The debut LP from the duo Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden is a warm-blooded exploration of the sensuality of the artistic process.
Drafting, more often than not, is terrifying for an artist. You can spend your whole life on a draft, ideating endlessly, never arriving at a finished product. It feels like an especially strange place for Jenny Hval, the avant-garde Norwegian artist who has been making rigorously theoretical, supremely varnished records under her own name for a decade. Hval primarily deals in feminist exegesis, in fully fleshed-out ideas about aging in a female body, or menstruating, or choosing whether or not to be a mother. Listening to music can feel like reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto after drinking three espressos. Her work with Håvard Volden as Lost Girls is different; it is more freeform, improvised. The duo’s debut LP, Menneskekollektivet, lives almost exclusively in the draft stage, and the music itself seems to relish in the experience of its creation.
Menneskekollektivet is primarily a dance record, a heady cocktail of muted drum machines and hypertrophied synthesizers. The first sounds on the album are Hval’s voice and a womb-like synth. They remain in stasis for nearly three minutes, when a drum machine that moves like a dinghy on choppy water comes to disrupt things while Hval speaks about selflessness. The song, the title track, is over 12 minutes, but the length is hypnotic rather than monotonous. Hval and Volden use the passage of time to simulate processing, to capture themselves figuring out what they are trying to say as they move through soft corners and harsh lighting.
It is a joy to witness someone like Hval, normally purposeful and direct with language, to let loose, and that joy is carried over into the flickering, warm-blooded music. This is not to say her words are meaningless, just that her emphasis is more on sound than sense. On “Carried by Invisible Bodies,” Hval talks about storytelling. “Right now,” she says, her voice inquisitive, as if she were looking for her words in the air, “there are two—there’s like double fiction.” She continues, sounding more assured, as she goes on to explore the feeling of writing music—its layers, its unreality. As she probes her way through, the drum machines sail through space like a perfect tennis serve. She sounds almost like Robert Ashley on Automatic Writing, softly grasping onto particles of phrases, watching them atomize, and taking as long as she needs to arrive at a destination.
Of course, like all drafts, there are less-successful moments. Jenny Hval’s aimless musings on pork, lettuce, and cucumber over the minimalist drum machines of “Losing Something” are a bit nonsensical, and not in a particularly interesting way. This moment, however, is one of very few. More often than not, Menneskekollektivet’s inherently unfinished quality makes it feel naturalistic, deeply human. If Menneskekollektivet is about the sensuality of meandering through one’s artistic process, then “Real Life,” is the record’s most fully realized, gorgeous cut. Here, improvised guitars glow like sun rays, and the emphasis is placed on Hval’s vocal arrangements. She sings of writing a letter, of what it means for life to be real. Her voice is vibrant, blissful, bursting with bright color. Ironically, the lack of surtext makes Menneskekollektivet as conceptually rich as anything Hval has ever done. It is a statement about the beauty of slowing down, of not worrying about what you say and instead focusing on how you feel.
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