Jenny Hval - The Scent of Notes

Jenny Hval is one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary music scene, and her work, split between music, performance art and literature, proves it once again. Her critical, engaged perspective now lends itself to an original multisensory experiment tied to the world of perfumery and to scent in the broadest sense. Without giving up the ironic spark of her writing, Hval deepens her meta-reflection on the role and meaning of being an artist in a present ever more fractured and clouded by digital disconnection. 

Smells and scents are a major source of inspiration for your new album. Did you conceive these songs as a synesthetic experience?

I started getting interested in perfumes right around the time I needed to begin writing new music, and this new interest gradually folded itself into the writing process. While I worked, I tried out different perfumes and fragrances and read a lot about their history. I didn't realize how deep this interest ran until almost the very end: for a long time I thought it was just a return to an old hobby of mine. As a teenager I was in fact very drawn to that world.

Could you say that, in a way, you tried to write differently from the traditional way of listening to and "seeing" music? How do performance art and the physical body intertwine with this different way of conceiving the musical experience?

It's a fascinating theory, but I have to say I wasn't really aware of the meeting point between music and perfume until quite a late stage of working on the album. I didn't deliberately try to go beyond the sonic realm. I was trying to write something that would sound like a mixtape or a radio show: a group of songs able to move between different times and spaces. As for the second question, I find it hard to answer because, while writing, I didn't have the sense that I was crossing into something truly interdisciplinary. That said, it's true that any work of art always exists within an interdisciplinary sensory world.

I saw your performance “I want to be a machine” a year ago, and I remember that smells already played a crucial role back then.

I'd already written most of the music for the album in 2023, but before recording it I wanted to create a performance starting from that material. I think it was a way of escaping the feeling of the classic “album cycle”, where you record something and then play shows to “promote it”. There's something deeply necessary about performing without the obligation to promote your own music. Håvard Volden and I then decided to produce the album starting from the initial demos, written before “Machine”. It felt like the most natural choice, even though in some performances we'd played parts of the songs differently. But the show, and in particular the use of scents and materials, still influenced the way we produced and assembled “Iris Silver Mist”. I wanted to have fragrance diffusers on stage, but I also wanted an object that would give off vapor in a less abstract way, something that conveyed safety and a sense of home. So I suggested using rice cookers. I love cooking rice in the rice cooker at home, because I always end up forgetting it's on, and then suddenly I smell the rice spreading through the house after half an hour. It's something that develops over time and almost sinks into your subconscious. It felt to me like the show needed both something openly reassuring and domestic, and something more alienating, like the sharp and maybe slightly provocative scent we diffused towards the end of the show (a lot of ambergris). What's more, I also knew that the rice note was “trending” in the perfume community. Maybe for the same reasons: something safe to hold onto in difficult times. These were interesting things to bring into the performance space, because I found there were a lot of oppositions within the music: welcoming melodies against more direct monologues, acoustic instruments alongside very synthetic-sounding keyboards.

Part of “I Want to be a machine” changed shape and then flowed into “Iris Silver Mist”. What influenced your choices about which parts of the other project to include or leave out?

I knew I didn't want to put too much spoken word on the album, partly because I was already including a lot of those ideas in my latest book (unfortunately, for now only published in Norwegian), which came out alongside “Iris Silver Mist”. I also felt that some of the material from the show would age quickly – for instance, I'd written a monologue about the link between Spotify and military AI. And sure enough, it's already dated: the situation is now decidedly worse.

I've read that you've become something of a perfume and fragrance “nerd”! Have you ever tried creating your own fragrance?

I have the utmost respect both for the “noses” of the fragrance world (both classically trained ones and independent creators) and for creative directors, and I have no intention of getting into mixing oils myself. I see the composition of a fragrance as a sister art to musical composition or poetry. I'm more interested in the intersection between these worlds than in working in a field that's completely new to me. Although it would be fun one day to write something that could inspire a fragrance, a kind of score for an olfactory composition. My favourite smells are wet cement, dark roses and my dog's paws (as separate scents, not all together). My favourite creative director is Serge Lutens, the creator of the perfume Iris Silver Mist. There are several Lutens fragrances I love, like Daim blond, Filles en aiguilles, Muscs koublaï khan. On the other hand, I find that a lot of the more recent brands (at least the most popular ones) are less interesting. But of course I'm still pretty new to the world of perfume, so I'm still exploring. And then, of course, a lot of interesting things are happening in this field in Italy.

I've read that you've described “Iris Silver Mist” as a “late-night musical essay”. Has your work as a writer (novels, essays and other texts) influenced or perhaps changed the way you now approach song lyrics?

Absolutely. I wanted to be a writer long before I started making music, and everything I've done musically has always been tied to literature. As well as to more mysterious, intuitive, invisible places. I often find that song lyrics are perceived as puzzles, something that has to fit already-existing melodies. But many times I've taken words from an essay I'd written, or from a poem, or even from someone else's poem, and set the words to music (once I took a paragraph from Chris Kraus's book “I LOVE DICK” and built the song “Conceptual Romance” on top of it [from “Blood Bitch”, ed.] – later on I changed the words, turning it into a kind of tribute to Kraus, or even a “review”). For “Iris Silver Mist”, though, I was more conventional and wrote the melodies first. Maybe because at that time I was more focused on smelling fragrances than on writing words. If I'm not mistaken, the lyrics for “To Be A Rose” weren't finished until two weeks before the album was mastered. It took me a very long time to find the right words, even though I'd already played the song live many times with placeholder lyrics. That happens to me a lot: sometimes songs need to be played live before you can understand what they really want to become.

One of the most interesting concepts you explore in your latest work is the idea of artistic performance and the constant metamorphosis that comes with it. Staging a “metaphorical stage” and meta-reflecting on artistic creation were central aspects of “Classic Objects”, particularly in the title track. How did your thinking on these themes evolve while working on “Classic Objects”, “I Want to be a machine” and “Iris Silver Mist”?

I think this meta-reflective aspect has always been there for me, ever since I started writing songs. In everything I've written there's always been an element of “what the hell am I doing here?” and a certain ambivalence about letting myself fully surrender to a specific genre or language, like “fiction” or the “pop song”. I think I grew up feeling like a bit of an outsider, and as a child I could never simply dance, sing or play music without also asking myself “why am I doing this?”. While writing both “Classic Objects” and “ISM”, I was also working on a text that I initially thought was going to be a novel, but which then turned into a work of nonfiction. It's called “Scenemennesket”, which roughly means “the human being on stage”. There are a great many parallels between those two albums and the book, and the main theme is exactly this: “What does it mean to be a human being on a stage? What kind of person do I become, up there? And what happens to us when we're so exposed and visible?”.

In “Iris Silver Mist”, death and absence seem to me to be set up as two distinct categories, and the second seems to me even more frightening than the first. From death you can be reborn as a ghost or as another small, fragrant particle, continuing to exist within the Universe in that way; absence, on the other hand, represents a complete, irreversible void, a dissociation from existence. I'm thinking, for instance, of “All Night Long”, where a friend dissociates from her own life and her own home, and the artist stages a danse macabre on her own grave. In your own reading of the songs too, are death and absence two separate entities?

By “absence” here I mean an absence decided by others. Death, perhaps, can be decided by the mind, but in reality it will be determined by the body. When you're absent, you might not even notice it: you've simply been erased. I feel that in our era there's a lot of absence precisely where art ought to be, whether that's the time we end up spending endlessly scrolling on our phones or reading conspiracy theories, time we could instead spend within ourselves, reading a book. Or, where there once was at least live music, today there are reality shows with celebrities on TV. Saying this makes me sound very old, and of course it's an extremely simplified view, but I have the feeling that art has already been rendered absent for many years now.

I think this distinction between death and absence becomes even clearer in “The artist is absent”, which seems to me to push beyond Roland Barthes's idea of the death of the author. Here the artist isn't just “dead”, but can no longer exist at all. So perhaps the question to ask becomes: can art still continue to exist and to have meaning, perhaps even a political one?

I don't know. Maybe…

It seems fairly clear that literature, poetry and philosophy coexist in your music. In particular, I get the impression that your last two albums embodied and transformed ideas from new materialist philosophy and posthuman feminism (I'm thinking of Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and other, younger authors). In your most recent music you can glimpse the bond between the human and the non-human, organic and non-organic matter, in a way that critically questions the traditional Western dichotomies of nature/culture, body/mind, woman/Man. Do you ever work explicitly with these ideas when you compose music and write poetic lyrics?

Not really. I've read a lot of what you mention, but I don't feel "academic" enough to transform certain theoretical ideas. I can borrow from them – and I know there's a lot of art out there that carries very deep theoretical research within the work – but I also know I don't have deep enough knowledge to really push in that direction. I can let myself be inspired by certain ideas, but when I write "becoming-animal" in "The artist is absent" I'm perfectly aware that Deleuze & Guattari would probably find my context – the composition, the rest of the lyrics – completely disconnected from their writings. And maybe even childish, or "undergraduate-student"-like. By the way, fun fact: my "becoming-animal" actually references Kate Bush's "Get Out Of My House" more than Deleuze.

What role do irony and absurd, surreal imagery play in your writing?

The same role they play in dreams: they help bring deeper truths to the surface, while also masking our banal, boring existence.

(3 August 2025)

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