Jenny Hval has revealed her second collaboration with Norwegian noise artist/producer Lasse Marhaug. Due out September 30th through Sacred Bones, Blood Bitch was initially described as “her bold, new vampire blood solo album.” This being Jenny Hval, it’s of course not that simple. According to a statement from the singer/multi-instrumentalist, the concept record actually revolves around “the purest and most powerful, yet most trivial, and most terrifying blood: Menstruation. The white and red toilet roll chain which ties together the virgins, the whores, the mothers, the witches, the dreamers, and the lovers.”
‘Blood Bitch’ is also a fictitious story, fed by characters and images from horror and exploitation films of the ’70s. With that language, rather than smart, modern social commentary, I found I could tell a different story about myself and my own time: a poetic diary of modern transience and transcendence.
There is a character in this story that is a vampire Orlando, traveling through time and space. But there is also a story here of a 35-year old artist stuck in a touring loop, and wearing a black wig. She is always up at night, jet lagged, playing late night shows – and by day she is quietly resting over an Arp Odyssey synthesizer while a black van drives her around Europe and America.
So this is my most fictional and most personal album. It’s also the first album where I’ve started reconnecting with the goth and metal scene I started out playing in many years ago, by remembering the drony qualities of Norwegian Black Metal. It’s an album of vampires, lunar cycles, sticky choruses, and the smell of warm leaves and winter.
Tour Dates in the UK
10/17 Glasgow, Scotland – Stereo
10/18 Manchester, England – Soup Kitchen
10/19 London, England – Oslo
From the new album “Inner Journey Out” available June 3rd. Available on Sacred Bones Records. ***Limited Edition Version: Edition of 400 hand-numbered copies on desert haze vinyl, comes with alternate screen-printed brown paper bag outer sleeve, inserts, wax sealed, and available by mail-order
The seekers in New York City’s Psychic Ills have spent more than a decade following their muse wherever it takes them. Inner Journey Out, the band’s highly anticipated fifth album and first since 2013, is the culmination of an odyssey of three years of writing, traversing the psych-rock landscape they’ve carved throughout their career and taking inspired pilgrimages into country, blues, gospel, and jazz.
When it comes to following the beat of their own drum, New York’s Psychic Ills have exemplified the phrase since their beginnings in 2003. Initially spawned from electronic-centered home recording experiments, they progressed into all-night full-band exploration in a neighborhood where noise wasn’t a problem
Independent Record Label based in Brooklyn New York City formed in 2007, included on its Roster are ZOLA JESUS, DAVID LYNCH, MOON DUO, THE MEN, PSYCHIC ILLS, and CRYSTAL STILTS one of the best american record label in the last 5 years,
It’s a prolific time for Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones label; with some of the finest records of the year released under their belts, plus last year they curated a stage at Liverpool Psych Fest (co-curated a stage with Chile’s BYM label), general manager Taylor Brode explains,
“I can’t imagine that I would ever be interested in doing something else as a career,” Taylor Brode tells us. It’s a familiar expression in the music industry, as common from the mouths of pouting indie rock hopefuls as from doe-eyed X Factor auditionees. Though intended to convey a mixture of romanticism, determination and focus, it almost always betrays the pie-in-the-sky hopelessness upon which dreams of fame and fortune are built – a lack of experience clouded, sometimes wilfully, by blind hope that the reality of ambition is neither intangible as clouds nor delicate as bubbles.
And yet when Brode utters those words, they sound perfectly straightforward; completely reasonable. Then again, her role as general manager of Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones Records is one where dreams and ideals have to be wedded to pragmatism – where romance has to be tempered by practicality without losing its sheen. “This is what I love to do,” she continues. “I love working with bands and finding out about new music, and just helping bands realise their goals.” That balance, it would appear, is in good health, which is presumably just one of the factors behind the renowned and increasingly respected indie label’s meteoric rise over the past eight years… but back up a minute. Let’s start earlier.
Sacred Bones was founded in 2007 by Caleb Braaten, an employee of Williamsburg’s Academy Records, who simply wanted to release an EP by his friends and reissue some curate’s eggs from the 80s heyday of British post-punk. Even as a youngster, he had always been surrounded by records. “His friends’ parents owned a store – they still do – called Twist and Shout, in Denver,” explains Brode cheerfully, with the knowledgeable air of someone well-versed in their own history. “He got into music from working there when he was younger, and he’s been a lifelong record collector. His taste is really wide, he likes a lot of post-punk and darker music, but also a lot of jazz and soul music and rap music… pretty broad.”
This open approach served Braaten well when he moved to New York over a decade ago, and began to immerse himself in Brooklyn’s notoriously hip music scene. “The first record that he ever put out was a seven-inch by this band called The Hunt, who were just good friends of his. He started a label to do that and also to do some reissues. It was mostly a New York-based label, and the bands were from here – people he’d met in the shop. Blank Dogs was the first 12-inch he ever put out, and that was [Captured Tracks boss] Mike Sniper’s band. They worked at Academy together, so that’s kind of how that came up.”
Food for thought is offered to anyone who imagines that starting a label – even in such a cultural metropolis – might be a glamorous pursuit. “He started the label in the basement of Academy, and he did two, three years there. I moved here in 2010 [having worked previously for Chicago’s legendary Touch and Go stable, the effortlessly professional Brode is no stranger to the industry] so we both worked in their basement for about two years. We moved into our office in 2012; we didn’t have internet and there were rats in the basement, no windows… it was truly a basement for a long time. But we have a proper office now with phones and stuff…!”
Since those humble beginnings, the label has relocated (along with Academy) to Green Point, slightly further to the north of Brooklyn than their Billyburg origins. It’s also become one of the most widely respected indie labels in North America – a tastemaker label in the mould of Sub Pop, Homestead or even Touch and Go, covering a wide base of genres from the glistening electronic pitter-patter of Blanck Mass to Jenny Hval’s deconstructivist, gender-freeing pop to Destruction Unit’s sandstorm-buffeted hardcore to… well, you get the picture. Did the label always have designs on such eclecticism, we wonder? Brode pauses to consider. “I think it was more just what was going on in Brooklyn; I don’t think [Braaten] started the label with the intention of it just being one genre. We’ve done folk records and a lot of psych records, and experimental, and noise… we try to keep it open.”
And yet it feels like there has been a consistent strand of darkness in the label’s output. “We don’t like to box ourselves in as being goth or dark or anything. People sort of attach that to us. I think a lot of it is because of ZolaJesus; we did all of her early records, and a lot of her coverage at the time was comparing her to Siouxsie, so I think we kind of got lumped in with that genre. It’s not really what we consider ourselves.
“You know The Men? Leave Home, the first record we did with them, sounds really different than the stuff they put out after; they got a lot more into country and folk and blues. They were sort of like a hardcore band at the beginning, but they really evolved over the four records we’ve done with them. We’ve had opportunities to work on stuff like that before but we’ve passed; we veer more towards the avant-garde, or edgy, weirder stuff.”
For all this wilful diversity, however, Sacred Bones have always been drawn towards the concept of visual uniformity: the vast majority of their sleeves bear a simple design concept created specifically to draw regular listeners to new projects. The significance of this straightforward notion is not lost on Brode. “It’s really important!” she exclaims. “Basically all of our full-length LPs carry a template, so they have the record label logo on the front, and then the album title, and all the tracks listed on the front of the record. Caleb designed that format with our graphic designer David Correll – he really wanted to have our records be instantly recognisable, so you could look at something and know it was a Sacred Bones record. It was inspired by the Factory Records stuff, and Impulse Jazz. We really tried to make it coherent, so our listeners could trust our taste and take a chance on a band they don’t know because they recognise it from being on the label.”
This format is a little more flexible for bands who’ve stayed with the label for more than two records, but it begs the question of whether anyone has been reluctant to go along with the theme. Brode laughs. “There’s been a couple of bands that don’t love it, but you know, it’s sort of part of our deal. So I think bands know when they sign with us. We’re pretty upfront about it and if bands don’t want to do it, we don’t do their records. But that’s really only happened one or two times at the most.”
In terms of the US labels we mentioned earlier, are Sacred Bones conscious of being part of that lineage? “I think we are now. We’re in our eighth year and things are pretty different from when we started. We’re getting to work with a lot of artists and filmmakers who really influenced us, David Lynch being the forerunner there [SacredBones reissued the soundtrack to Lynch’s uber-surreal debut, Eraserhead]. We really count that as a blessing and not something we try to take that for granted.”
Are indie labels of that ilk important, then, in terms of defining eras or places? “Yeah, absolutely! It’s a document of what’s happening at the time – I mean, that’s literally what the word ‘record’ means. But I don’t think Caleb ever intended for it to just be that, you know? We have bands now from all over the globe, which is amazing.”
Indeed, it seems the process of bringing acts into the Sacred Bones fold is a shared task: “When we’re looking for new bands, we’ll ask our bands who they like, and we pay a lot of attention to who they’re touring with. We really try to have a community and a lot of our artists work together on releases or just become friends and hang out and do shows together. That’s really special to us.”
That community has since extended to BYM Records, an independent label based in Santiago, Chile, who share elements of their roster with Sacred Bones – specifically trance-tinged krautrockers Föllakzoid and the motorik dreampop of The Holydrug Couple. “It’s their friends’ label,” Brode tells us enthusiastically. “I think two of them are in this band called La Hell Gang, who are amazing – they were touring with Föllakzoid and Holydrug Couple in the United States a couple of years ago, so we hung out with them. They’re really sweet guys and we’re mutual fans of each other.”
This shared love has even extended to one of the highlights of late September, as the two labels jointly curate a stage at the hotly anticipatedLiverpool International Festival of Psychedelia. Placing the likes of Blanck Mass and Destruction Unit alongside South American wonders such as The Ganjas’ stoned fuzz brilliance and the epic Chicos de Nazca, it’s sure to be one of Psych Fest’s greatest spectacles.
This may be one of the biggest “no duh” labels on our list . Though they’ve made a name for themselves as a home for initially smaller artists with big visions, often with stunning visual art components, to grow into true forces, SacredBones aren’t content to rest on their cred, to settle into a comfortable groove. Their output this year took a lot of risks and showed a lot of ambition, and also showed the true care they put as a label into every detail in order to let their artists grow.
Please Seek Out:Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, girl; Institute, Catharsis; Destruction Unit, Negative Feedback Resistor; Rose McDowall, Cut With the Cake Knife; The Holydrug Couple, Moonlust
Earlier this year, Föllakzoidreleased its third long-player, the appropriately-named III, which also happens to be the trio’s strongest work to date. III consists of four expansive tracks; the shortest one runs for over nine minutes and its longest is nearly thirteen. Track times are rendered utterly immaterial when you’re actually listening to the thing, however, as you lose all sense of time, space and place while its propulsive neo-Krautrock rhythms and spiraling guitar patterns weave their magic web around your brain. III is rock minimalism that still possesses depth, it is vaguely industrial without sounding too cold and if it fails to put you in a trance-like state, then you’re not listening to it loud enough.
For III, the band wanted to expand their sound while building an atmosphere with mainly monochords and reiteration. After recording and mixing the album on their own at their studio at BYM Records, they partnered with German electronic maestro Atom TM to flesh out the album’s synth parts. Most of the sounds he provided were atonal electronic sounds, aiming for concrete frequencies and sampled organic glitches. (The Korg synthesizer Atom TM plays on this record was used by Kraftwerk on tour in the ’80s.)
III is a four-part minimal sound voyage in which you can hear Föllakzoid’s musical language developing into something more upbeat, obscure, and sharp, yet even simpler in terms of elements.
released 31 March 2015 on Sacred Bones Records BYM Records
The third full length from Chilean two-piece The Holydrug Couple, ‘Moonlust’ falls well outside the boundaries of the prevailing psych-rock idiom. In addition to French soundtrack and Gainsbourg influences, they cite inspiration from the soul ballads of Aretha Franklin, 80s South American synthpop acts like Los Encargados, Virus, and Los Prisioneros, and the contemporary French electro of Air. A shimmering and languid psych delight.
The Holydrug Couple began in Santiago, Chile in 2008, a little over a half-decade after Ives and Manu met for the first time. The two young friends hadn’t seen each other in a few years when Manu texted Ives to tell him that he bought a drum kit. They started jamming, and a week later, the band was formed. A flurry of songwriting activity followed, culminating in 2011’s Ancient Land EP and 2013’s Noctuary, both released on Sacred Bones Records.
“Moonlust” boldly treads territory that those earlier psych-indebted recordings only hinted at, especially the dreamy French movie soundtracks of the ’70s and ’80s and the discography of Serge Gainsbourg.
“I had clear what I wanted to revisit from the last album, as well as what I didn’t want to do again,” Ives said. “I definitely wanted to make a good-sounding record, clear and heavy. I wanted to get away as much as possible from the ‘band’ sound. The last album wasn’t recorded live, but I tried to make it sound as if it had been. This time, I wanted to make an electronic-like album instead.”
The result is an album in the self-recorded “Moonlust” that falls well outside the boundaries of the prevailing psych-rock idiom. In addition to the French soundtrack and Gainsbourg influences, they cite inspiration from the soul ballads of Aretha Franklin, ’80s South American synthpop acts like Los Encargados, Virus, and Los Prisioneros, and the contemporary French electro group Air. The songs are streamlined hook delivery machines, without any baroque arrangements or unnecessary flourishes to get in the way of their ultimate goal.
To Ives, the lyrical themes on the record represent “feeling lust, desire, for something that you see when it’s dark but it’s so far away that it’s unreachable. It’s an unrealistic target, like God, maybe, or a dream archetype of a goddess. It’s the feeling of melancholy that you can’t fulfill with anything.”
If that feeling sounds anything like the songs on Moonlust, then here’s hoping that he and Manu keep reaching out into that cosmic void anyway. Its a gorgeous record ,Languid, shimmery, indie-Floyd sounds. Like when Air had a stab at The Floyd, but way better! Just lovely, mellow, melodic music. Definitely worth checking.
Following the release of her critically acclaimed new album and one of our best albums of 2015 “Apocalypse, Girl”, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval has unveiled the video for stand out track “Sabbath” alongside UK tour dates to take place in November.
The video sees a full band collaborating with Jenny on lead vocals, and including Håvard Volden on electronics, Annie Bielski performing and Zia Anger on visual enhancements. The music video was shot on Anger’s iPhone during their European tour. In the words of Anger the video is, best viewed on a cracked screen.
Previously talking about “Sabbath”,Jenny explains: “I think I’ve been writing this song since about 1986. Because when I was really young I had a dream that my vagina had braces. For a long time, it (‘Sabbath’) was a monologue with a heavy drum loop and I had no idea what it was or why. It was just a galloping urge to say something. And then the chorus appeared. It’s like a mother; it just wants you to be happy. I really wanted to create something soft & loving. And I think it’s really catchy. Which is also very mothering, a mother catches you.”
Apocalypse, girl is out now via Sacred Bones. Jenny Hval has announced UK tour dates this November, full tour dates are available below.
November – 5th @ The Hug & Pint, Glasgow // 7th @ Brudenell Social Club, Leeds // 8th @ Soup Kitchen, Manchester // 9th @ The Lantern, Bristol // 11th @ Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, London
It’s impossible to encapsulate the various themes that Jenny Hval invokes on her anthemic offering, Apocalypse, Girl, but above all else, this album is an exploration of sexuality. “I’m six or seven and dreaming that I’m a boy,” Hval sings on “Sabbath,” before interrogating exactly what it means to be that: a girl displaced by her own body and the carnal desire that it inspires. Hval’s sound is performative and spoken-word heavy, but her earnest, prose-driven monologues inevitably descend into melodic choruses. Hooks jut out like elbows and knees in the tangled bed sheets of her narration as she questions what true intimacy should look like: “It would be easy to think about submission, but I don’t think it’s about submission. It’s about: holding and being held.
Taken from the album “Apocalypse, girl” out June 9th on Sacred Bones. & Su Tissue (Norway).
Think big, girl, like a king, think kingsize. Jenny Hval’s new record opens with a quote from the Danish poet Mette Moestrup, and continues towards the abyss. “Apocalypse, girl” is a hallucinatory narrative that exists somewhere between fiction and reality, a post-op fever dream, a colourful timelapse of death and rebirth, close-ups of impossible bodies — all told through the language of transgressive pop music.
When Norwegian noise legend Lasse Marhaug interviewed Jenny Hval for his fanzine in early 2014, they started talking about movies, and the conversation was so interesting that she asked him to produce her next record. It turned out that talking about film was a great jumping off point for album production. Hval’s songs slowly expanded from solo computer loops and vocal edits to contributions from bandmates Håvard Volden and Kyrre Laastad, before finally exploding into collaborations with Øystein Moen (Jaga Jazzist/Puma), Thor Harris (Swans), improv cellist Okkyung Lee and harpist Rhodri Davis. All of these musicians have two things in common: they are fierce players with a great ear for intimacy, and they hear music in the closing of a suitcase as much as in a beautiful melody.
And so Apocalypse, girl is a very intimate, very visual beast. It dreams of an old science fiction movie where gospel choir girls are punks and run the world with auto-erotic impulses. It’s a gentle hum from a doomsday cult, a soft desire for collective devotion, an ode to the close-up and magnified, unruly desires.
Jenny Hval has developed her own take on intimate sound since the release of her debut album in 2006. Her work, which includes 2013’s critically celebrated Innocence Is Kinky (Rune Grammofon), has gradually incorporated books, sound installations and collaborations with poets and visual artists. For Hval, language is central, always torn between the vulnerable, the explosive and total humiliation.
Jenny Hval has just finished the first run of US shows w/ St Vincent, which was truly AMAZING, Thanks to everyone who came to see us, cheered, got a bit terrified by the bananas, bought Soft Dick Rock shirts (or bought Soft Dick Rock shirts for their friends/girlfriends/boyfriends/kids! WORD!). Most of all: a big thank you to the amazing St Vincent + my exquisite band: Håvard Volden, Zia Anger and Annie Bielski. LOVE. Shows continue in a few days when we meet up w Perfume Genius.
“Meshes of Voice”, my collaboration with the wonderful Susanna, will finally be released on vinyl! Please support this very special release by pre-ordering here.
“Meshes of Voice” by Susanna and I won the Norwegian Grammy in “Åpen Klasse” (Open Category)! We were very surprised and grateful and very, very close to completely speechless. Thanks to everybody who were involved in the project, both back in 2009 (when it was a concert piece) and for the 2014 record!
Meshes of Voice will be performed at CTM festival in Berlin, and we’re also doing a Scandinavian mini-tour in February (see above). What will it be like? Take a look at these beautiful sneak peaks: 1 &2.
Susanna (Wallumrød) and I have released a collaboration album, ‘Meshes of Voice’ (via Susanna’s excellent label SusannaSonata). We recently performed the project at Ultima Festival in Oslo, at (the excellent! feminist!) magazine FETT’s 10 year anniversary in Bergen, and at UNSOUND Festival in Krakow…and hopefully there’s more to come. There have been some excellent reviews:
Jenny Hval is a an ambient/electro-indie/art rock singer-songwriter and novelist from Oslo. In the late 1990s, she was in a goth-metal band, but since then, she’s been making music that people often compare to the likes of Laurie Anderson and Björk. She released two albums under the name Rocettothesky, and has released two under her own given name. Next week, her third album “Apocalypse, Girl” comes out on Sacred Bones Records.
I didn’t know too much about Jenny Hval Anyway, the point is that Jenny Hval is often compared to Björk, so I kinda feared that it was the “weird Björk” that people compared her to. The MedullaBjörk. When I listened to a couple of the new Jenny Hval songs I was immediately smitten with her voice . Sure, this is some stuff that most people would consider “weird”, but I like it. If this is like Björk, this is like the late-90s Björk. Like Vespertine,
While I haven’t tracked down any of the older stuff, I’ve heard the new album, and I really like it. There’s some harsh moments though. The album is strewn with some pretty graphic references to male and female genitalia, and to sex. It’s actually fairly erotic. It’s not an album that you can listen to with your grandmother. It is, though, an album that rewards the listener for patience and thorough listening. Here’s one of my favorites:
This song has some elements that remind me of Broadcast, Oviously I’m not saying that Jenny Hval sings like the late Trish Keenan or like Björk. The synths and the drums sound like Broadcast. The overall “feel” of the song is kinda Björk-esque. Sexy and mysterious and weird. In the best kind of way.
“Apocalypse, girl” comes out next week. You can pre-order it via bandcamp here. You can also buy physical versions of the album, or bundle an LP with a t-shirt at the label’s web shop. If you’re looking at that t-shirt wondering what “soft dick rock” means, it’s a reference to a line in the first song from the album. That first song “Kingsize” is itself a reference to a collection of poems by Danish poet Mette Moestrup. The first line of the song is a line from one of Moestrup’s poems.
Hval’s latest novel is called Perlebryggeriet, (which means “Pearl brewery”) and it hasn’t been translated from Norwegian. So if you’re fluent in Norwegian, you should buy her book . They say it’s set in a “fictional town somewhere between Glasgow and Melbourne” and that it’s about some kids living together while their house turns itself inside out. I got a big kick out of that “between Glasgow and Melbourne” line. That’s a distance of 17,000 km approx.
The Holydrug Couple have done a lot of growing since their first release with Sacred Bones Records in 2011. The “couple,” consisting of Ives Sepúlveda and Manuel Parra recorded their second album “Noctuary” in Santiago, Chile. They put together a home studio and recorded the entire album themselves, from start to finish. Feeling that no one else had been able to capture their sound, Ives decided to take a risk and produce and engineer the album on his own. After four months of obsessively working and barely leaving the house, Ives emerged with a final product of which the band is truly proud. All of this hard work has manifested in a more elaborated, astral sounding album than its predecessor,Awe. While “Awe” and their “Ancient Land EP” had a bluesier, woodsy sound, “Noctuary” plays out like a slow motion 60’s beach party dream that you never want to wake from.
On “That Battle Is Over,”Jenny Hval spills her guts like it’s no big deal: these days every thing I write begins with the question, “What’s wrong with me?” That’s only one of several dozen ideas that spill out of the Norwegian singer-songwriter’s brain in the span of four minutes. The track is the first single from “Apocalypse, Girl” , the follow up to Hval’scollaborative LP with Susanna and her first full-length since signing to Brooklyn label Sacred Bones.
In a press release, Jenny Hval said the song—which is just built on a percussive loop, some organ chords, and Hval’s angelic multi-tracked vocalizations—is intentionally “flat,” and that it’s like her version of Fiona Apple karaoke. While it’s true that the song’s melody mirrors “Criminal” in a few places, “That Battle Is Over” feels more conceptual than that comparison allows; it’s like a weird, rambling, Hval-ian take on the idea of a “pop song” in general. “Apocalypse, Girl” is out on June 9th.
The Fat Angel Sings 