Interview: Jenny Hval on Vangelis, yodeling and the ecstasy of singing

Jenny Hval twists her voice every which way on Innocence Is Kinky. She starts by talking. (The oft-quoted first line to the album: “That night, I watch people fucking on my computer.”) She then yells, yodels, cajoles, pleads, whispers and sometimes even sings. It’s the sound of an artist in love with possibilities. And it’s an album that has gained more and more acclaim as the year has continued. The second under her own name, it’s a harder-edged and wider-ranging follow-up to 2011’s Viscera, which relied more heavily on acoustic guitar and hushed menace. We caught up with Hval late last month to talk about Vangelis, yodeling and her interest in the human voice.

As someone who is so interested in language, I’m curious: When you decided to sing, why was it in English as opposed to Norwegian?

I’ve actually never sung in Norwegian. Except maybe when I was a child – and even then I was singing in mock English as well, because when I was small I was more interested in Kate Bush, Erasure and Pet Shop Boys than kiddie songs. So I was inventing my own words and thinking that I knew what they meant. When you don’t know what the words are, you invent something.

Were there any illusions shattered later on as a result of this?

I don’t think so. The meaning of the voice stays. It’s not an illusion. Because it wasn’t about the meaning of the words: It was about how they made me feel, which didn’t change at all.

You’ve mentioned before that Vangelis was an early influence.

Yeah. The first thing that I ever tried to play was Vangelis sounds. I got a keyboard when I was six years old and I was learning how to play [Beethoven’s] “Für Elise.” But my parents wouldn’t give me piano lessons, because they thought that it felt too much like a punishment to kids. So I had to invent my own version of it on my synthesizer. I fell in love with the synth brass sounds.

You used to write about music quite a bit. When you were writing about it, do you find that it made you think about your own music in a different way?

Well, I’m at the point now where I need to not write about music anymore because it influences – or obscures – my relationship with sound too much. I was really interested in the experience of sound, but then I realized I was writing the same thing over and over with very different types of music. So I was very disappointed in myself as a writer. It was difficult for a while to write music. To feel free about it, and just let things happen.

How do you get out of your own head?

It’s enough to just play. I don’t need anything else. But most of the time I need to play for a while, to kind of play my way out of reality or something – and really get into the emotional levels rather than just thinking. Singing is thinking, too. It’s just a different way of thinking. Looking at singing as thinking is no less valuable than talking about it as emotion. It’s no less emotional than talking about it as emotion either. These are complex things. I wouldn’t discredit the word thinking. That would also be branding myself. I do think singing is thinking.

Do you remember when you first became aware of your voice as an instrument?

When I was in my first band at age 15, we played at a school party I think. There were three singers in that band, and I was playing an instrument and doing backup vocals. I had this one song, though, where I played a bassline on my guitar that was very simple and I just sang something kind of chant-y. It was a cover of a Swedish band. It was probably then that I realized that – even if these girls like all the difficult songs and want to sing the Lion King and stuff that has a lot of vocal range – it was kind of different when I was singing. Not because I was a better singer, but it was something different. Playing live made me realize I didn’t have to have this interest in more musical singing. But I used to hate the idea of being a singer so much, because I grew up in the Bible Belt [of Norway] and “singing” was gospel. There was nothing else. I think I was really attracted to it, which is kind of why I also hated it, you know, the idea of orgasm in singing. I just found it very repulsive.

What do you mean by that?

I think I am attracted to it. I’m attracted to going into a trance state by singing, using your body to feel the vibrations of it. That’s why I’m so interested in the body I think. But when growing up, I always wanted to be different. It’s the same story for every nerd I guess. I just found that being a singer was something that was less intellectual than being a guitarist or being a writer. So I kind of didn’t want to go there. Also, there’s so much failure in singing. Especially when you do things like musicals or classical music. Everything can go wrong. Every note is potentially something that can go wrong. That’s what happens on these singing TV shows. Listeners, viewers are just listening for a mistake and that was very frightening to me. At the same time, I was very attracted to the ecstasy of singing.

Do you remember the first time you heard “different” singing and it turned your head around?

I think I was very young. My father was a big fan of Annette Peacock and Diamanda Galas, so he would play that to me when I was quite young. I think children can relate to experimental singing, because it’s all body stuff. You can really feel that kind of singing that’s aggressive or dangerous or different from your normal expressions. When you hear it you can really feel it in your body. That was really thrilling.

I saw you play at a festival in Poland, Unsound. I was really intrigued to see how you moved around the microphone.

I think that’s the first time I’ve ever done that. It’s very recent. It’s because I’ve been touring more. I played the guitar until this year, I always played the guitar. I’m a terrible keyboardist. But now I’ve learned some kind of way of moving because I try to play with one hand. I’ve always been afraid of moving my hand because I’m afraid of the Mariah Carey movement. [laughs] I think I’ve developed this way of actually relaxing a bit more about playing recently, which is good. It’s much more fun than staring, terrified, at the keys.

You’ve said that there are a lot of moments of humor on the album. I was curious if you could point out one in particular.

I can point out a general one, which is the yodeling at the beginning of “Oslo Oedipus.” That’s a track that I took from a sound installation I did a few years ago. At the time I was watching the Werner Herzog film Heart of Glass. I love the opening of that film. It was a terrible attempt to have that feel in this sound installation that was mostly composed of talking. That yodeling made me very uncomfortable. It made me think, “Oh, this is so European.” Placing me in an ethnic... in Norwegian, you’d say “a brown area.” Going into a very stereotypical idea of Northern European Germanic purity or something.

It made me feel very uncomfortable. And so I thought, “Oh, I have to put it on the album.” [laughs] It’s probably not humorous in itself, but it’s weird.... It’s not meant to sound beautiful. One night I woke up and thought, “Oh, I have to put this yodeling track and then make a hip hop track that it goes into because… I just need to do it.” So that required a lot of editing. That was a very liberating experience. Breaking it up, destroying it in a way. It felt good.

You recently did a performance piece together with Jessica Sligter where you focused on voice. What is it about her voice that is so interesting to you?

It’s actually more the songwriting that’s interesting. She manages to combine tradition with a political voice very well. She’s also very interested in the sacred harp tradition.

That’s a very American tradition.

She’s extremely American. I know all these people that are really, really American. But she’s Dutch. The drummer in my band is Norwegian, but he’s very American.

Would you say you’re extremely Norwegian?

No.

I guess living in another country, Australia, might have something to do with that?

Yeah, but regardless of where I had been living, I wouldn’t have been very Norwegian. I look quite Norwegian, even though I think my ancestry is Polish. Maybe that’s why I moved so much in Poland. I’m not sure what a typical Norwegian is. In the area I live there are all kinds of cultures crushed together, it’s a very multi-cultural area.

You grew up in the Bible Belt, though.

I live in Oslo now. And I grew up there up until I was nine. Then I moved to the Bible Belt. I guess the small town world is what I would call typical Norwegian. And I hated it so much. Maybe hating it is typically Norwegian. I’m not sure. Who could say they’re a typical citizen of their country?