The profoundest secret is that which is enacted in the body – Elias Canetti

Viscera is Jenny Hval’s first release under her own name (she has previously released two albums as Rockettothesky) and her first for Rune Grammofon. It’s a highly ambitious project that looks to explore the relationship between body and space, between high-concept ideas such as the Modernist I and the Modernist eye, and the effects of travel and stasis on the most intimate areas of our minds, and of our bodies. Sonically, it’s a fascinating mix of the experimental and the warm and lush, echoing the Cocteaus, Kate Bush and even spectral folk figures from the early part of the 1970s such as Linda Perhacs. Like any project with such far-reaching ambitions it teeters at times on the brink of tipping into melodrama and pretension but Hval manages the terrain skilfully. It’s a fascinating record.

Hval’s technique on Visceral is essentially literary/poetic. The album was created around a series of notes she had made, the music improvised and extrapolated outwards from a series of core themes. Those themes are loosely based around ideas of metamorphosis. Hval cites Virginia Woolf as an influence, and the shape-shifting gender-swapping figure of Orlando in particular. Another antecedent might be the characters Angela Carter created in Wise Children or the Gothic fairy tales of The Bloody Chamber. The figures (or the fluid I/eye) in these narratives are embroiled in a world of (willed and otherwise) sensory confusion: there’s at once a kind of synaesthesia in which sensory organs are swapped and melded (‘I carefully rearranged my senses/so they could have a conversation’) and a notion of flesh expanding and taking on monumental proportions – the world becoming an extension of internal organs and genitalia and vice-versa: the clitoris becoming a sphinx, the body described as a ‘one way street’ and thighs like train tracks. There is also something of the animal in all this too, the body frequently described in animalistic terms – as sprouting gills, and producing feathers or swathes of new-grown hair.

Yet, for all its insistence on fantastical ideas and metamorphosis, Hval also insists on representing the body as a body. It’s reminiscent of a kind of anti-pornography in places, the secretions and excretions (even all that missing hair) that pornography eliminates from its smooth surfaces are reintroduced like a particularly pungent return of the repressed. As such, the other writer I’m reminded of is JG Ballard, who was similarly intrigued by the mechanics of the body, and the ways in which we merged ourselves into our surroundings, the erotics of the body extended to the rigid angles of technology (the angle of two walls). For all that, Ballard was largely amusical and always observed with a clinician’s eye and certainly never produced anything this lush, this erotic.

And let’s be clear, Viscera is a voluptuously erotic record. From these descriptions you might imagine something distant and distancing, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The production is warm and clear, almost velveteen in places, pitching muted string sections and washes of broad keyboard tones. Then there is Hval’s voice which has a fantastic depth and allure – whether she’s biting into clipped syllables or crooning a phrase like ‘golden showers’ and making it sound like she’s singing from a hymn book. To invoke Woolf once more, what Hval’s doing here is finding a musical and poetic language for exploring what Woolf called ‘the things we do in the dark’. It’s a dazzling achievement. ‘Speak body and bone marrow’ indeed.

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