Iris Silver Mist, the new album from Norwegian art-pop polymath Jenny Hval, is, in many ways, music about absence and music about attunement—music about the absence of music itself. On the record, she ponders the early days of lockdown when performance, smoke-filled clubs, and live music disappeared from her life in an instant. This sense of dislocation—from a practice, from a place, from the body—suffuses the whole album, which is icy and reflective, with hints of Vespertine and Laurie Anderson. The pandemic was characterized not by our closeness, but by its cavernous gaps and the objects we sent in our place: snail mail, flowers, a bottle of smoky mezcal from our stockpile, or an olive oil polenta cake with orange and rosemary left on the doorstep. This is a part of what remains from that time: the smells, the objects, and the lack.
In the absence of music, another sensory attunement takes its place: perfume. Hval is an artist whose music is often suffused with her tactile obsessions, whether it’s the juicy vampirism of 2016’s Blood Bitch, or the sensual feints of 2013’s Innocence is Kinky. For her, perfume is the activating, atavistic essence that tickles Tom Robbins’ floral brain, the sexual, illuminating next step in evolutionary being. “With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation. With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate. With floral consciousness, we’ll have empathic telepathy,” Robbins writes. In the vacancy left by music and performance, perfume offered its own form of intimacy for Hval: The title of the album itself comes from her preferred scent, made by Maruice Roucel for the French perfumerie Serge Lutens. Prickly and powdery, the scent of iris is subterranean—Old World—once used in Tuscany to perfume linen cupboards.
Hval’s Gertrude Stein-ian debut single, “To be a rose,” traces the woody, carcinogenic stench of cigarettes through her life: from her mother to poorly lit green rooms, to an intimate encounter on a balcony. After all, roses and cigarettes are fantasies, pauses in our daily lives. Lean against the wall and have a smoke break; stop to smell the roses. Beginning with the mid-range thump of hand drums and call-to-arms trumpets, it takes a moment for the softer heart notes of the stringed instruments to join in and round out the song, an invitation to bloom.
The language of fragrance shares the vocabulary of music. Many notes, assembled to attack and decline, harmonize and contrast. Just as scents move in particles and music shivers on the air, the songs from Iris Silver Mist evaporate and condense into each other. On “I want to start at the beginning,” Hval gets lost in a whispering reverie, fantasizing about becoming a hamburger. “Juicy, warm, voluptuous, with muscle and fat, texture and resistance, animalic, toxic, tough or tender, burnt, loved… real. I used to be that,” she confesses. Her desire for a sizzling corporeality bumps against “All night long,” a triptych on music making, social isolation, and performance. The first section, all syncopated drums, follows an overwhelmed Hval, while the second section, colored by fluttering guitar and gentle car engines, probes a distance between herself, everyone, and everything. “Do you remember all the pandemic birthdays?” she sings. “A friend received so many flowers, it looked like she had died. She found herself absent, absent from her own house.” The third section, thin and reedy, returns to the stage: “As long as I’m performing, I’m not choosing or dying.”
Jenny Hval’s usual idiosyncrasies and specificities are present—walking her dog in the rain, free bleeding, tinnitus, the sounds of the Oslo subway—while she engages in new sonic spaces. Standout track “The artist is absent” embodies elements of deep house and ‘70s funk breaks, while “The gift” features stabs of organ that recall the ecstatic playing Anna Von Hauswolff, done over a snapping dance beat that could have almost been a cut track from Eusexua. As much as the album is about dislocation, Hval’s distance from her craft and her loved ones, it is also an awakening—an attunement to sense and the languages that reach out to it. “We are resin, we are powder.” The experience is heady, gliding, interior, sensuous, and polymathic. Despite Hval’s discomfort with performance—with embodiment—Iris Silver Mist returns to presence, even in its most reflective moments. On “A ballad,” she says it plainly: “I couldn’t tell you why I keep singing, only how.”
