Unknown Pleasure: interpretations of the mystery hiss in Feist’s 2017 album

Abstract

This article examines the critical reception of Feist’s 2017 album Pleasure, and interpretations by reviewers of the mysterious hiss that permeates most of the album’s tracks. I firstly contextualise Pleasure in relation to the aesthetics of record production. I then examine interviews with Feist and her collaborators to identify the source of the hiss, and explain its presence on Pleasure. Lastly, I examine a corpus of 20 reviews, showcasing how critics (mis)identified and (mis)interpreted the sound, as well as the effect of this on their overall understanding of the album. To explain the relationship between the hiss and accompanying music, I assume a semiotic perspective. Following Poyatos, I regard these two kinds of sound as part of distinct yet related cosystems of signs, loosely analogous to the relationship between verbal utterances and nonverbal behaviours in face-to-face communication. Through this lens, I analyse how Pleasure’s hiss was heard to modify, support, emphasise and undermine the meaning of the music by reviewers.