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Baker's Dozen

"Where Was My Mind?" Jenny Hval's 'Favourite Albums'
JR Moores , October 28th, 2015 12:02

We asked Jenny Hval to pick her 13 favourite LPs, which she didn't, because she thinks that's a "horrible" task. Fair enough, said JR Moores, so here, instead, are 13 underappreciated records she's hoping you'll go out and enjoy

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Various - The Spirit In Past & Present (Vocal - Music From One Earth)
That's very hard to talk about and, I bet, very hard to find. I guess I found it a few years after it came out. I remember very specifically lying in a bathtub listening to it on a portable stereo that I moved into the bathroom. That's not very interesting but what is interesting is that this is a compilation, so it's several artists, which makes it quite difficult to talk about because it's incredibly, vastly different stuff. But at the end of this album there are some multilingual radio sound pieces with lots of voicework with a lot of cuts and edits of voices and when I heard that it just kind of blew my mind, because I realised that I could do this stuff with recording and it was so immediate and it made me so much want to listen to it without there being any melody or any music at all. I'm not sure if it could be even classified as music. So I got really interested in more of a kind of radio- or soundart way of working because of that album. I don't know anything about those artists who did it... I could try to find it on Discogs [taps at laptop]... I had it up but it all fell apart... Oh god, I can't even find it now... I've never met anybody who's ever listened to this... it's even hard to find on Discogs. I have to do several searches to find it. It's amazing that some things are still hard to find, as annoying as it might seem, which is good because some of these albums are things that I've had trouble getting back to on the internet. You can't find much Annette Peacock, Abstract-Contact, online. And that's kind of why I wanted to have it there because that in itself is kind of amazing these days.