Jenny Hval has left the building

Whether it’s the unmistakable and musty-sweet aroma of secondhand record shops, the pungent harbour of a used microphone, or – as Hval describes in recent single “To Be a Rose” – the smell of cigarette smoke drifting on stage from somebody in the audience, it has to be said: music stinks.

Scents of all kinds waft in and out of Hval’s new album Iris Silver Mist, which takes its title from the name of a fragrance made by French perfumer Maurice Roucel. The album sees smell both as a way of navigating the world sensorially – when mourning a pet on “You Died”, she observes “You almost died, but still smell alive” – and also in a Proustian sense.

“The stage is now decorated with cigarette smoke / from a hundred, no from a thousand mouths in synchrony / This is every cigarette my mother ever smoked” she sings on “To Be a Rose” in a trance-like state of involuntary memory. “I love the phrase Proustian rush,” she explains. “Serge Lutens, the brand behind Iris Silver Mist, the fragrance, claim they make Proustian perfumery."

Hval seems a fitting artist to bridge the unlikely gap between two disparate senses in her work. Her first novel, Paradise Rot, seems as interested in sound as it is in the written word, and as much as any of her music is. Its narrator, whose ears seem to work like some ultra-sensitive condenser microphone, hears curls of hair falling on cheeks, the stretch of cotton sweaters, and even tiny ripples on the surface of milk. Similarly, her 2016 album Blood Bitch is a record about touch and about the body; on “Ritual Awakening” she half-whispers “I clutch my phone / with my sweaty palm,” while on “Secret Touch” she sings, “As I write this I must pretend someone’s holding my hand.”

It makes sense, then, that the author of such a loud novel and such a tactile album would bridge the gap between two other senses, hearing and smelling, to create something that might be described as a scented album, a record infused with fragrance. It’s a combination she sees as perfectly in tune: “In retirement homes, they sometimes have sensory stations, don’t they? I think smelling different things is an excellent cognitive exercise. And obviously melodies we know really stick with us, we can remember a song longer than our own names.

“When I got into scents it took me a year to take it seriously, maybe because perfume doesn’t have many connections to other artforms, in my world and work-sphere at least. But I did realise after a while how serious I was about scent and how I needed to open up that compartment to get more excited about sounds. In a way, I felt like I was getting into smelling roses and jasmine bushes and incense in order to understand instruments and words, and maybe even the sound of my own body better.”

Indeed, Hval’s creative fascination with the body is part of what led her to embracing fragrance. “I got into scents after the pandemic,” she says. “I think I would have really enjoyed getting into it during, though. I needed it then. In the pandemic people were losing their senses but we were also reminded of how we smell ourselves, when wearing masks.

"I had hardly ever worn a mask before and I felt like I got to know myself – my breath, my perspiration – better, in a way that prepared me for enjoying a lot of weird smells. I think everyone was reminded how precious our senses are. Without a sense of taste, how do we even eat? Without our senses, a big part of our lives are taken from us.”

This aromatic epiphany also made her think about how art engages – or shuts off – certain senses. “I love the idea that art is a way of both closing off senses and opening them,” she says. “You close your eyes and listen to music more closely. You shut out conversation from your brain to better look at a video at an art gallery. Writing is, for me, a constant opening and closing of the senses, as well as a way of changing the feeling of time and space.”

Hval began thinking about weaving other senses into her latest album during a series of performances last year in her native Norway, as well as in the Netherlands and the UK, entitled I Want To Be a Machine. “The material I’d written was very much an essay on performing music and the stage as a communal, artistic space, so I wanted to fill that space with sound and other sensory material simultaneously. Using fabrics, textures, lighting and scent in the space to think about the sound gave me more freedom to play with composition and how compositions were performed.”

“It ended up being really interesting for me. I got new collaborators and friends along the way, who work with clothing design and perfume, and got to work with these facets in real time, in a room, with an audience. I feel like the album is very much influenced by that multisensorial work."

The Machine show was also inspired by Hval’s interest in theatre and performance art, and borrowed a little from German dramatist Heiner Müller, who “made many wonderful plays really playing with what theatre is.” “I think the title, Iris Silver Mist, comes from my re-reading of Hamlet and Hamletmachine [Müller’s postmodern reworking of Hamlet] actually,” says Hval. “Someone, somewhere – I don’t know who it was – said this perfume is what the ghost in Hamlet would wear. And that felt very related to the record. A ghost perfume.”

“I think I’ve made an album that very much places music in between life and death, a place to speak with – or sing with – the dead,” she adds. “Whether it’s people, other artwork, public space, or democracy. This is how I see the sort of eerie string sounds on some of the album tracks. Misty, hoarse, ghostly, but still making sound, and with texture and scent.”

Ghostly is certainly an apt way of describing the songs. Iris Silver Mist is punctuated with field recordings capturing the tread of footsteps, the squeaks of door hinges, the rustle of fabric on fabric. Listening to the album, out in the world in day-to-day life, it becomes unclear which noises are coming from your own surroundings and which are coming from the record and, by extension, the past.

Hval says of the field recordings, “I spent a lot of time relistening to them. It’s just me on the subway or walking home, but I loved the idea of figuring out or remembering where I was in those recordings, through background sounds or the sound of my steps. I feel like listening to footsteps is like I’m attached to the soles of the shoes. Or to the gravel on the ground.”

There is also an unmistakable ghostliness in the way Hval portrays the image of the stage on Iris Silver Mist. On “The Artist is Absent”, she sings about “A stage without a show / A hazy silhouette / Around an empty space,” and on “The Gift” the stage has “…been disassembled now / Taken down / Instruments packed.” On “To Be a Rose” – a song that seems to consolidate a number of the album’s themes; smells, ghosts, stages, absence – “The stage is obviously, literally, falling apart.”

Is this portrayal of the stage as a precarious and haunted space a reflection how Hval feels about the performing, touring, and about the state of the music industry? “This is probably remnants of the Machine show and the fact that quite early on I was imagining an empty stage for it,” she explains. “Maybe also a byproduct of the pandemic, when all venues around the world were silent simultaneously. It’s also insinuating that music as a public space and performing arts as a crucial cultural and political event is over, or over right now. Music is in many ways a ghost from the past. I have felt like this for at least ten years, perhaps my entire career. I wrote a book about the human on stage as a ghost and the history and mourning of that person – it just came out in Norway and is very tied to the record.”

“However,” she continues, “since you mentioned ‘The Artist is Absent’ and ‘The Gift’, they are tied together, and if you see them together – plus the in-between track ‘Huffing My Arm’, which refers to smelling yourself when you’ve put on a perfume you at first found weird, but were then majorly attracted to – it kind of ends on a positive note. Music is a gift, and even if I am a ghost I will give it to you. You may not want it, but the idea of a gift is unsettling to modern capitalism, right-wing wins, and oligarchy. And that may or may not be enough to have accomplished something.

“This is probably how I feel about the industry. And I’m saying that at the same time as being extremely fond of the amazing people in the industry that I work with. Without them, no me. I feel like my music can’t escape reflecting the means of its production. The means of its production are not the tools in this case. not Ableton Live or AI or whatever, but the missing amount of value – money and trust – and the appreciation surrounding the work that artists do by the hierarchy of power, big tech. And the sorrow of that combined with the sorrow of feeling disconnected, of aging, of the disasters going on in the world, of losing loved ones… it’s all connected.”

Ghosts are not just to be found in footsteps or on stages on Iris Silver Mist, but also within the music itself, within the software. The ghost in the machine is cold, unfeeling, but sentient nonetheless: “The recording software asks: This note or that? / The recording software asks: Quantify? / It doesn’t ask where I’m from,” Hval sings on “All Night Long”. “I’ve been angry at software almost every day since I got my first ProTools bundle in 2003,” she explains. “And it’s not been angry back, just failed, usually because of my own lack of interest in getting good at using it.

“I made a lot of music before I worked with computers, too. All of my favourite music tools are hands-on, non-computers. Which is probably because I’m not interested enough in technology. Or because I refuse to make decisions first and then play. I feel like a child most of the time when I work. A crying child.”

Appropriately enough, it is the ghosts that have the last word on Hval’s latest album. The record ends with the instrumental “I Want The End To Sound Like This”, which sounds fully like the ghost in the machine taking charge with its cacophony of computerised and synthetic sounds. But close your eyes and you can also picture the empty, ghostly stage, with Hval having left the building. On the one hand, the absence is reassuring, optimistic: the music will play on. But on the other hand, what is a singer without a voice, what is a stage without a performer?

Thankfully, albums can be played over and over again, and if you flip the record over Hval’s voice returns, unchanged. But the absence nonetheless evokes Hval’s theory that popular music is simply a ghost from the past, an anachronism, an unsustainable model given its means of production. Take away the artist and all that is left is noise from a computer and an empty stage. Hval’s is a compelling hypothesis, but hope can surely be taken from the fact that she seems well-equipped and determined to kick against it, and to make a record that so tangibly engages our living, breathing senses. No hay banda, and yet we hear a band.