“I came to town with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris,” opens Jenny Hval’s 2011 album, Viscera. This opening lyric predicts the rest of the album well. On Viscera, Hval investigates the spaces of the body and the nature of corporeality, all while experimenting with sound, namely through her voice. That voice is often delicate, angelic even, even while singing the most pornographic of lyrics, though she has the ability to strengthen her luscious vox to entangle a range of sounds. Raised in Oslo and a small town in the south of Norway, Hval has fought against life in a country where musical success often depends on being mainstream. Trained in a music high school, where she initially hated the electric guitar and Christian music around her, Hval remained dedicated to music despite her unsupportive environment.

Later, she went on to pursue a degree in literature which resulted in a dissertation on one of her icons, Kate Bush. Hval has managed to avoid comparisons to Bush that dog so many female artists, perhaps because she lacks Bush’s trademark helium-esque lilting wail. Her love of literature shows, not just in the poetry she reads or the novel she penned (originally in English, but then translated into Norwegian), but in the sonic shapes that form her music. Those sounds are key to comprising Viscera, crafting elegant songs that tour through the body and emerge as something more ethereal.

I’m excited to hear more about your literary background

JH: I have my master’s in literature as well. Woo-hoo! I started studying in Australia, but, as I moved back to Norway, I switched from creative arts to literature, which is the closest you can get to creative arts in Norway, I suppose. I did my thesis on Kate Bush. It’s in Norwegian, which is stupid, but it is.

Who are your favorite writers?

I just read poetry these days. At the moment, I’m reading a lot of Caroline Bergvall. She writes in English but she’s French-Norwegian and I just find it interesting that she knows Norwegian, obviously,but she chooses to write in English rather than Norwegian or French. I just really enjoy that because I write in English. But I also really like Juliana Spahr, I’m just getting into her at the moment. And there’s a Candian poet Nicole Brossard. There are also a lot of other writers. I like a lot of surrealist writing I’ve read a lot of pornographic stuff as well. At one point, I was going to do a thesis on it, like Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer. She writes–what’s it called–The Piano Teacher. That’s one of her books. She writes in a very pornographic language. It’s very interesting.

I saw that you almost named your album after The Story of O, which I really love. What captivated you about that book?

I read this book when I was quite young. I had never read anything like it at the time and I was just like ‘whoa.’ I think the metaphors and the way that the metaphor sort of takes over the narrative a bit, and all the round things, the eggs, the different round things. I think it’s influenced me a lot in regards to using body parts and sexuality in a very surrealist, poetic way, and like using the body as a different kind of tool than a surface area. I remember the atmosphere and the sort of crazy situations in that book and obviously the eye.

I noticed a lot of sexuality on your album. There’s a lot of erections and clitorides on your album. I was wondering where that came from.

Yes, that was very influenced by that book. And going back to the surrealists as well, like the Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou), the Buñuel film, which also has an image of an eye that is slit by a razor blade. Just images like that–I was watching all these films again that I watched years ago, and at some point it became less harsh and more poetic and perhaps more about the space of the body, not just the surrealist kind of playing around with surrealism but also looking at the body from the inside.

I read that you start your writing process with a sound. Can you tell me more about that?

I usually start with the sound of words. Not always, but I tend to find ideas by just speaking. I think maybe that’s because I’ve always been recording music. I didn’t always write or think I could write music or words before I started recording. So I got a three-track and started just reading or speaking into it.

You’ve referenced Meredith Monk and Kate Bush and the way they use their voice as an instrument. Was that something that you always had a fascination with?

I think that I realized when I was first recording, one of the things that I realized was that I could use different vocal effects. I could make the voice sound like different instruments or percussion or any kind of sound. I’ve got this dimension of always wanting to be interested in certain sounds of the voice. Even if I’m writing something that’s just like a pop tune or something, there’s always an element of experimentation with the voice in different layers or pulling the words apart or something, and I like that you can do this with any type of music.

What kind of musical training do you have?

I went to a music high school, which is quite common in Norway. It’s like you choose what kind of high school you want to go to. That’s pretty much it. I played electric guitar but I really hated it. I really hated playing sort of standard jazz scales, lead solos, I really hated it. And I hated singing, because I just had this thing where I was living in this really religious area, and all the singers in my class, they just loved gospel music. So I did my electric guitar and hated it. But I also started playing in bands. I played in a goth band at the time, which I was much more influenced by than my training. But since then it’s just been writing that’s taught me how to sing, I think.

Did you grow up in Oslo?

Partly. I lived in Oslo till I was 9, and then I moved to the south of Norway when I was nine, where there wasn’t much music, and then I’ve moved around quite a lot since. I moved away to go to high school and then I lived in Australia for four years and I’ve been back in Oslo since 2004. I travel a lot so it doesn’t feel like I’m stuck.

What was your childhood like?

JH: After I moved to the small town, it’s really beautiful, but it’s a dump. I was the only one interested in music, pretty much. Well, some people were interested in listening to Metallica. But I was really angry when I was living there. The boys were listening to Metallica and the girls were listening to TLC or Mariah Carey. I became really interested in music and I remember I listened to music as you do when you grow up, I listened to music to get away. And to get away I listened to music to teach myself English. I really wanted to be in another language, so I was listening to music that no one else was into in my town. I remember I was really into Lush, and because of Lush, I started speaking with a British accent and not an American one, ’cause in school you have to choose. I was in my room a lot trying to be Lush.

It seems like you started getting famous all of a sudden. What was that sudden change like?

The last five years have been quite strange for me because I released my first album in Norway almost five years ago, and it became a hit, and I had a radio hit, which was really unexpected. I was recognized on a ferry, which was very weird. I was used to reading poetry to ten people. And so I was more famous then than I think I’ll ever be. And then I started going and moving away from the song structures a little bit and now I’m not very popular unfortunately. I think I’m reaching out to more people internationally now, which I love. Norway is obviously a very small country, obviously. If you’re going to reach a variety of people there, you have to be huge. In order to play more than three cities on a tour, you’ll have to play very popular music since there aren’t very many people there. But I really hope that I can get to play to a lot of people, like a lot of small communities around Europe and come to the States even though it’s very difficult to get a visa. I’m trying alone and it’s really difficult. I’m really hoping I can make my way over.

What does it mean to consider yourself a feminist?

JH: Yeah, I have no trouble considering myself a feminist. And I think that being a feminist means being really open, at least when you’re doing music and art, it’s something that should be about subjectivity and finding your own expression and many expressions and many different creative opinions, expressing a lot of opposing opinions within feminism is really important. I’ve studied feminism and I was obsessed with the French feminists for a while. I guess I still am. I’m a huge fan of Helene Cixous, and lots of other feminists too. The work she has done with language and feminism is so important. I’m really using music to think through a few things, my own ideas about feminism and gender, and this time it’s about the body, but it’s also about words and writing because a lot of the songs are about traveling or sort of a stranger, and I remember reading a lot of modernist novels, especially like the Beckett novels, the trilogy, and Camus, when I was in high school, and the protagonists are always so interesting, and sometimes they didn’t even have names, like The Stranger, and they were always male; it was a very male thing to be the sort of stranger that you didn’t know anything about. Now I realized after I’d done the album that I was sort of writing a female and very bodily kind of traveler or stranger.

Do you think those things are going to continue on your next record, or are you going to do something different?

JH: I’ve started writing different stuff and I think that it will change a bit. I’m not sure how, I think that the feminist stuff will probably be there in some way. But I think that, well, up, I’ve written a few songs that are more like essays at the moment and they’re more like dealing with nature a little bit, and some about the floods in Australia, since I was there during the floods in December, so I started writing about water, which is a theme on my other work, following a trail.

What are your live shows like?

They’ve changed a lot over the past two years. I think now they’re kind of close to the record, but they get louder. They’re more dynamic. It really depends because we’ve adapted to a lot of different situations. We can play acoustic guitar and we can play on a huge festival stage with a lot of stuff. But it tends to be louder with a couple of new things as well which are probably, I wouldn’t say more rock n roll, but more electric than the album. There’s not more electronic music, there’s just more electric guitar because that’s what I’m playing now. I started a side project that is partly improvised, and I started enjoying playing really badly, like I did the first day I played guitar, but musically, and I have a side project and it’s called Nude on Sand, and it’s really poorly played blues, and it’s also really well-played, poorly played blues. And I think that made me able to play electric guitar and solos and everything.