Jenny Hval

Jenny Hval has in recent years made a name for herself as a recording artist, sound artist and writer. Multidisciplinary and transgressive are words often employed to describe her art, but Jenny Hval’s polyphonic artistry is in fact seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. She has infused, carved and modulated an artistic voice that is altogether present, accessible and obscurely complex at the same time.

I Want To Be A Machine will be the first new music from Hval since her critically acclaimed album Classic Objects (2022, 4AD).

I Want To Be A Machine is the name of the new work by singer, composer, and novelist Jenny Hval, developed in collaboration with Håvard Volden, Jenny Berger Myhre, and Linn Nystadnes. She was inspired by Heiner Müller’s Hamlet Machine, a key work of the 1970s avant-garde: as Müller once dismantled Shakespeare’s Hamlet and reconstructed it as a theatrical machine, Hval attempts to do the same with the essence of musical production. Her performance is a concatenation of situations, intensities, unconscious action and conscious non-action: broken shards of fallen greatness are reassembled to tell other, stranger, and more exhilarating stories.