iris Silver Mist calls for to be skilled wholly, its fragmented components unable to convey the burden of the entire.
Hval’s music has a really cerebral, nearly haunting high quality, making it seemingly unsuitable for a broader business viewers. Nonetheless, followers of the style will certainly respect the LP’s experimental method. Whereas Iris Silver Mist won’t be showing at your summer season barbecues and pool events, it could 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 gives one thing far 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 beneath prior. Vaporous, dispersed, and summary, Hval’s album nearly 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 scholar learning 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 centered 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 bought principally unhealthy critiques. I used to be informed my music was higher. I used to be informed 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 important 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 might not have written that e-book at this time.”
Like Paradise Rot, Hval’s newest album appears like a visceral expertise. Whereas discussing the distinctive liminal house efficiency creates, Hval informed us, “Once 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 value and equal magnetism. They even put on the identical scent.”
A haunting summation of the file’s ethos, Hval checks the boundaries 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 tune, fiction and actuality dissolve solely. With Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval pulls us into that in-between place to pound at its partitions and check its bounds.
