Events with Jenny Hval
Jenny Hval
Iris Silver Mist, the new album by Norwegian musician, writer, and artist Jenny Hval, is not
named after a song but a fragrance. The perfume by the same name was made by the nose
Maurice Roucel for the French perfume house Serge Lutens, and is described as smelling more
like steel than silver. It is cold and prickly, soft and shimmering, like stepping outside on an
early, misty morning, your body still warm from sleep. For Jenny, Iris Silver Mist smells like being
close to ghosts. “A flower that is a root that has died, been resurrected and finely grated.”
In other words, the album didn’t begin with music but with the absence of it. During the pandemic, as concerts were cancelled, the physical presence of music disappeared alongside the bodies that listened to it. The smell of cigarettes, soap, and the sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by unphysical, algorithmic listening at home. Suddenly, and for the first time since she was a teenager, Jenny found herself growing interested in perfumes. Smelling, reading, collecting, writing—she immersed herself with the scented while her music was put on hold. It took her a year to understand what was happening, until she did: she was seeking another way of sensing physical intimacy. Where music had turned into a void, she filled it with fragrance.
Just like the scent of iris comes from the roots and not the flower, the album, too, begins underground. “Lay down, down in the deep where your love comes from,” Jenny sings in the first track of the album, ‘Lay Down’. Surrounded by soft drums, synths and strings, she emerges from the dirt and into the blue sky, like the root of the iris aspiring to become its scent. When she sings “You had bled through your jeans,” it is both observational and emotional—a sign of what is to come. One song bleeds into the next, just like a daughter is connected to her mother, the smoke of a cigarette sticks to a sweater, or the layers of a perfume unfold over time. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.
In the next song ‘To Be a Rose’, we emerge through the ground and onto the stage—this time, as yet another flower. “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” Jenny half-speaks, half-sings to the beat of a drum machine. Roses and cigarettes are romantic forms of wishful thinking, transporting you someplace else. Just like when you focus too closely on something, it easily changes into something else—one synth that turns into another synth that adds on a bass. The rose grows taller with each chorus as the accord changes. Her mother’s cigarette smoke dancing through the air. “I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.”
The word perfume originates from Latin, through smoke. In Latin, smoke is an ambiguous word, and could just as well mean scent or dust or mist, which, by nature, all share similar characteristics yet remain equally difficult to capture. Throughout Iris Silver Mist, perfume continues to turn into smoke, mist, and music. In the song ‘You Died’, descriptions of scents and perfume ingredients appear in the lyrics. “You still smell alive” is followed by “We used to be human but now/We are resin/We are powder/Scattered all over.” Life and death intertwine like powder and mist.
The album is very sensual. You might think sexual, but what I mean is more tactile, intimate— touching you as smells, sounds, and images do when they multiply. Sounds as smells, lyrics as images: this is music that wants to touch. Again, I don’t mean physically, but rather emotionally. Or maybe that is two sides of the same thing. During a series of performances Jenny did last year, titled I want to be a Machine, she placed rice cookers around the stage, filling the songs with the misty smell of rice. I want to be a Machine is closely connected to Iris Silver Mist in more ways than just the scent. The songs she performed were entirely new and had never been recorded, yet eight of them would actually end up on this album. Starting the album with a performance was quite an unusual approach—it was also an intimate one. Emphasising the importance of the physical and live elements of music, these songs held the experience that was lacking in Jenny’s life for so long.
Iris Silver Mist continues to change shape, one song seeping into the next, like in a mixtape. ‘Spirit Mist’ turns into ‘I Don’t Know What Free Is’, which again turns into ‘The Artist Is Absent’, ‘Huffing My Arm’ and ‘The Gift’. These songs are like one long track divided into different chapters, which is also the way they were performed in the Machine piece. Although adjustments were made between the stage and recording, the intention of a performance persists. In ‘Heiner Müller’, intended as an a cappella for three voices, the voices are replaced by the sound of footsteps and a whispering singing as the artist walks her dog in the rain, and it feels like we are listening to a private performance taking place inside the song.
On the track ‘Spirit Mist’, we hear the Oslo subway, recorded by Jenny on a winter’s day in 2022. And just like traveling on a train, one song smoothly turns into the next, and the next. “It is about moving,” Jenny says about the album, but she means it in a more symbiotic way. Moving on, moving into the sound—as one sound blends with another, as one song turns into the next, as she turns into the music, and her perfume does so, too. As I carry her around in my ears, I wonder if the sounds are coming from the music or somewhere else around me. If the words are hers or something I’m thinking. If the cold marble hallway in the library I’m walking through is part of the music. The flushing of a toilet.
In other words, the album didn’t begin with music but with the absence of it. During the pandemic, as concerts were cancelled, the physical presence of music disappeared alongside the bodies that listened to it. The smell of cigarettes, soap, and the sweat from warm stage lights and shared bathrooms was replaced by unphysical, algorithmic listening at home. Suddenly, and for the first time since she was a teenager, Jenny found herself growing interested in perfumes. Smelling, reading, collecting, writing—she immersed herself with the scented while her music was put on hold. It took her a year to understand what was happening, until she did: she was seeking another way of sensing physical intimacy. Where music had turned into a void, she filled it with fragrance.
Just like the scent of iris comes from the roots and not the flower, the album, too, begins underground. “Lay down, down in the deep where your love comes from,” Jenny sings in the first track of the album, ‘Lay Down’. Surrounded by soft drums, synths and strings, she emerges from the dirt and into the blue sky, like the root of the iris aspiring to become its scent. When she sings “You had bled through your jeans,” it is both observational and emotional—a sign of what is to come. One song bleeds into the next, just like a daughter is connected to her mother, the smoke of a cigarette sticks to a sweater, or the layers of a perfume unfold over time. A perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.
In the next song ‘To Be a Rose’, we emerge through the ground and onto the stage—this time, as yet another flower. “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” Jenny half-speaks, half-sings to the beat of a drum machine. Roses and cigarettes are romantic forms of wishful thinking, transporting you someplace else. Just like when you focus too closely on something, it easily changes into something else—one synth that turns into another synth that adds on a bass. The rose grows taller with each chorus as the accord changes. Her mother’s cigarette smoke dancing through the air. “I was singing in my room, she smoked on the balcony/Long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography.”
The word perfume originates from Latin, through smoke. In Latin, smoke is an ambiguous word, and could just as well mean scent or dust or mist, which, by nature, all share similar characteristics yet remain equally difficult to capture. Throughout Iris Silver Mist, perfume continues to turn into smoke, mist, and music. In the song ‘You Died’, descriptions of scents and perfume ingredients appear in the lyrics. “You still smell alive” is followed by “We used to be human but now/We are resin/We are powder/Scattered all over.” Life and death intertwine like powder and mist.
The album is very sensual. You might think sexual, but what I mean is more tactile, intimate— touching you as smells, sounds, and images do when they multiply. Sounds as smells, lyrics as images: this is music that wants to touch. Again, I don’t mean physically, but rather emotionally. Or maybe that is two sides of the same thing. During a series of performances Jenny did last year, titled I want to be a Machine, she placed rice cookers around the stage, filling the songs with the misty smell of rice. I want to be a Machine is closely connected to Iris Silver Mist in more ways than just the scent. The songs she performed were entirely new and had never been recorded, yet eight of them would actually end up on this album. Starting the album with a performance was quite an unusual approach—it was also an intimate one. Emphasising the importance of the physical and live elements of music, these songs held the experience that was lacking in Jenny’s life for so long.
Iris Silver Mist continues to change shape, one song seeping into the next, like in a mixtape. ‘Spirit Mist’ turns into ‘I Don’t Know What Free Is’, which again turns into ‘The Artist Is Absent’, ‘Huffing My Arm’ and ‘The Gift’. These songs are like one long track divided into different chapters, which is also the way they were performed in the Machine piece. Although adjustments were made between the stage and recording, the intention of a performance persists. In ‘Heiner Müller’, intended as an a cappella for three voices, the voices are replaced by the sound of footsteps and a whispering singing as the artist walks her dog in the rain, and it feels like we are listening to a private performance taking place inside the song.
On the track ‘Spirit Mist’, we hear the Oslo subway, recorded by Jenny on a winter’s day in 2022. And just like traveling on a train, one song smoothly turns into the next, and the next. “It is about moving,” Jenny says about the album, but she means it in a more symbiotic way. Moving on, moving into the sound—as one sound blends with another, as one song turns into the next, as she turns into the music, and her perfume does so, too. As I carry her around in my ears, I wonder if the sounds are coming from the music or somewhere else around me. If the words are hers or something I’m thinking. If the cold marble hallway in the library I’m walking through is part of the music. The flushing of a toilet.