Taste Test
What is “good taste” anyway? Allow your favorite actor, musician, celebrity, or comedian to let you in on what they’re watching, reading, and consuming.
Like a great gust of wind, the Norwegian singer-songwriter Jenny Hval sweeps up debris from the outside and carries it into the room. “When I perform, I’m always aware of the fact that this is the year, this is the month, Trump did this last week,” she tells me. “I see myself as a vessel for everything.” Working across disciplines, she incorporates insights from found texts, personal histories, and direct experience into her free-flowing compositions: “At times, I have been/Obsessed with connecting/To materials and textures,” she sings on her 2022 song “Classic Objects.” She has released nine solo albums, two collaborative records with her husband Håvard Volden, and four novels. Last year, she performed a mutating experiential piece called I Want to be a Machine in which she lined up simmering rice cookers with “scents, kind of popping in, invading you,” as she explains, while performing songs that would eventually comprise her ninth records, Iris Silver Mist.
Iris Silver Mist was borne from a desire to restore physical intimacy lost during the pandemic. Hval found herself missing concerts: splashed beer, cigarette smoke, the subtle alchemy of bodies. She began revisiting her childhood perfume obsession. Drawing its name from the famous Serge Lutans fragrance, her album dwells on the transience of ourselves and our material environment: “We used to be human but now/We are resin/We are powder/Scattered all over.” Though its imagery is wandering and vaporous, Iris Silver Mist settles in at a time when movement is being restricted: “I was gonna say, maybe see you in America, but who knows if we can actually go there?,” she says wistfully, referring to the U.S.’s tightening borders. “All the deportations and screenings of people, there are many things to oppose, the role of an artist is not to comply with the government so that I can travel.”
Where did your journey with scent begin?
I think it started in the ’90s, when I was a tween. There’s a tax free shop on the ferry over from southern Norway to northern Denmark, which I rode a lot because my mom is half-Danish. I remember having L’Eau d’Issey from Issey Miyake and CKOne. That smelled really sweet and warm, but also fresh, like a shower with a very clean person inside it. A robotic shower, in a way.
I had the same relationship with music and scent at the time. If I didn’t like an album that my parents owned, I never gave up. I did the same thing with perfumes. It’s very different from this culture of accessibility that we have now, where you just give up very quickly on things.
When did you first try Iris Silver Mist?
I tried it in Paris a year ago. I had fallen into the honey trap of reading about it online. It’s really endearing to read all these different people on the internet doing their best to describe difficult things. I’ve worn it many times, and I finally managed to get a bottle of it. It’s very special. It’s kind of underground, cold, boiled carrots, milky fog.
I had read a lot. I was prepared. Luca Turin, who’s maybe the most famous perfume critic of all, gave it five stars. But the experience of it was very special. It fits with me a little bit, because it’s sort of airy and shy but also ghostly and in your face.
Where do you go to learn about perfume?
The Nose Candy podcast. It’s a blind smelling challenge, so they talk about scents for a long time without knowing what they are. This kind of grappling at nothing is a very realistic experience of many types of art. I’ve been on the forum Basenotes a bit. I like Fragrantica too but it’s problematic for other reasons. I found this random comment on Fragrantica, I think, where someone was looking for a perfume that smelled like her diseased cat. It’s really creepy, but also very human, and reassuring that we want to try in any way possible to get our loved ones back.
Have you searched for anything like that?
There’s some kind of chemical magic going on with dogs paws that make them smell like something prepared and heated, like hot popcorn, but in a very nice way, like a little fermented. I have been dreaming about finding scents that remind me of my dog Cleo’s paws or fur, which I also think smells heavenly. She’s a Finnish Lapphund, which is a Finnish reindeer herding dog. But then I think: I have her already. I’m lucky enough, she’s still here. But it’s not about buying something that smells like her. It’s more about being able to recognize something that reminds me of her and understanding what that is.
What is the last ineffable experience you’ve had?
I’ve had a lot of weird experiences with my voice over the last nine months. The feeling of something being wrong with your body is extremely frustrating, obviously, but it’s just so interesting to me. Going to speech therapy and learning about breathing properly and just noticing — it’s almost like I’ve had an operation. I wake up with an unknown throat that I need to re-familiarize myself with. I’ve had this feeling like my body is like more of a tube or a weird air vessel, spaceship thing.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Has that changed what you listen to? Are there certain sounds or voices that are more comforting than others?
I accept most things when it’s music. I’ve become the worst listener of speech. I’m always watching videos of people discussing political issues, what’s going on in Gaza, et cetera. Now I have a new devil on my shoulder saying, I can’t listen to this voice. This voice is ruining itself. They sound very wounded. There’s no flow. It just sounds painful.
What political podcasts do you listen to?
COEXISTt Inc, is modern journalism. It’s about what you do when you’re in Florida and your state is fucked, your country is fucked, and you’re supposed to be a journalist, but journalism is fucked, so you report to the best of your abilities. It turns out to be really insightful and interesting. It’s a nice sort of view on a more radical America. There was an episode with a journalist jailed in Israel. It was really interesting to hear about the day-to-day experiences.
Some of the podcasts I follow because I heard various people on the Interdependence podcast that Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst did, which I love. Now, it’s becoming this web — like a hopeless murder mystery. Norwegians, we read and watch a lot of crime fiction during Easter. It’s a weird tradition that we have.
You sent over a list of things you’ve been interested in that included Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber. Is that crime fiction? What else have you been reading lately?
Good transition there. It’s a stupidly beautiful reworking of fairy tales based on the Bluebeard fairy tale. That is the best example of texts that play with other texts. When I lived in Australia in my early twenties, it was on the curriculum. I really loved it, but I didn’t really savor it. An amazing Norwegian translation came out last year, and the publisher sent me the book. I got to reread it in my own language. It’s a classic.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which I heard about in a Patreon exclusive episode of Contrapoints called “Granola Fascism.” I really appreciate how it’s such a vulnerable journey into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. It made me think about how I should have paid more attention to the stuff that I didn’t want to see with Trump and Bannon.
While you were working on Iris Silver Mist, were you also listening to music that wasn’t your own?
I hardly listened to anything until the album was done. I listened to Julia Holter’s new album. I only finished [Iris Silver Mist] in November, so I think I started listening to a lot of old stuff that I like, stuff that I’ve forgotten about: Yoko Ono, Annette Peacock, and for New Years, I played my favorite B-side of the 80s for some of my friends. The Kim Wilde album.
You have a song titled after Heiner Mueller. Can you tell me about your first discovery of him?
I read Hamletmachine in university. Everyone had to make a little version of it in groups. The characters are the same as in the original Hamlet, but they’ve woken up in East Germany in the late 70s and just see endless violence. There’s this incredible, weary, nonchalant awareness of them. A character from a play wakes up on stage. It’s very Pinocchio. I often find classic rock stars to look like that, a famous character out of a famous play who’s all of a sudden bringing the contemporary world with him. To me it’s a study of what an artist is on stage.
Heiner Mueller wrote a poem of pigeons sitting on telephone wires, pooping on East Berlin. One of my first published articles was about Heiner Mueller, and I quoted this poem in it. It’s a big part of me. This snippet of the song is from a show I did last year.
What is your relationship to the stage these days? A regular subject of your songs is the relationship between life and performance.
In my case, I think they’re very related. All my adult life has been related to being on stage in some way. I studied theater. I’ve always been very fond of quite performative literature that plays with the idea of being a critic, looking at things that already exist, not really caring about what is fiction and what is not. For example, Kathy Acker. The poet Caroline Bergvall. I’m always aware when I perform that I’m performing music. Everything is in the body, whether we want one or not.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
