Jenny Hval - Viscera

Fancy vinyl version of BB - http://www.sacredbonesrecords.com/products/sbr161-jenny-hval-blood-bitch

Seeing her tonight with Moor Mother and Olga Bell! Her last show in Philly (for Apocalypse, Girl at the Boot & Saddle; I forget the openers) was incredible so my expectations are pretty high

have always been a bit intrigued with individual songs i have heard - if you had to choose one record is this new one just as good a place to start as any

Start with Apocalypse Girl. More consistent and less intensely experimental than Blood Bitch. I feel you'll have a good idea whether or not you'll like her after just taking in the first couple songs off that. However, I feel the new one has the higher peaks and is the more rewarding repeat listen.

Personally, I think they're both much better than Innocence is Kinky. I have yet to hear Viscera.

Have her lyrics got any less blunt this time around? That killed the last one stone dead for me even when the music was often excellent.

I can hardly make out most of the lyrics on the new one.

I think Apocalypse, girl is just as "experimental." Blood Bitch just seems very blurry all the way through, and doesn't have the peaks of Apocalypse, girl. Where are the brilliant melodic eruptions on the new one? Blood Bitch is also not as varied in terms of sheer sound. She had a lot of collaborators for Apocalypse, girl, which obviously doesn't inherently make an album better, but in this case the greater sound palate is a huge attraction.

Also kind of getting annoyed with her. An album about vampires and menstruation--Oh Jenny, you're so quirky!

Parts of Apocalypse, girl still remind me in an odd way of Psychic TV w/ White Stains At Stockholm (which I don't especially recommend although maybe I do for at least one listen). The transition at 1:28-1:32 in "Why This?" for instance.

Recommend "Apocalypse, girl" as well. Her lyrics are not any less blunt on the new one.

The Psychic TV name checking is enough to get me to listen to this

It really only reminds me of At Stockholm at a couple points, but there are a couple transitions which are similar. I guess some of the use of samples overall is similar as well.

Conceptual Romance is really something

Hval can pretty much do no wrong in my book http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/18693-kelly-lee-owens-anxi-ft-jenny-hval/

this is basically a Maria Minerva track

Maria Minerva's the best - OK with me. It's a lot less fun than Minerva though.

this new lost girls EP (two tracks, 24 minutes) is very good. anyone else listening to it?

i went to check out a bad andrew wk review, but left listening to a new hval side-project i didn't even know about. it was a good visit to pitchfork

Yeah, it's quite good. I think the A-side was the centerpiece at her concert at Roskilde last summer. Anyone else who have heard it live?

Oh damn there's new hval; tnanks Karl

hval's music shares so many of the best qualities of kate bush and laurie anderson. i'm surprised there isn't more love for her here since those two are certified ilxor legends

Listened to Blood Bitch soooo much in the last year or so, it's pretty wonderful.

Love to get a hold of Hval's Kate bush essay, but haven't found it in English

Have you found it in Norwegian? Would love to read it as well :)

there is some sort of academic paper on the subject on the link below but it's written by someone else:

jennyhval.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ENO-Kate-Bush.pdf

actually no, it's just a long interview with jenny on the subject (i think!)

an interview w/ jenny h about her thesis i mean

I would like to read the thesis. Hval says that it's a 'listening' of the music, an analysis of the relationship between Bush and Hval, as facilitated by headphones. The things they say about The Dreaming are really interesting, I'll try and listen more to that. About how Bush until then mostly depicted one subject at a time, but on The Dreaming the very sense of self breaks down. Also, Hval really likes The Dreaming, the song, because Hval herself speaks English in a fake Australian accent :)

Dreaming is a huge basis for the Kate influence on her stuff I think. A song like Secret Touch is lyrically anguished and brutal but cut with a sweetness vocally similar to Kate songs like Houdini or Infant Kiss. Hval is also a proponent of esoterotica mixed with pop

#releasethethesis

I'm trying to contact Jenny for the thesis - fingers crossed

I think all Master thesises are publically available in Norway. Anybody should be able to check it out of the university library.

^ I'm in canada bud :P

I didn't see the new one on iTunes - is it under lost girls as band?

i'm not sure about iTunes but on Spotify it's filed as you'd expect: Lost Girls as the artist, Feeling as the name of the single.

speaking of, i came here to express my love for the first song on that single, "Drive". the first 8 or 9 minutes of it in particular is gripping, culminating in the sounds of her crying to her own music (or at least alluding to that memory). it's kind of shocking to hear it happen, because those kinds of memories are usually hidden (which she references with "i would never tell you this" just before her admission). also it's kind of weird how all the online lyrics for the song just stop halfway through. apparently whoever was working on it just got tired of it and wandered off

Thanks Karl, as you mentioned it's artist - Lost Girls and album "Feeling" as title. The description above sounds amazing, just need to find the proper head space for this

i listened to driving in the middle of nowhere in illinois the other day and i was crying along with it. not exactly sure why, even, but it's intense stuff.

Love that first track. Seems like a peak display of one theme that has permeated her work to date: desire for physical and spiritual connection. Hval's penchant for immediacy and addressing her audience without disconnect from narrator to audience or superiority is refreshing. Embrace the suffering and it ceases to exist

drive has a reference to kate bush -

hval - i just want to show you things, here, here, here"

kate - "i put this moment here, i put this moment here, i put this moment over here"

Hval's thesis is restricted access, besides the abstract.

Google translate:

"Stepping out of the page": Kate Bush and the singing voice of literature
Whale, Jenny
2010
This thesis investigates the singing voice and sung text in a literary and phenomenological context through analyzes of Kate Bush's recordings The Dreaming (1982) and The Sensual World (1989). Central to the relationship between text and song, a field that is underrepresented in literature science. Bush is a literally conscious pop artist in his work on songwriting, song and production. The unique of her expression is the ability to create literary qualities in the actual song-Kate Bush's texts are articulated, manipulated and tanned using voice usage, vocal effects and sound images.
The aim is to place the singing voice in the literature of literature by listening to how text is singled. In the analysis section, close listening is used to the text that I hear, as you usually read text. Inspiration for the method is derived from theories that appreciate the audible, volatile experience of music, voice and text: Roland Barthes' essays about music, Charles Bernstein's approach to poetry readings, and Adriana Cavaro's phenomenological study of the voice. Toril Moi's work with Simone de Beauvoir is also emphasized because it links phenomenology and feminism in a way that is relevant to Bush's expression.
The close-up can reveal poetic qualities that are not found in written versions of lyrics. The method can show how the song expression is not just musical or text interpretative work, but literary work that is rooted in the singing body and the relation between artist and listener. Throughout this work, Bush can create a personal and strong female expression. This expression is most evident when she recounts the end of James Joyces' Ulysses on the song "The Sensual World", and this recording can demonstrate the literary and feminist potential of pop music.

Thanks Sanpaku

Hval was heavily influenced by Safe on "Apocalypse Girl", great film (opening music seems to have been a sonic reference on the record)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWzQGIjiePs

Her novel is coming out in English in October: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2775-paradise-rot

New ep. haven’t heard it yet but damn she’s prolific

whoa thanks, i didn't know!

i really like the opener "spells" and the long, mostly instrumental title track. she's really on a roll imo

First track references steal my sunshine by Len

So does the second track. Whoa

Honestly I think I like this as much as any lp she’s done

Some of my best friends are EPS!

Honestly I think I like this as much as any lp she’s done

Some of my best friends are EPS!

Oh god I hit the button twice. Sorry

Karl the ending killed me on this. She says thank you, I love you which felt like sincere appreciation. She may be an avant-garde weirdo but she communicates so directly and breaks through boundaries

yeah, and before that, warning that it might be promotion. so good

Wow, I really like the new "The Long Sleep" EP. It's like Jane Weaver's recent works without the motorik beat. Are any of her other releases in a similar vein?

Hard to say. Her LPs veer from spoken word to dream pop to a combo of both, but the new one is more digestible cuz it’s 4 tracks. Start with apocalypse and then go to blood bitch?

have been transformed into something gossamer by this

oh, like you weren't already fantastically gossamer

Didn’t really connect with Classic Objects as much as with her previous work but this new one seems more immediate to me; really love the flow of it.

classic objects is my favourite, this is maybe second best

It's very delicate, on her ethereal side. Full of pretty moments, maybe lacking a few surprises, with the experimental moments mostly limited to
snippets - seems like there was some space for her there. I note Lay Down as a soft rock ballad, the folky harp in All Night Long, the bossa nova of Don't Know What Free Is (my fave here), To Be a Rose which has grown on me. Some songs seemed to have even more potential - I'm looking at The Gift and A Ballad. Still a satisfying effort.

just listened to the new one for the first time. To Be A Rose is such a banger it's distracting me from the rest of the album. (she has some kind of hand-cranked machine in her basement that grinds up diamonds and produces ecstatic choruses.) had a hard time listening to anything else after that, honestly - everything just seemed kinda thin or beside the point. had to go to the latest Peter Gabriel album, which for the first time didn't strike me as just too much. all of this is definitely avoidant behavior the world is so fucking dark right now.