Jenny Hval : Iris Silver Mist
Tonally speaking, Jenny Hval the novelist and Jenny Hval the musician couldn’t be further apart. Her novels, brilliant and brief, jagged like aged daggers, focus on a grit and grime of the body and our enmeshment within them, intimate in their portrayal of the natural violence of the heart and the thresholds of the sublime beyond the abject. Meanwhile, as her literary career swells and grows in accolades, her music has turned more and more to an uncomplicated beauty, the kind of wind-swept sophisticated grandeur of Peter Gabriel with the incredible soundscaping or the literary pop that grew in the ’90s on to the present day. These tonal divergences enrich one another, paint a fuller picture of the human experience through her eyes.
Which is fitting because her eye toward keen speciality of detail remains across both. Her unifying eye, which naturally across details both achingly small and grand, carries a slight glossolalic lilt, landing somewhere between Half Waif and Björk, drifting like a half-dream, sleep-talking to a notepad left next to the bed. Her musical approach on new album Iris Silver Mist is less the through-composed song suite of The Practice of Love and more a cluster of spiritually bound material, the way great singer/songwriter albums or short story collections hover around a spoke. The record is named after a perfume, which describes the emotional center of this collection well; scent, the most ephemeral and thus most literary of the senses, drifts like a cloud of clustered ghosts over the spaces, objects, people and events of our lives. Only scent seems capable of so strongly juxtaposing a scene without deseating it, capable in the very next moment of marrying itself intimately to the flesh. It reframes the motive of this work: this is not dream logic but scent logic, the movement of invisible particles coloring our sense of the world.
Hval on Iris Silver Mist joins the bevy of artists who used the pandemic to generate work more abstract than perhaps they would have before. This, if anything, was the only critique one could give of, say, Blood Bitch. Sometimes we use the intensity of the physical as an ecstatic door toward the transcendental; other times, the same approach might feel like puerile tantrums. The past six years of music making and writing seemed to have transformed Hval. Her use of found sound and field recordings among these tracks brings to mind claire rousay, a contemporary peer who excels at portraying in simple unadorned terms the lay experiences of a life in a way that explodes outward their intimate intensity. You could easily imagine these sounds as the score to a stage play, somewhere between a contemporary opera and a modern dance piece.
As I get older and my eye turns from vulgar intensity in its singularity, works of this kind of crystalline, delicate and near saintly depictions of the common, the ordinary, the highly specific, sing to me with a great unbearable intensity. Records like this feel like that moment of lifting your head in a restaurant or cafe and, in a moment of inexplicable sublimity, carving every sound, scent, gaudy poster, chipped and stained Formica table, distressed and faded cushion, lingering holiday decoration and mismatched hybriding of the clothing of everyone around you into eternal memory. Iris inverts my typical relation with music, letting it score my continuing life. It instead is the space itself, rooms and furniture and perfume and history.
Label: 4AD
Year: 2025
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Jenny Hval : Iris Silver Mist
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