On Repeat: Menneskekollektivet by Lost Girls Is As Close As It Gets To Spellbinding
Tristan Young @talltristan
It should come as no surprise that any contender for weirdest pop music of any year would come from Jenny Hval, but even for her this is some ambitious stuff. Menneskekollktivet is the new track from Lost Girls, the formerly dormant project of Hval and instrumentalist Håvard Volden. Translating to ‘human collective’, even a term as sprawling as that seems woefully inadequate to capture the sentimental mind fuck of Hval’s verses. Rest assured this is a good thing. The first section of the 12 minute long track is purely spoken word with minimal production. Don’t let Hval’s distinctly anodyne register lull you into a sense of boredom, as her musings are a fascinating collection of anomalous streams of thought. Hval has an indelible talent for taking all of the ambient bureaucracies of simply living life and draping them in the arcane language of mysticism. “Do we know who makes sounds/ sounds is more familiar than subjects”, suggests Hval in aptly primordial terms considering where she is going to go with all of this. She can also take abstract concepts of moralism and renders them in the most cerebral of terms, “Darkness leads us closer to what will in the future be called death/ which is now inseparable from what in the future will be called life”. She digs even deeper into the nucleus of whatever this all is by defining the very nature of existence in pure hypotheticals and theoreticals, “You knock on the door because you believe in the concept of a door, and in conviction, preaching, the good word”. Her brief sojourns into the contemplation of god seem comparatively simplistic. Yet as the music starts to kick in the intent behind all of these abstractions becomes a bit more acute- trying to understand the origin and potential of sound and words. All of these dauntingly multiplex ruminations might just be a mental exercise to stretch her melodic and lyrical mussels. That may seem like something of a lark were it not for the impressive cross section of hypnotic electronica and the haunted house sub genre pioneered by The Knife that kicks in. Hval’s voice shifts into the atonal, but no less intriguing style of melodic floridity that she is known for. With ritualistic drums and transformative tunnels of iridescent synth she crafts a sci fi lullaby. A secondary, and then completely domineering strain of cinematic scales that could score a Tron film steer the song into plummeting depths and picturesque heights with a methodical and lumbering pace. The notations are exotic and alien, the fabric of each beat slightly ruptured to create a layered dissonance, but their pathways are calm, subdued and natural. The energy of the song is pronounced less by inertia than by the inevitably of something with so much gravity as these beats seem inexorably comprised of. The doldrums of the track’s inception seem like a distant memory amidst the luminous pulse and transfixing essence. Menneskekollktivet is potentially as strange a 12 minute stretch in 2021 you may experience, but your musical palate and appreciation for what a song can be will be better for it.