JENNY HVAL - Iris Silver Mist

Wrapped in fragrant fumes, greyish smoke and roses blooming amid ash and hills of cigarette butts, ghostly figures move about, blurred memories transfigured into concrete matter beside a deathly bedside or lost within their own dwelling. Spectres, hallucinations, a wandering artist, before vanishing, on a disassembled, decaying stage, among the remains of past sets, microphones and electrical cables entwined in a serpentine labyrinth. The voices of "Iris Silver Mist", close and distant at once, move along collapsing timelines, drawn towards the centre of a stage on which no pièce can be staged any longer.

The new collection by Jenny Hval abandons the garish colours of "Classic Objects", while still carrying forward its reflection on the role and meaning of artistic performance. With a title drawn from a fragrance, the Norwegian artist's new album moves between multisensory experience and conceptual abstraction, in a desolate landscape where life nonetheless keeps flowing in unexpected ways.

Art is erased, the author is no longer merely dead but entirely absent: is the hammering dada ritual "The Artist Is Absent" a séance, a mechanical liturgy, or the baptism of some new possible becoming? In "All Night Long", by contrast, the performative scenario becomes its own tombstone, the curtain a black coffin waiting to be pried open, the show a feverish danse macabre transfigured into a celestial song.

I'm performing there

Performing on top of my bones, mine and my family’s bones

As long as I’m performing, I am not choosing, or dying

I am performing in the speed of light

faster than autotune can read and transform a note

faster than a microphone can pick up any sound

dodging the entire industry

Just a living matter moving through light and shadow

Happy birthday!

Hval's music stirs more restlessly than ever within ambiguity, hinting at the unspeakable: “It is given. Here and now is a gift. You may take it or leave it, but I give it to you, nonetheless. It is given.” So it goes in “The Gift”, over a synthetic bed reminiscent of her latest compositional work on “Classic Objects”. And, as with its predecessor, on “Iris Silver Mist” words, voice and music merge into an experimental art-pop that never loses sight of a persuasive melodic hook.

Here the result is certainly more fragmented, yet the sonic flow still tends toward a single possible conclusion. “I want the end to sound like this” is a powerful ambient meditation that, despite the irony of its title, plays a crucial role in plunging the listener back into the material breath of the cosmos. Thus ghosts, artists searching for their own lost bodies, animals, and scented particles are all reabsorbed into a universal matter that pulses and endlessly reorganizes itself.

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03/08/2025