JENNY HVAL and BRIANA MARELA at the Drake (1150 Queen West), Friday (September 4), doors 7:30 pm. $11.50. rotate.com, soundscapesmusic.com, ticketfly.com.
Jenny Hval’s Apocalypse, Girl is one of the best albums of the year so far. Meticulous and fearless, intellectual and visceral, with intricate full-band arrangements as well as moments of disorienting noise and sound collage, it defies easy categorization. It also, as she explains over the phone from her home in Oslo, takes inspiration from a huge array of sources.
“I could mention writers, filmmakers, actors, people doing microphone demonstrations on YouTube, people speaking in tongues, there’s just so much. The multiplicity is more important than a single piece of work or a single voice on this album. I tried to be brave and use general themes with voices that were not particular.”
What were those general themes?
“Being universal, talking about gods and apocalypse, big things.”
Sure enough, “Think big, girl,” are the first words we hear on the album, spoken in a halting cadence over a soft bed of static, as though we’ve just come within range of a mysterious broadcast signal. That song, Kingsize, is the album’s opening gesture toward those universal themes, with poet Mette Moestrup’s words serving as one of the many voices Hval absorbs and makes her own.
While songs like Kingsize feel empowering and affirming, the slow-burning Take Care Of Yourself explores the idea of stripping yourself down to a kind of bare humanity.
“I’m trying to find the protagonist [at a point where she’s] almost wiped away from any personality,” she explains, “like we are when we’re just lying in bed awake at night in this sort of in-between state. When we’re not ourselves, but we’re still very human.”
I ask if knowing yourself involves adopting an alienated “outsider” perspective. She doesn’t think so. “I was sick of seeing myself as a minor voice, having to do something strange, something unusual all of the time.”
This album, she explains, is more about striving to make a harmonizing, universalizing gesture, an attempt to synthesize many voices and ideas into a shared perspective.
But she acknowledges that there are limits to any perspective, even when it contains multitudes.
“When you look at something, even a blank slate, up close, it has fibres and weird patterns. I’m interested in looking at very specific situations and moments up close, and then everything becomes strange.”
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