Jenny Hval
The Mill — Wednesday, September 2 at 9 p.m.
Norwegian composer Jenny Hval will visit the Mill on September 2 in support of her latest album, Apocalypse, Girl. It will be her first Iowa City show since a stirring 2014 performance at the same venue for Mission Creek Festival. Hval took time to field some questions just after arriving in San Francisco at the start of her month-long US tour.
Your last two records were explicitly inspired by various works of art—a 2011 sound and light installation gave birth to 2013’s Innocence is Kinky, and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) inspired Meshes of Voice (2014, Hval with Susanna Wallumrød). Was there anything in particular that fed Apocalypse, Girl?
There’s a lot of music. A lot of films, and thinking about how to make an album, but there were a few things that were particularly inspiring: Safe by Todd Haynes and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The album was a inspired by energy from a lot of things as well.
Can you describe the process of translating other art forms into music?
It isn’t translation as much as freedom. Music would require translation because it’s more similar. Film takes place in time, and there’s a certain knowledge to it. It is similar to making music, but film opens ways of thinking that makes me need to write, rather than working from what inspired me. With film, I don’t feel like I have to do something justice — I’m making something different up. I’m not writing an essay about something, I don’t have to do any artistic or academic justice by what I’m inspired by.
You wrote a master’s thesis on Kate Bush. Was academics always a path to being a better musician?
I love studying. It was comparative literature — you can’t use a degree in it for anything anyway. In my early 20s, I intended to be a professor of some kind, but I drifted into creative work, and even with my thesis, which I finished in 2010, I was more interested in building and developing a way of listening to music that took the poetic qualities of language into consideration. I wanted to be a better listener. For me, music is conversation.
What opened you to listen in this way? How do you listen to film/art/music?
Sometimes I think critically about the way that I think this — it’s self-censored listening. I can’t really separate listening to something and taking something from it, getting creative energy from it. I do try to spend a lot of time with what I see and hear. I want to listen to it in the moment, but I don’t feel like I have to make up my mind right away. That’d be exhausting — to have to make a judgment. I don’t listen as a critic — it’s embracing another element and putting it in my brain and having it live there for awhile.
How often did you watch Safe or Persona as you worked on the album?
I saw each once — but I watched a lot of clips on the internet to relive it, and feel, and to figure out which scenes people take an interest in. It’s interesting to see what resonated with other people. I went back and watched scenes and also collected a lot of images. That’s what people do now — they put screen shots online. I don’t need to watch something again and again — it makes me think, and sense, so much. I’d rather gather bits and pieces as though I’m making poetry of them in my mind.
So your process involved the films and also the way that she understood people experiencing them?
Yes! I love to get other people’s approaches—people enjoy reading record reviews or articles about works of art. I like this kind of immediacy of putting things out there, and citations, and screen shots, and … it also involves a degree of feeling, when you’re putting a snippet of a film online. It’s illegal, but I like the culture of stealing and reliving.
A lot of this process reminds me of Heidegger’s aesthetic theory in “Origin of the Work of Art,” where he discusses how artists respond to truth by preserving it in an art work which, in turn, inspires other preservers to hold that truth in their own creative efforts. Does that sound familiar?
I avoided Heidegger for political reasons. I didn’t feel a need to read another white man. I also don’t understand what he means by truth, but I would agree if you’d replace that term with “energy.” It’s a revelation.
Speaking of revelation, what do you mean by “Apocalypse” in the title of your album?
I wasn’t intending to treat the concept of apocalypse with respect. It was totally more meant in a cheeky way; what I find that it references the most is the kind of jokey dumb political slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Things like that. I also like the various sorts of cartoonish ways of addressing people — calling them “boy” or “girl.”
This album was also about trying on the very big concepts, like apocalypse, that I’ve always avoided. The big things to me have always been cliches. But with this album, I felt liberated with the material. I can take on those words, the big words and the big thoughts, and it doesn’t mean I have to engage with them the same way as anyone else would, or in a cliched way.
I’m also then kind of critiquing the sort of role … it’s been easy to take on an outsider perspective because I’m a minor artist, not really well-known, and I don’t want to deal with the big stuff. This time, I wanted to climb into these huge concepts and see what I could do there and think through how I engage with music and with the world. There’s a great expression in Norwegian which puts three different words together. It’s “big man crazy” — means that you’re Napolean, taking on thinking really grand ideas and wanting to control and be king of something. The Norwegian word is an everyday word, which is why I like it. My lyrical world deals with the everyday thoughts and language. It isn’t full of academic phrases.
By engaging with the everyday, you manage to bring an intimacy to the apocalypse.
The apocalypse is capitalism — if I deal with intimate sexual imagery, it’s probably to sort of deal with how sexuality is seen in a capitalist narrative and how that is a total image of an apocalypse—not the one that comes with wars and the four horsemen, but the apocalypse of human emptiness.
What is your relationship with religion? It seems simultaneously omnipresent throughout your new album, but also something less easy to place than your interest in politics, sexuality, economics, art, etc.
I think that the song titles are trying to be real titles about big things. They came after the songs, and they place emphasis on religion more than I would have anticipated doing. Religion is something I always looked at from far away. I’m not a religious person: my family and community weren’t religious. But I traveled a lot over the past few years, and met a lot of people who have grown up in the South. It reconnected me with memories of the religious parts of Norway. I ran away from it so that it wouldn’t leave a mark. It was weird to have grown up around fundamental and charismatic Christians — there were a lot of them in my high school class.
I had thought it didn’t make an impression on me, but that was stupid. When I noticed it had made an impression, I took an interest in it. Where I come from—the type of place, the small town, the traditional side of Norway. I didn’t return to where I came from, but I want to insert it in my work rather than abstain from it. I found that very liberating.
When you’ve described your lyrics in the past, you indicate both that you simply sit and write without much editing, but also that you spend a lot of time drawing on philosophy, politics, sexuality and art. How do you see yourself as a lyricist in terms of becoming attuned to the truths you discover in those other worlds?
I don’t feel like I have to write academic essays. Sometimes I like the musical qualities of something, sometimes themes. I’m not sure that I understood the whole, but I very much like bits. I find a relationship between my thoughts about all that reading, and the energy from the process of reading it, and then find that I need to put it in my work. It’s more about my longing than any sort of direct thematic inspiration.
I’m having a conversation with other works of art, or other people’s political theories, and I long to belong in that conversation regarding certain themes of a philosophical nature. It stays in my head, and by the time I write about it, I’ve forgotten the exact words, but there’s something there that I still want to put it into my lyrics. There are questions in interviews that ask about this or that line in relation to philosophers. I can’t do it at all because I can’t remember each influence.
I can’t explain why I really admire this or that political theorist, but I have read a lot and have been enlightened by it and received energy from it. I feel it moving into my body, and it’s different than an academic way of describing and teaching.
If those sources feed you lyrically, what types of experiences guide your choices of instrumentation? What’s the origin of your sonic landscapes?
Instrumentation arises differently. My way of thinking about music is a weird combination. I’ve never wanted something unified, in the avant garde or something like that. If that was the case, then I’d make music nobody wanted to listen to. I’ve always loved combining musical ideas, arrangements, the way things are performed and chord structures and rhythms with total freedom in the lyrics, especially complex lyrics.
I love the simplest things. What’s beautiful about pop music is the ability to use basic human elements to create something complex, but that refuses to be complex in an academic way. It’s simple. It resists something … it resists and creates complexity at the same time. When I studied, I’d read a lot of philosophy I didn’t understand. I never studied music—music was my own space. I didn’t have to follow any assignment. I would try to understand philosophy by singing and repeating it.
English is my second language, so I needed to work to get what other students snapped up quickly. I made songs like Simon and Garfunkle could have made out from the philosophy I was learning. I used to be embarrassed about it, for a lot of years, and I had to remove a lot of those melodies from my music. I felt embarrassed of the simplicity. But now I’m interested in the coming together of various elements. I know a lot more about poetry now. They take simple language but they make it something that’s not just a blog. If you make work that has a lot of elements, they don’t’ have to be complex in the same way.
What’s the value of collaboration in your work? It seems that you tend to find partners to work with—what sorts of things happen in tandem with a hands-on producer or co-author that don’t happen on your own?
I’m terrible at finding collaborators. I’m the sort of person who will gladly go into something without knowing what it will be like. I’ll never be an artist who will only do great things and great collaborations. I’ll keep doing a lot of interesting ones that don’t work. But I do love conversation — that’s how I engage with other art works. The reason I explained it that way is that I enjoy conversations while making art. I’ve done things on my own without collaborators — but I’ve returned to other people because it works with the spontaneous writing that I do.
I find that I write best on my own, but I do love to collaborate with musicians. I love input, and I can take it. I can take criticism, and I find it interesting. I can change my mind, and hopefully listen and go deeper into something I was doing that I didn’t understand. It’s a great way of working and pushing your work—to try out input and having somebody to constantly speak with, who can make me see things in different ways. Not anybody, but I find my current collaborators really see a lot of things that I don’t see. That’s really wonderful. It expands everything.
