LIVE REVIEW | JENNY HVAL for MOFO |  JAN 2016

Hval’s ice clear falsetto tumbled out over the wharfs as I wandered down to the Brooke St Pier for my first live taste of the Norwegian vocalist and novelist as part of a SURPRISE! free MOFO gig. Approaching the stage was confronting to say the least, not because Hval was singing about childlessness & singledom while asking us whether ‘is art enough’ to justify her existence, but because the coffee machine three meters away from her performance was grinding out pearler after pearler of single origin gold, inadvertently stealing her limelight.

I wondered if she had choreographed the baristas milk frothing and paper bag scrunching to complement her revue? In any case it worked in her wonderfully abstract charm’s favour. I didn’t see Hval at the main stage at MONA on Friday but boy did she look right in her element at the Brooke St Pier today. She wore an orange wig and was curling her body around a pink fitness ball, proudly donning matching pink socks for maximum aerobic effect.

Rolling around on the concrete like a five year old, her vocals somehow managed to be impeccable and her performance entirely compelling. Though the attention of the majority of her audience was focused on sipping their lattes, at one point she played a loop of her own vocal through her iPhone into the microphone then sidled up next to the sound desk to slowly shimmy off her orange wig, exposing her Norwegian blonde bob like a ritual unmasking. For a fitting finale and in a moment which spoke to the most introverted parts of us all, she crouched on the floor, rolled under the sound desk, hid under the tablecloth and didn't come out.

-Amanda Laver