The Simple Life
When experimental Norwegian artist Jenny Hval found herself forcibly isolated during 2020’s lockdown, her musical ideas were stripped back to near-pop song structures. But what Hval calls ‘pop’ has become Classic Objects, her first release on 4AD and one of the most intriguing records you’ll hear this year.
It’s been 10 years since Prog first encountered Jenny Hval, at a Rune Grammofon showcase at the long-since-closed Borderline venue in central London. That evening, Hval appeared in a trio playing after labelmate Phaedra, appearing onstage with her guitar and looking slightly fragile with blonde pageboy hair and shy-ish shuffling between numbers. But, oh, the power in her high-register delivery and her surreal and sexual indie-folk tales, particularly Engines In The City, recalling an incident with an electric toothbrush, and the gender-convention questioning I Got No Strings. Viscera was her debut solo record, and visceral was the experience.
Hval is now on her eighth album and has roamed several tuned-in labels from her collaborator Susanna Wallumrød’s SusannaSonata, to Hubro, to Sacred Bones. The new home for her just-released album Classic Objects is legendary British label 4AD, formerly home to Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and Pixies, and recently holding strong with Dry Cleaning, Big Thief, The National and Aldous Harding, among others. Although a fan of the catalogue, that’s not been the draw for Hval.
“I’m always excited to work with whoever I work with,” Hval tells us on a Zoom call from Oslo. “I always found [record labels] slowly and sensibly, but I was curious when I heard from them. I don’t follow labels so much as I follow artists, and I’d spoken with [electronic artist] Holly Herndon who spoke of them highly. Working with a big label has been surprisingly creative and I feel extremely lucky and inspired.”
Classic Objects came together during lockdown of 2020, with Hval holed up for two and a half months in her rented flat in Oslo. The place is bright and cosy – today she shows Prog her dog Chloe having a snooze on the floor near to her – but during lockdown Hval struggled creatively. An author as well as musician – her second novel, Girls Against God, was recently published in English – Hval began writing a manuscript.
“I never have a plan,” Hval laughs when asked about the idea behind the project. “When you open a fictional door you can’t find reality behind it.
So I started with what I thought would be a book. Then I abandoned it because it was too… boring. It was like the world of lockdown, stuck in the four walls of my rooms, impacted my writing. So I started making music.”
Hval’s creativity took “snippets out of my manuscript” and made “more creative ‘rooms’” sonically. Lockdown in her flat, as a situation, became a foundation, which she then layered with imaginary rooms and activity
within them. “I was thinking about my experiences – past, present and hopefully future, or dreamscapes. This made me realise how important music is for me. I then used the language of prose to create ‘scenery’, and I found that different sounds resonated with the way I write words more than I realised before.”
Hval’s chosen instrument for writing tends to be a synth, or computer-based – Hval fell in love with synths at a young age, having heard Vangelis – and Classic Objects was built on her digital workstation.
“I work a bit like how you would in [life simulation video game] The Sims: you have your apartment and you have to furnish it,” she says. “I use prerecorded samples mostly as I don’t play any instrument very well. I’ll find finished sounds, I’ll take a note and I’ll work with it. But half the time I work with percussion and I’ll build layers of that, or sounds that are percussion. That creates energy, and I’ll work melodically over the top of that.”
For Classic Objects there’s an ArabicAfrican-style undercurrent that emerged. “I can’t say why!” Hval laughs, although she’d been listening to Sufi devotional songs and Alice Coltrane as well as pop music. “But once I had that, the players expanded on it when we were in a studio.”
In a small window between two virus strains, Classic Objects was recorded at Øra Studio in Trondheim.
“This was my most exotic experience of 2021, my highlight of the whole pandemic period,” Hval muses. “It’s my friend Kyrre Laastad’s place, who used to play in my band before he focused on being a studio rat, as we call them in Norway. I’d been working on computer-based editing but this time I craved a studio, and the music craved it, too. We were there for 10 days and I’ve never made a band record like that, recording and producing together.”
Hval admits that, when composing music, “words just fall out of me”, but as an author: “I’ve always struggled with fleshing things out because in my head I have to have sounds there. Girls Against God was me describing rites, religion and black metal. I have characters and they need to have a journey, but I never figured out how to make jumps in prose like I can make jumps in music. [Classic Objects] made me hear words and music closer together, and that was nice. It was more of a spiritual adventure than, ‘I wrote that chord and then that chord’.”
The compositions for Classic Objects became, in Hval’s notes for the album, “simplified” from perhaps her usual styles, and she states: “I let the songs go a bit their own way and have a verse and chorus, to see what kind of warmth and relationship that I could create even with an imaginary listener.”
Heaven forbid that there might be verses and choruses, but their presence hasn’t blighted a still complex and beautifully thoughtful work that muses on what appear to be easy topics, such as American Coffee or a Year Of Love, but are always more metaphysical or political. In her late teens and early 20s, Hval left Norway to study creative writing and performance in
Melbourne, Australia; her Masters thesis took in how Kate Bush lyrics were performed and transformed by the artist. These threads run through Hval’s work and are partly why her themes can often seem challenging. Classic Objects’ stories have Hval going back to being a babe-in-arms and her time studying in Australia, but also include French post-structuralist quotations. Hval’s writing style is always definitely different.
“With creative writing I learned that exercises are really necessary,” she nods. “Ideas are not so, because they come when you do things that challenge you. I also learned that when you do a random exercise in a room full of 19-year-olds, they all write about the lines on their hands or what’s outside of the window. You have to work harder to say something specific. You have to go deeper and go into the uncomfortable thoughts that stir things up. It takes a while to peel off the layers of expectation, what you think looks good and what harmoniously sits with you as a writer. Sometimes it’s not that interesting to be relatable.”
It’s no surprise to learn that some of Hval’s literary inspirations have come from the feminist realm, such as Virginia Woolf (“That was the first time I experienced the world being split in half: before I read one page of her work, and directly after; new colours changed, like in a musical.”), Canadian poet, essayist and classics translator Anne Carson, and American confessional literaturist Chris Kraus
(I Love Dick). Hval herself could now be considered a notable, quotable feminist figure in her own right.
“I don’t think I could have another perspective,” she says. “Growing up, I found it hard to accept the rules of gender and behaviour, and accepting ‘normcore’ society. However, when some people have asked me about this, it seemed like they thought it got in the way of my creativity, clouding direct speech about art, or overintellectualising when thinking about positioning, majority and minority.
“That’s changed now,” Hval nods. “I feel like my perspective is less special than when I started studying. I wasn’t taught to question what the feminist perspective is and who those feminists are. I’ve been raised on 90 per cent white middle-class feminism, so there’s a lot to relearn and a lot of perspectives more important than mine. I’m one small part of a spectrum of thoughts which needs to be expanded.”
Classic Objects is out now via 4AD. See www.jennyhval.com for more information.
“SOMETIMES IT’S NOT THAT INTERESTING TO BE RELATABLE.”