Listen: Jenny Hval & Susanna - "I Have Walked This Body"

24 July 2014, 09:45 | Written by Jon Putnam

(Tracks)

(Jenny Hval) (Susanna)

Stop what you’re doing. Give yourself five minutes for this. I know it’s hard to do – tell me something I don’t know – but you’ll thank yourself for doing it.

This site is primarily a pop/rock outlet and we pride ourselves on delivering you what we think are the best nuggets that the world’s huge umbrella of music has to offer. That said, sometimes there is something else; something that is different. It’s not pop or rock or pop/rock, it’s actually thrillingly not anything at all, so we all can rest our minds of our inherent humanly desire to categorise.

This is art. Sure, pop/rock is art as well and is, fortunately, wonderful art…but this – this is art. Jenny Hval and Susanna are unquestionably two of the most eclectic and enigmatically stirring artists Norway has to offer. In 2009, the duo composed and performed Meshes of Voice, commissioned for that year’s Ladyfest, and they will reprise the piece for 2014’s Ultima festival in Oslo, releasing it as an album.

“I Have Walked This Body” couldn’t exemplify the project’s goal of eluding categorisation, of embodying the fragility and brutality of life, or even the namesake of the project itself, more perfectly. Witness the unadulterated purity of voice poised against a deep drone only to be snatched into the jaws of and absorbed into dreadful swells of feedback and dissonance.

This is primal, lustful, beautiful and dingy at the same time. See, you’re thanking yourself for the five minutes you took for this and you can blame me for the time it’ll take now to regather yourself because of it.

Meshes of Voice is released on 18 August courtesy of SusannaSonata and will feature live at Oslo’s Ultima Festival on 12 September.