“I’m really boring,” she laughs. “There’s not much else to say. I’m much more interesting on an album. I’m on tour a lot, and touring is to me really interesting, but it’s also extremely boring if you just had to listen to what goes on in the course of a day. Having a real job in a normal life would probably be much way more interesting to hear about. For me, it’s like, we were in a car, we drove past some trees. I’m very much inside my brain – that’s where all of the exciting stuff is going on. It’s mostly in my imagination. So it probably seems quite boring on the outside, with lots of interesting stuff on the inside. During a day where I’m on tour, the most pleasant moment is when I’m actually playing, which is a very happy and very intense moment for me.” She pauses, then laughs. “And hopefully the audience.”
Over the last decade, Hval has developed a strong fanbase around Europe, and her popularity is on the rise Down Under. Australia actually holds a unique space in the songwriter’s heart, as she lived here for many years and studied Creative Writing and Performance at the University of Melbourne.
“It’s been three years since I was in Australia last,” Hval says. “I used to study there, so I was trying very hard to be Australian for about four years. But that was ten years ago now and I’ve only been back twice. It’s just so far, and too expensive. Obviously it doesn’t go very well with the economy of being an artist, though it does go very well with touring ’cause then you get to go to these places. So I’m extremely excited about coming back and playing some shows and playing some festivals.
“I have this alternative life in my head that I can’t really let go of. It’s what happens when you live somewhere else, you kind of invent the parallel existence where I never came back to Europe and I spent my whole life in Australia, and I reconnect with that idea whenever I go back. I definitely have an Australian longing within me at all times, and I have a lot of friends there still I’m hoping to see again. Some of my favourite people live there.”
Describing Hval’s sound is no simple feat. Broadly you can list her as an experimental pop artist, though that doesn’t encapsulate either her live show or lyrical aesthetic. She is often referred to as an avant-garde performer, and her history spans genres as disparate as gothic metal and electric folk. Labelling music is a rather restrictive task at the best of times, and Hval is quite happy to shrug off the task and let others judge for themselves.
“I think [those labels] are a combination of what people hear in the music, combined with which words are in people’s heads right now anyway. Maybe at some point that is electric folk, or experimental, whatever. It’s more about which words people are already talking about, about the words that are already out there being used in music. It’s very much a conversation and this labelling of art has more to do with other things than the work itself. So that makes it easier to just think of whatever people say is whatever they’re into. People tell me what they think I sound like, and it’s really a reference to their iTunes. I’m just happy that they want to say something at all; that they have something to share.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
