Read Me #14: Leave a Message

Jenny Hval, Joe Dunthorne, Jane Bustin

OOO #2

1. [28/04/2025, 14:30:23] Seb: Hi Jenny, this is Seb Emina. I believe we are scheduled to chat around now?

   [28/04/2025, 14:33:27] The singer-songwriter Jenny Hval: Hi! I’m here and looking forward.

   [28/04/2025, 14:35:05] Seb: Great! This is actually my first interview carried out via Whatsapp

   [28/04/2025, 14:35:22] Jenny Hval: This is my third. The first one was a week ago. It’s been great actually

   [28/04/2025, 14:39:00] Seb: So where are you right now?

   [28/04/2025, 14:40:27] Jenny Hval: I’m at home. I live outside the city centre of Oslo. Near “Østmarka” the eastern city forest, where I go almost every day with the dog

   [28/04/2025, 14:46:02] Seb: And what can you smell?

   [28/04/2025, 14:47:06] Jenny Hval, whose new album is called Iris Silver Mist, after a perfume on the Serge Lutens label: I can smell a perfume I’m testing, which is Tubereuse 3 Animale from Histoires de Parfums, as well as some wood from the wooden walls in this room. And electricity from speakers and sound equipment. Also if I turn around there’s an acoustic guitar here which smells amazing.

   [28/04/2025, 14:49:05] Jenny Hval: The perfume is interesting, floral but also woody and vintage. A more traditionally masculine tuberose perfume. Unique. It’s not my personal fave but lovely to test.

   [28/04/2025, 14:52:07] Seb: Do you have a good sense of smell? And has it improved since you devoted an album to smell in particular?

   [28/04/2025, 14:54:34] Jenny Hval: I think I have a pretty good sense of smell. I also think it has improved greatly (or perhaps how I perceive it? a part of my brain has expanded?) since I started getting into perfumes. Now I can smell much more concisely what’s in a scent. And I know more about the different facets of materials. I could sit on the subway today and know that cardamom can smell almost citrusy. Someone was wearing a cardamom perfume. I think it’s similar to what happens when you play music - over time your ears learn to grab onto details. It’s an amazing ride, although it also takes away a little magic that you have to work hard to reinstate

   [28/04/2025, 14:56:16] Seb: Was the encounter with Iris Silver Mist the cause of this preoccupation, or was it a side effect of an already growing curiosity?

   [28/04/2025, 14:59:45] Jenny Hval, who has also published four novels: I read about Iris Silver Mist first. I never got to try any Serge Lutens perfumes here, since they are not available in my country at all, but my interest in perfume has been quite literary, meaning I’ve probably read even more about perfumes, history of perfumers, materials etc than I’ve tried actual scents. Norway is traditionally a very understated country when it comes to (most things, but also) perfume. I read that ISM was a scent that could have been worn by the ghost in Hamlet… I felt that was just so evocative. Then I was in Paris a few months later and got to go to the Palais Royal shop and try it. It was very earthy and carrot-like and dry and milky at the same time - whoever said it was a ghost perfume was right I think.

   [28/04/2025, 15:00:43] Seb: What are some of your favourite perfume books (or perfumes in books)?

   [28/04/2025, 15:01:49] Jenny Hval: I don’t have a lot of favourite books. I love reading NEZ magazine, that’s not a book but it’s really great.
   [28/04/2025, 15:02:37] Jenny Hval: I really don’t like that novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. It’s too obvious and not really my thing. Honestly I think it ended my original obsession with perfume. I was really into scents in my teens and I think I wanted to revive my relationship with perfume in the early 2000s but that book was the end.

   [28/04/2025, 15:07:58] Seb: Do you have some all-time ‘this is what perfume can do!’ scents?

   [28/04/2025, 15:10:23] Jenny Hval: I have a second hand Shalimar eau de cologne and I smell it and think of people I have met wearing Shalimar - that’s certainly a “perfume can do that” kind of scent. I’ve encountered it in some memorable situations. I once smelled Shalimar on the street and it was the most amazing and fierce woman wearing it, dressed in all leather, in a wheelchair, speeding down the road

   [28/04/2025, 15:31:32] Seb: What are you reading right now?

   [28/04/2025, 15:31:59] Jenny Hval: I’m reading Roman 1987, a classic, by the recently deceased Norwegian author Dag Solstad. It’s amazing

   [28/04/2025, 15:32:50] Jenny Hval: I have skipped reading so many modern classics because I was so drawn to the subcultural. It’s good to resurface and dig into something I should have read at 19 so many years later

   [28/04/2025, 15:33:47] Seb: Are there books that fed into the new album in some way?

   [28/04/2025, 15:35:13] Jenny Hval: Only Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller, the play, but that was more related to the work in my show that was performed in 2024 (with some of the songs in it). Which is why I loved the idea of ISM the perfume as a “Hamlet ghost” perfume.

   [28/04/2025, 15:36:21] Jenny Hval: There is a trace of it on the album. Two traces. One: The snippet Heiner Müller, which is really more about my admiration for his work and wanting to sort of become one with it by writing about it… and Two: The red letters in the To be a rose lyrics (in the record sleeve), that form the word “Hamlet”

   [28/04/2025, 15:37:32] Jenny Hval: Hamletmachine takes the characters from Hamlet and wake them up in Berlin in 1977. They are given self-awareness, like Molly Bloom in Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, and step off the page (and into Heiner Müller’s rewrite…)

   [28/04/2025, 15:39:24] Jenny Hval: Einstürzende Neubauten recorded a radio version of Hamletmachine. Heiner Müller read the directions. It’s great (but the music is very beautiful and neat for an early 90s EN record)

   [28/04/2025, 15:39:54] Seb: Are you writing a new novel?

   [28/04/2025, 15:40:35] Jenny Hval: I wrote an essay book. It just came out here in Norway. Sadly no plans for translation. It’s very related to the album. A chapter about perfume, several chapters about music ghosts, chapters on family, my mother, a stalker, auto-tune, the connection between the military and music technology

   —

   Iris Silver Mist, Jenny Hval’s ninth album, was released last week on 4AD (as for Iris Silver Mist the fragrance, it was invented by Maurice Roucel in 1994).

2. Here’s the reading list for the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference at Harvard University.

3. READ ME: What’s on your (computer) desktop right now?

   JOE DUNTHORNE, NOVELIST: Yesterday I cleaned my actual desk for the first time in years – and today I will clean my desktop. For me the accumulating filth on both of them ends up being its own kind of deadline for whatever I’m working on. Because even if I have abandoned my grand artistic ambitions there at least remains the visceral need to wipe away the dead skin in the hinge of the laptop. (And no, I’m not allowed to do it until a project is complete.) Regarding my desktop, there are currently thirty-four images that I’ve collected in the process of writing my new book, Children of Radium. Here’s a small sample of what’s been staring back at me for the last few years:

   

   

   

   

   

   I very much look forward to dragging and dropping these into a folder marked ‘finished’.

4. The maths are simple: issue 40 of Fantastic Man marks twenty years since the magazine came into the world — a world then convinced that the future of media was blogs and blogging. Indeed I launched my own blog, The London Review of Breakfasts, that year, eventually closing it when it became clear that social media is to online attention as black holes are to passing spaceships. Anyway, Fantastic Man is not only still being updated but releasing some of its best work yet. Issue 40’s lineup of definitively photographed/interviewed men includes Adrien Brody, Carlos Alcaraz, Mark Borthwick, Jeremy O. Harris, Ed Atkin, Haider Ackerman and Rocco Ritchie. I first contributed ten years ago in the form of an under-discussed method for poaching eggs, printed as one of the ‘recommendations’ in the front section alongside architect Richard Rogers encouraging people to take up boxing and an unsigned but genuinely useful tip about using potatoes as shoeshine. Somehow my encounter flowered into a long-running, ever-changing relationship, the current manifestation of which has been my commissioning the magazine’s front section, now called ‘Phenomenons’ (this time including a short story about a silk scarf, an essay about puka shell necklaces, an insight into the work of cult fashion designer Telfar Clemens). A screen could never be as beautiful. An AI could never produce it. Happy twentieth, FM.

5. Featuring pirate radio recordings going all the way back to 1969, and being filterable by culture, language, religion and music, the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Map traces “the lingering connections between unlicensed radio broadcasting and Brooklyn’s local neighborhood culture”. By resurrecting once-ephemeral broadcasts as streaming media it ends up feeling like a form of emotional time travel — even for someone who, like me, has only been to Brooklyn maybe four or five times. Radio’s so good at making itself feel familiar immediately, which is a lot to do with that sense of place.

   

6. Do you sometimes treat bookshops less like commercial outlets filled with buyable products than lavish exhibitions of proper nouns framed by beautiful graphics? Are you, or could you be, in Northumberland? This picture, like the one at the very top of this issue, is from OOO at the Old School Gallery in Alnmouth, an exhibition of collaborative work by book cover artists Tom Etherington (the legendary former art director of The Happy Reader) and Jon Gray (behind those mesmerisingly-patterned Zadie Smith jackets). Note: the title stands for ‘out of office’ and not the once-fashionable philosophical movement of Object-Oriented Ontology.

7. READ ME: Please describe your immediate surroundings.

   JANE BUSTIN, ARTIST: The view at the back of our new house. The brickwork of 1796 is crumbling and I’m told it needs to be repointed but I love this wall of distress, its sunken surface, indentations from forces of nature and misbehaving drainpipes, rain water, chimney smoke, the redness, the blackness, its badly patched skin, the work of unskilled workers in a hurry, its delicate patina showing its years, unafraid of a changing armour. Somehow its uneven surface reminds me of soft rippling notes on the piano, a dishevelled Chopin playing to a disinterested audience, stained fingers brushing uneven keys but still making the most delicate of sounds. A gentle breeze and still I can hear the whispers of the leaves.
   —
   Jane Bustin’s exhibition Pirelli, Let Me Count the Ways (Part II), which draws inspiration from the Pirelli pin-up-girl calendars of the 1970s and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York until 21 June.

8. If I was in LA I would like to think I’d go to the LA Art Book Fair, which is taking place there until Sunday. Every time I think of these fairs I remember a book bought at Offprint Paris in November 2015. The cover is a monochrome print of a bear playing the accordion. It’s wrapped in the kind of steel mesh you’d use to make a chicken hutch. Rightly or wrongly, it’s my archetype of an art book bought at an art book fair. I have never opened it.

9. Last autumn I arrived at the Marlfield House Hotel in Gorey, Ireland, where I’d arranged to interview the author Claire Keegan, only to find it was completely shut. Thankfully I managed to track down the owner, who after a little persuasion led me down a wallpapered corridor to a lamplit drawing room where a pair of armchairs faced one another by a glowing fireside. There were oil paintings on the walls and an ornate white and gold clock on the mantelpiece. The phrase ‘simulation theory’ came to mind, but it was a real place, reached via one of the most beautiful train lines in the world, Dublin Connolly to Rosslare Europort, which mostly hugs the coast but occasionally plunges inland offering real-world equivalents of the paintings at the hotel. I didn’t stay the night at Marlfield House but I had a good feeling about it, and recommend it on that basis. The subsequent interview, for The Gentlewoman, is here.

10. “I was basically going from room to room just pouring out this stream-of-consciousness manifesto, like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road.” Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb.