Named after a perfume created in 1995 - not merely expressing that of the flower but a milky fog, it also describes a LP of ghostly, fragile, fragrant beauty by the Norwegian musician and novelist work scattered with field recordings and tricks of memory. Made by Maurice Roucel for the high-end French perfume house Serge Lutens, Iris Silver Mist the perfume is described “as smelling more like steel than silver, is cold and prickly, soft and shimmering, like stepping outside on an early, misty morning, your body still warm from sleep.” Hval adds that “perfume, with its heart notes and scented accords, shares its language with music. Both travel through air, simultaneously invisible and distinct.”
That then sets the olfactory, and aural flavour for this album, one first conceived during the pandemic when performing music was on hold, so other senses and ideas were brought to to fore - the smell of soap, cigarettes, the outdoors, smells transporting the imagination, moments that are mutably present, then transiently gone in a puff. Despite the perfume’s definition, the album, Hval’s ninth (as well as two under the alias Rockettothesky) is also warm as well as intimate, sensual and tactile, plays with the senses. The sparse single A Rose Is Rose, inverts the clichéd rose smell with that of a cigarette, her version of the Proustian madeleine to memory and dream. Another standout is The Artist Is Absent, a short but vivid track a dark alluring melody and beats playing with a fantasy about a “stage without a show, a hazy silouette around an empty space, a club without a club”. Other highlights include ambient opener Lay Down with culminates in recorded birdsong; the evocative All Night Long, with a beautiful dreamy, twisting sound and clever, meta lyrics mixed with hazy memories summoning a birthday and funereal images linked through the image of a flower: “The recording software asks: This note or that? / The recording software asks: Quantify? … Do you remember all the / Pandemic birthdays? A friend/ Received so many flowers / It looked like she had died”; the oddly uplifting rippling electronica and melody You Died; Spirit Mist’s ghostly, crunchy spoken word and field recordings; the dreamy I Don’t Know What Free Is, the lovely, soft A Ballad, and closing, all-embracing instrumental I Want The End to Sound Like This. Transportive and tantalising. Out on 4AD.
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