‘Iris Silver Mist’ is, until today, our album of the week. We are facing a small work of art that reflects on the figure of the artist and the function of the stage, and also before one of Jenny Hval’s most accessible works, author of 9 albums.
The song that represents it best is ‘The Artist is absentee’, which is our song of the day today. There are 2 versions: that of the album, which lasts just over 1 minute, and then an extra known as “89 Seconds Rewrite”, longer, adding a second stanza.
‘The artist is absentee’ presents an industrial rhythm, Synth-Pop, danceable in all its darkness, also with an openly pop instrumental required. Inspiration could be the icy life of some the Knife, but at that other moment Jenny Hval approaches the Saint Etienne who swept around 2000 with ‘Good Humor’. I am thinking specifically in ‘Wood Cabin’.
The lyrics are influenced by a crisis that the artist suffered during the pandemic: “The artist is absent, has abandoned the building,” says the chorus, while the first stanza requests: “Let someone help me, a stage without a show, a blurred silhouette in an empty space, a club without club.”
The second stanza recides in the same concept of “empty room”, although with a mention to death in tune with other album texts that also relate fame to the disappearance of the artist of this world.
Hval explained in Mondosonoro about pandemia: «I was very disappointed with music at that time, because it had lost its entire physical part because of streaming, the restrictions by the pandemic and the disappearance of cultural criticism in the general media. This had been spending a lot of time and the pandemic manifested it in a more acute way.
Jenny Hval is these days of tour of Europe, unfortunately without stop in Spain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ouod8dxne
