Jenny Hval Quotes

I got really interested in the language used in blogs written by young girls - a young person's aggression, which is always lacking from the visual world.

Norway is pretty forward thinking in terms of gender equality, but we don't seem to practice it as well as we think. I'm constantly thinking: How much power have we really gained? We have to keep fighting to even keep what we've fought for already.

I'm inspired by that rawness in very direct communication. My work is not meant to keep people happy or give them an escape.

I'm obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show.

Health is so important now, it's ridiculous - the body has become frightening, this thing that will kill you if you don't keep really healthy. The body is the enemy now.

I've studied film a lot, so I know much more about film than music, but I don't think I could have made films.

Everything you do is so personal. In the end, it doesn't matter so much if you write about your own life or not. It's going to be as much artifice when it comes out as a piece of music. Everything is in character in a way. But that's a great thing.

I'm always going back and forth between wanting to do stuff that's abstract and stuff that's just telling everybody to listen.

If you believe that you have nothing to fight for, that just means the people in power, and the people with money, can sneak anything into your life. Everything can be taken away from you.

I've never been good at being nostalgic, and I've never been able to focus on sound without having a voice that's very here-and-now.

When you're outside of genre, you can expose more vulnerability.

Gym is a center of capitalist breakdown, and everything is focused on the individual.

I'm constantly reading and trying to enlighten myself to how the world works in its silent ways to make everything seem normal when it's actually incredibly discriminating.

I've always seen myself as the person listening to alternative music and all that - generic indie person. I always tried to be the least pretty I could be.

Norway's a very gender-aware country, and we're very liberal. There are lots of women's voices being heard here compared to many other countries.

Soft things are terrifying. They're the real signals of death. Images of strength can never be that terrifying. It's the images of weakness that are a real apocalypse.

I'm not in any way trying to make statements that are not also invaded by emotions and abstract ideas that I don't really understand myself. It's more interesting when I can do that.

The body should not just be something you see. It's also the inside of it. It's frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring.

On an emotional level, I don't want to be a guide. I want people to hear things and experience them their own way.

I went through various phases of different accents - I get ridiculously obsessed with different accents, different regional ways of using the voice, different types of singing. It's all tied together. Speaking is a kind of singing, as are crying and laughing.

There's a great relationship between pop music and the way the body could be seen from the inside - when I was singing or listening to music I would change shape in my head, becoming all kinds of things and people. Music is a way of making your body.

I'm very interested in the visual world because I'm also very interested in feminism. I find that the world of watching takes us into the most psychotic state of, like, "You are this one person, but you have to become another person to see these images."

Everybody needs to read a lot of revolutionary stuff, because the revolution is a big part of our will to live.

I remember being very, very aware of gender when I was really young. Not necessarily in a bad way. Maybe it's a little bit because I'm Norwegian and how I've been brought up.