http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/see-bjork-talk-utopian-new-album-inspiration-as-live-avatar-w437474


See Bjork Talk Utopian New Album Inspiration as Live Avatar

"I think it's important to be determined about the light, to be intentional about it," she says


https://www.facebook.com/bjork/videos/10154448402851460/


By Althea Legaspi

Björk appeared as a live avatar for a press conference during a preview for her Björk Digital exhibit at London's Somerset House on Wednesday. The feat was accomplished with the use of live motion capture technology and was rendered in real time using a Unity 3D game engine.

While in her native Reykjavík, Iceland, Björk wore an XSens inertial motion capture suit, which then streamed data to a computer running 3D character animation software in London where her avatar appeared.

In a clip from the press Q&A, she was asked about her thoughts on utopia, a concept she has said will be more representative of her next album versus the darker Vulnicura.

Her avatar gave the appearance of an ethereal, colorful nymph, who mirrored her movements as she answered. During the Q&A she said both pessimists and utopians have valid points to make, but the former end up "actually attracting a lot of dark stuff and surrounding themselves with a lot of black mud in every sense of the word." Meanwhile, the optimists and utopians have "a little bit more chance, if you focus on the light, after a while all the seeds you've sown have become plants that you might be surrounded by fertility and light."

"I think it's important to be determined about the light, to be intentional about it. I think I'm a little bit like that," she said.

The traveling, interactive Björk Digital exhibit features several VR videos of songs from Vulnicura. It premiered in Sydney, Australia before its run in Tokyo, Japan. The exhibit will be at Somerset House from September 1st through October 23rd.

http://www.spin.com/2017/08/bjork-announces-new-album/


NEWS \


Björk’s New Album Is “Coming Out Very Soon”


Anna Gaca // August 2, 2017

Here’s the entirety of the information we have about Björk’s tenth solo studio album, the follow-up to 2015’s Vulnicura:


“I am excited to share with you that my new album is coming out very soon warmthness björk,” reads the handwritten message the artist posted to Instagram today. She’s sharing no additional details for now: Although preorders are already available, they’re simply labeled “new björk album.” Under the heading for “tracklisting” is the word “no.” But let’s focus on the good news: new Björk album, coming out very soon!

Maybe the last album of her's that appealed to me was Verpertine. But I'm a sucker for positive thinking and people who follow some type of path to spiritual growth, so this might be the album that gets some play.

It's pretty dope. Def her best since Vespertine. I didn't care much for Medúlla, Volta or Biophilia. Even though each of those albums had a few joints I loved.

I'll check it out then. I tried to get into Volta but didn't like it. Maybe Vulnicra is more my speed.

Based on it I developed the expectation that she'd keep making albums like that. She hasn't. I stopped trying after Vespertine.

I really liked Post and Homogenic (I liked her so much Selmasongs wasn't bad to me)

But since those three albums, her music hasn't moved me as much outside of 'Hidden Place'.

She seems like Radiohead to me in the sense that they never go back and touch on their style from previous albums.

That would have really appealed to me in my 20's and early 30's, but at this point in my music listener-life, I just want to hear what I like.

My patience for new music is lower than I would like in general. With the pace of new releases increasing so much over the last five years, it's difficult for me to spend time trying to 'get' Bjork's or any new artist's work. It's just easier to move on to something that I like.

But those first albums were great so on the basis of the value her music has to me, this new album will get some spin.

or whatever it is w/this album. i applaud her for following her muse but i don't have to follow behind them. my time is precious.

i wish her the best of everything.

http://www.spin.com/2017/08/bjork-new-record-tinder-album/


NEWS \

Bjork on Her New Record: “It’s Like My Tinder Album”

Dale Eisinger // August 3, 2017

Yesterday, Bjork gave word of an imminent new record through a short statement on her Instagram, saying the as-yet untitled album would be “coming out very soon.” Today, the Icelandic art-pop icon graces the cover of Dazed, along with a new interview regarding the record beside gorgeous photos by Jesse Kanda.

In the story, written by Selim Bulut, Bjork opens up about finding love, saying of the album, “This is like my Tinder record.” She goes on to say that the record is “about being in love. Spending time with a person you enjoy on every level is obviously utopia. I mean, it’s real. It’s when the dream becomes real.”

Since her last record, 2015’s Vulnicura, Bjork says she’s been rebuilding, following her divorce from artist Matthew Barney. “I set myself up with the last album being a heartbreak album,” she said, “so everyone’s gonna be like, ‘Are you married?’ with this one. But… it’s too fragile still. I think, if I could, I’d just say this is my dating album. Let’s just leave it there.”

She also reveals how the rise of right-wing populism helped shape the record: “Maybe that’s why it became a utopian theme — if we’re gonna survive not only my personal drama but also the sort of situation the world is in today, we’ve got to come up with a new plan,” she said. “If we don’t have the dream, we’re just not gonna change. Especially now, this kind of dream is an emergency.”

Bjork also goes deeper into her relationship with Arca, who co-produced the record, calling their collaboration “the strongest musical relationship I’ve had.” She likens the working relationship to that of Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius during Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. “You can tell they’re doing the tango,” she says. “It’s that synergy when two people lose their ego.”

A few song titles from the new album are revealed in the piece, including “Allow,” “Loss,” “Features Creatures,” and “The Gate.” It’s revealed that visual artist Thomas Andrew Huang, who directed three Vulnicura videos, has already shot a video for “The Gate.”

Other details on the record are scarce.

Loved Vulnicura

it really gave a view into the innards of a divorce, making it one of my favourite divorce albums. Also, I still bang Volta from time to time. Good parts to that as well.

https://www.spin.com/2017/09/bjork-new-album-utopia/

Björk Says Her New Album Is Called Utopia

Anna Gaca // September 15, 2017


Björk has announced the title of her forthcoming album. She and artistic collaborator Andrew Tomas Huang sat down for a Facebook Live interview with Nowness today to discuss her new single “The Gate,” her touring VR exhibition Björk Digital, and aspects of her previous album, Vulnicura. Toward the end, host Jefferson Hack asked if she could reveal the title of her next album.

“I have had a thousand name suggestions, and I think it’s going to be called Utopia,” Björk replied, after some hesitation. “I can’t think of anything better.”

The album now known as Utopia is expected in November, and features Arca as a co-producer. The video for “The Gate” debuts on Monday (September 18). According to Huang, the video is “quite ambitious,” involving computer-generated imagery and a dress by Gucci designer Alessandro Michele. Watch the full discussion below; the album title reveal takes place at 47:30.

https://www.facebook.com/nowness/videos/10155942546587454/

Björk: The Gate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n0Ps1KWVU0

breaks my little heart

https://www.spin.com/featured/bjork-homogenic-cover-story/


Björk’s December 1997 Homogenic Cover Story: The Outer Limits

Björk's Homogenic was released September 22, 1997. To mark its 20th anniversary, we've digitized our cover story on the album, which ran in the December 1997 issue of Spin.

Written By Jonathan Van Meter September 22 2017

There are three things that surprise you right away upon meeting Björk: 1. She is not short; 2. She has the second deepest laugh you’ve ever heard come from a girl; 3. Her name rhymes with work, not pork. On this particular London afternoon, there one other surprise: Björk is terribly hungover. Noticeably, unapologetically hungover.

“How late were you out?” I ask.

“10:30.”

“A.M.?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Everything.”

Apparently, everything includes bar-hopping with a “mate,” making a DJ play the Beatles’ “Yesterday” so that she could sing along, and getting drunk to the point of forgetting a chunk of the evening. “It’s quite humiliating for a 31-year-old,” she says. Because she is sniffling and rubbing her nose, and because alcohol alone does not usually keep people out until 10:30 A.M., I am wondering if drugs were involved in her pub crawl.

“I come from a country where from the age of 15 you drink one liter of vodka every Friday straight from the bottle,” she says. “I watch my granddad and my grandmother, and it’s my pattern. It’s a release that’s been going on in my family for a thousand years. Purely from alcohol is how people lose themselves and put their little policeman off shift and run riot. I actually need it in my life.” Finally answering my question (more or less), she says, “A lot of drugs basically just don’t agree with me.”

Conversation with Björk, you come to learn, is no more straightforward than any of her songs. “I find it really interesting that elephants hide apples and stuff and wait for them to go bad, and then eat then and get pissed,” she continues. “They actually make an effort to hide that apple behind that tree and then go on a bender.” The idea sends her into a fit of giggles. “I saw this photograph of a drunk elephant once and it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

One gathers, then, that the reason Björk stayed out all night and most of the morning, the reason that she’s nursing a blinding headache, is this: “I’m a Viking, and elephants hide apples.” Which, in fact, could very easily pass for the subject of a Björk song—a shimmering, flicking, dreamy tune that would be both deeply strange and not so strange at all.

***

On the day that I am to meet Björk for the first time at Nomis Studios in West London, where she is to begin rehearsing for her upcoming tour—she never shows up. On the second day of rehearsal (the day of the hangover), she is many hours late. It is hard to gauge from the people around her—the people waiting for her—if this is normal. If they are annoyed or worried, they don’t let it show. It is as if they have not only given her a permanent benefit of the doubt, but also refuse to burden her any more than absolutely necessary, perhaps because she appears a bit fragile and plenty leery—still somewhat unhinged from the events of the recent past.

1996 was Björk’s year in the barrel. While on tour in Asia, Björk arrived in an airport in Bangkok and was descended upon by a bunch of television reports. The most aggressive telejournalist of the bunch shoved a microphone into her ten-year-old son’s face and tried to interview him on live television, saying to him at one point, “It must be really difficult to have a mom like that.” Björk—who says she has only lost her temper two other times in her life—snapped, beat the stuffing out of the reporter, and then, in an unintentional display of her recently acquired karate skills, threw her to the ground. The footage immediately went into heavy rotation on the Hard Copys of the world, and turned Björk into a most unexpected tabloid subject. Several months later, a crazed fan in Miami, disturbed by Björk’s impending mixed-race nuptials to jungle star Goldie, sent her a letter bomb and then killed himself. (The letter bomb was intercepted by police; she and Goldie never tied the knot.) Overnight, photographers were camped outside her London home, and Björk went from being the cultish and irresistible iconoclast of dance music—a hipster novelty from a strange land—to an international celebrity. The fuss has mostly died down, but it was, she says, the most “outrageous, mental year of my life.” With some distance on these events, she now believes she was asking for it. “I sent out messages,” she says, “and I got answers: Please put me on the edge of a cliff and will someone please kick me off.”

Björk’s response to her emotional crash was to fly off to El Madroñal, a small town on the southern coast of Spain, where she spent several weeks sleeping, Jet Skiing, and making music. If we are inclined, as Björk seems to be, to find the silver lining, then her beautiful, spooky, difficult new album, Homogenic, appears to be it. It is a minimalist masterpiece. The extravagant disco show tunes of yore are gone, and what’s left are the fuzzier musical experiments that popped up on Debut and Post, her first two solo records after leaving the punkish Icelandic band the Sugarcubes in 1992. A head-on collision of often contrary sounds—the Icelandic String Octet; the electronic, ahead-of-the-curve weirdness of coproducer Mark Bell of techno outfit LFO; and Björk’s outsized, unprecedented voice—Homogenic, she says proudly, is her least compromised work to date. “It’s the record that’s closest to the music that I hear in my head. It’s closest to what I am.” But. “I don’t know if people are going to like it or not.”

Neither does her record label. “Björk’s challenging her audience, and, more so, radio, to get beyond traditional song structure, to step outside their comfort zone,” says Greg Thompson, senior vice president at Elektra. “So yeah, it’s a challenge. No doubt. I liken her to Beck. They’re not necessarily radio-driven, single-driven artists. They conceive great albums. Björk’s concept is to combine strings and hip-hop beats, and quite frankly, from radio’s standpoint, that’s difficult to mix in with Sugar Ray.”

While Björk has charted 11 Top 20 singles in England, she has yet to have the same commercial impact in America (Homogenic debuted at No. 28 on the Billboard Top 200.) The worldwide combined sales of Debut, Post, and Telegram (last year’s remix album) total around six million, with her biggest single success in America coming from “Army of Me,” a song from Post that appeared on the Tank Girl soundtrack. Despite the steady momentum gained from the MTV airplay of 1993’s “Human Behavior” (Björk being chased by a bear) and ’95’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” (Björk dancing with a mailbox) and electronica’s recent Stateside foot-in-the-door, chances are remote the the bizarro Homogenic will launch Björk beyond her cute, cuddly cult. The album’s first single, “Joga,” a love letter to her best friend, feels nearly a cappella, a barely detectable beat humming under Björk’s soaring vocals. The stuttering, scratchy “5 Years” sounds as if it was recorded in a video arcade circa 1980. “Immature” repeats the same four lines over and over (“How extremely lazy of me!”) over a church bell-laced beat. You get the idea. Unless your name is RZA, such avant-garde strivings don’t do much for your bankbook. When Thompson says that the folks at alternative radio are “waiting for her to make that one gem that actually works as a radio song,” you can be sure that he knows it’s not on Homogenic.

Though Björk’s loath to put down Americans and our notorious need to categorize pop music into endless charts and radio formats, she can’t help herself. “It’s American radio’s own worst enemy,” she says. “Music, to me, stands for freedom, and to be so limited is the opposite of what music is.” And even within our endless sub-categories, it seems to her, we’ve still gotten it all wrong. “I went to New York last January and did some interviews and they were all like, ‘Electronica is the next big thing,’ and I’m like, ‘Please.’ And they put it under the same thing as Prodigy, Kraftwerk, Massive Attack—the whole lot. To them it’s this thing that was born half a year ago. Please.”

To Björk, the charge that techno is inherently cold and soulless—the typically rockist, typically American criticism formerly known as “disco sucks”—is patently absurd. There is no soul in a guitar, she points out; someone has to play it soulfully. “I saw this magazine called Guitar,” she says, with a smirk, “and there was this comic in the back with this blues guy with a guitar, and the question was, ‘Why will computers never take over the guitar?’ And the final thing was, ‘Well, you can never call a computer Layla.’ Please! Have you heard the names all the kids give their computers?! They’re like pets.Please!”

***

Settled in, at last, for band rehearsal, Mark Bell and engineer Allan Pollard are on stage fiddling with the pets: a 909 drum machine, a brand new, powerful effects unit called a Sherman—that is no bigger than a typewriter—a keyboard, and a mixer. They are gearing up for an eight-city mini-tour of nightclubs around Europe hat kicks off in Munich a couple of days from now. All of the shows are low-key affairs—either barely promoted or unannounced—that will allow Björk and Bell some time to learn to play off each other before the Icelandic String Octet is brought in for the tour proper that begins in November. This is, in many ways, a new model for onstage musical performance: one person pushing buttons—remixing live, really—the other singing. “I think I can say this has never been done before,” Björk announces. Many of the songs will be left “open” so that Bell “can drop things in and surprise me. And then it’s just eye contact. It’s all very free-form.”

Bell has remixed parts of Homogenic for this tour, better to suit a late-night disco experience. He plays for Björk his pumped-up drum track for “Alarm Call”—it’s both deafening and skittish, a nimble feat—at which point Björk joins Bell onstage and begins to dance from one end to the other, sometimes skipping, sometimes marching, sometimes standing in place and twisting her torso in a strange reverie. She’s wearing an odd pants-with-a-skirt combo, a faded black T-shirt, and funny little canvas shoes that, she will tell me later, are worn by Japanese men who build houses. They make her feet appear webbed. The performance—Björk’s mad dance, her improbably voice, the unlikely outfit, the schizophrenic beats—reminds me of nothing so much as Alice in Wonderland, a trippy little universe unto itself. When Björk sings the line “I’m no fucking Buddhist / But this is enlightenment,” the track sputters out, and she and Bell matter-of-factly huddle, swapping asides on this tape loop and that string noise. Bell heads back to work. Björk comes down off the stage, yawns, and says, “I need meat.”
A few blocks away from the rehearsal studio, Björk sits in front of a huge plate of crispy duck, devours it like a hungry truck driver, washes it down with red wine, and explains to me why she’s titled such a weirdly eclectic new album Homogenic. “This album is only songs that were written last year,” she says, while Post and Debut were like back catalogs of all the songs she’d always wanted to record—of all her obsessions with different sounds and ideas from different times in her life. Those records weren’t as much solo projects, she says, as collections of duets with the producers who had inspired her: Nellee Hooper, 808 State’s Graham Massey, Tricky, Howie B. “This is more like one flavor. Me in one state of mind. One period of obsessions. That’s why I called it Homogenic.”

Those obsessions were, improbably, pre-Off the Wall Michael Jackson (“I love Michael Jackson so much. He’s got a ridiculous, outrageous, stubborn faith that magic still is with us.”) and 20th-century string quartets. “I went to music school in Iceland for ten years,” she says, “and obviously I was introduced to a lot of music.” In some ways, Homogenic is a return to her classical training, “going back through everything I learned,” she says, “and trying to focus on where I was in that moment.” With the help of Asmundur Jansson, a musicologist friend in Iceland who has been making her tapes since she was 14, Björk would sit down to compiled cassettes of, say, songs about ships or songs featuring angular, out-of-tune brass. “I went to him h`oping to find a treasure,” she says. “I really wanted to discover what Icelandic music is, and if there is such a thing. And in a way, there really isn’t.”

It is not a very big leap from this discovery, or lack thereof, to conclude that perhaps Björk herself is Icelandic music. Iceland is a country obsessed with literature and story-telling (think Viking sagas), to the exclusion of nearly all other arts. And, unlike America and Europe, countries that industrialized slowly over a period of a few hundred years, Iceland has come into the technological present fairly recently. Björk’s grandfather, for example, lived in a mud house. Out of this sped-up modernization sprang both an almost mythological relationship to nature and a brand-new fixation on technology. “All the modern things / Like cars and such,” Björk sings on Post, “Have always existed / They’ve just been waiting in a mountain / For the right moment… / To come out / And multiply / And take over.” And on Homogenic’s “Alarm Call”: “I want to go on a mountain top / With a radio and good batteries.”

Call it techno-nature. Or natural techno. Acoustic strings and programmed machines. Voilà! Icelandic music! Björk music!
“You know, I would tour Asia and see a very similar thing as I see in Iceland: farmers who’ve got really modern roads with lights and everything, but the roads have got a bend in them around a rock because they think elves live in it. And they’ve got a mobile telephone. It’s these two extremes. People hear that in my music, but it’s not so conscious with me. It’s just because I come from that kind of country.”

***

Björk Guðmundsdóttir was born in 1965 in Reykjavik, Iceland, to parents who had been together since the age of 14. Björk’s mother was unhappy being a housewife, so she divorced her husband and became “a hard-core hippie,” eventually living with her daughter in a house with seven other adults. (Björk now has three brothers and three sisters with three mothers and three fathers among them.) “Can you imagine being brought up by seven grown-ups,” Björk once said, “who all hate work, and all they want to do is play games with you all day long, and tell you four-hour-long stories, and make kites?”

But by the age of seven, she began to grow tired of the unfulfilled dreaming of her mother and her groovy, in-crowd friends, and rebelled by becoming a self-sufficient and ambitious little girl. Studying flute and piano in Iceland’s classical music system, Björk became something of a prodigy, and actually released an album of Icelandic folk songs at the age of 11. It sold 5,000 copies in a country of about 265,000. The hit off the album, “Arab Boy,” was written by her stepfather and made Björk famous in Iceland. She posed for the album cover in a caftan.

After her early success, Björk refused to make another record; the preteen had already developed a distaste for the music business. At 13, she began to play in a series of short-lived punk bands, the last of which, Kukl, lasted two years and recorded a pair of albums. As she got pulled further into the tiny punk scene in Iceland she met fellow anarchist Thor Eldon, and, after getting pregnant at 19, married him and gave birth to their son, Sindri (he now splits his time between Dad in Iceland and Mom in London). In 1987, Björk, Thor, and four other Icelandic bohemian types formed Bad Taste, a loosely structured collective through which they ran an independent label, produced art events, and published one another’s writing. As a lark, they formed a band called the Sugarcubes in 1987, and released a single, “Birthday,” which, to their surprise, caught the attention of the British music press. So they rerecorded it in English, followed it up with a full-length LP, Life’s Too Good (they released four albums in all), and before long, Björk was on her way to rock stardom. Elektra’s Joel Amsterdam, who has worked with Björk since 1990, says that, in many ways, she is nothing like her younger, punkier self. “She was a kid then,” he says. “Now she’s a professional, a mother, a homeowner, a businessperson, an artist, and focused. Then, it was all about beer and partying, hanging out with her childhood friends, and traveling the world.”

I mention to Björk that all this history, both hers and her homeland’s, doesn’t solve the musical riddles she casually tosses out record after beguiling record. Half-jokingly, I suggest that I might like to “unravel the great Björk mystery.” She stares at me, unblinkingly, and with absolute earnestness says, “Okay. I’ll try.”

“First of all,” she begins, “I decided that my heart was with pop music because I believe in things that grannies and kids can get. If they don’t get it, fuck it, you know? So even though my arrangements are quite experimental, I’m very conservative when it comes to song structure. So it’s this beautiful relationship between complete discipline and complete freedom. Most people think that when I’m singing I just go, ‘Wah wah wah,’ and the song is finished. And I’m actually quite flattered that I get that feeling across to people.

“Usually I write about one song a month. I never write them down. The chord structure, the bass line, the lyric, the melody, it just goes around in my head when I’m in taxis or whatever. I know what instruments, I know what noises, and I could arrange these things on my own—sometimes I do—but I love working with people so much. They almost operate like my midwife—they get the song out.

“If I’m lucky, it all comes at once. With lyrics, sometimes it’s a very strong feeling, then I’ve got to work it out, almost like a scientist. It’s all these noises: wha oui aah ooh. It’s syllables and noises. Ahh eee ech crmpffff eeo. First, I only sing noises, then I slowly go into Icelandic and then do hints of English. I always write in Icelandic, and when I translate it to English it adds to the song and then maybe I translate back to Icelandic and then back to English. I actually get quite a lot out of the translation.”

“Your word associations are very nuanced,” I say.

“Very…?”

“Nuanced,” I say again. “Subtle. They don’t hit you over the head.”

“Oh,” she says, understanding. “I love nuance. I love that word so much. Me and my mate, we keep talking about nuance and nuisance. They’re our favorites.”

Watching and listening to Björk talk—and eat—is an event unto itself. She rolls her R’s in about 19 different ways, perhaps because she learned English in several accents, including Mancunian, Scottish, southern Cockney, and French, as well as, she says, from “quite camp drag queens in America.” She also makes the most amazing faces—baring her teeth, wrinkling her nose, widening her eyes—and pulls on her face and hair constantly. A few journalists have noted that Björk often, and without embarrassment, picks her nose, and sure enough, in the middle of one riff or another, one of her little fingers found its way up to one of her cute little nostrils and wiggled itself around, before being called away to perform another spazzy, adorable gesture.


***


One Friday night, Björk arrives at Bar Rumba, a small, newish club near Picadilly Circus where her current boyfriend, U2 techno swami Howie B, is on the DJ lineup, along with Ben Watt from Everything but the Girl. According to Björk, she doesn’t go clubbing like she used to, so tonight is all about running into old friends, a situation that makes her “hyper.” She spends most of the evening clutching a cocktail, surrounded by people who know her, pretend to know her, or want to know her; every time the crowd gets too thick, she escapes to another room, onto the dance floor, or up into the DJ booth, where she lovingly watches Howie B work his magic. The two first met when Björk moved to London in ’91, and they became best friends. Suddenly, she goes all girlish and demure. “Last February we started going out together.” She bats her eyelashes, and puts her hands over her mouth.

Björk and her boyfriends have been the subject of much scuttlebutt; she counts among her exes fashion photographer/video director Stephane Sednaoui and dance-floormachers Tricky and Goldie. One gossip column item had the two fighting over her in a New York City nightclub. When it is suggested that the pattern to her choice in men might be labeled “insufferable geniuses,” she doesn’t flinch. “They’re very obviously geniuses,” she says, “straight in your face. But for me, the guys I had the most fantasies about as a child were David Attenborough and Carl Sagan. Really. In school, I would fall for the guy in the back of the class with really thick glasses and the insect collection who told you about the solar system. It’s these people who show you these secrets. They pull out this rock”—she gets out of her chair and lifts up the cushion she’s sitting on as if it were the rock, and then leans in, staring at me, widening her eyes in mock wonder—“and they go, ‘Do you want me to show you a lot of really strange things that nobody’s ever seen?'” She looks back under the “rock” and then back to me.


“It just drives me nuts. It gives me 53 hard-ons. That’s what turns me on.”

***


“I dare you to take me on,” Björk wails from the tiny stage of the Sugar Shack in Munich as she sings “5 Years” to a firetrap-capacity crowd of sweaty, happy, twenty-something Germans. Fifteen minutes later, Björk bounces offstage and into the dressing room, all soaking wet hair and crazy eyes. The brief set—six songs from Homogenic—went better than anyone expected, and she is clearly relieved and thrilled. As she drums madly on a table with her hands, Mark Bell and the rest of her crew pile into the dressing room. “That was our most crowded rehearsal ever!” she says to the group, and they all laugh uproariously at what is obviously a joke at her own expense. Björk, it turns out, does not like to rehearse. She prefers, she says, “jumping off a cliff.”

As everyone pairs off and recaps, Björk says to the engineer, “The best thing about the show was what you and Mark were doing. So tight. Every sound was perfect.” Her sweaty hair is now clumped into little daggers all around her face. “I’m just glad I got my ‘Aaaaah!’ right. One-two-three, ‘Aaaaah!’” Suddenly, the PA guy, who couldn’t see the stage from the back of the room because the crowd stood on the furniture, shouts, “It was like setting off fireworks in the fog: ‘Oh, that must have been a pretty one! Oh, that must have been a loud one!’” Everyone falls out laughing, Björk loudest and longest.

The day after the Munich show, I am waiting in the airport for my flight home. Half asleep in a coffee shop, I look up and see Björk off in the distance, walking down some far-flung ultramodern hallway. She is wearing a 21st century, floor-length, sleeveless purple dress with a big orange circle on her stomach, and her web-footed, Japanese carpenter shoes. She is carrying a funny, furry little purse in one hand, and a cell phone in the other. She is chattering away into the cellular in Icelandic, oblivious to the fact that people are staring, not necessarily because they know she is Björk, world-famous pop star, but because she appears to be deeply strange and not so strange at all.

She's an iconoclast in every sense of the word. Her childhood was crazy tho, but obviously without that influence she wouldn't have that sense of openness to life that she puts into her approach to music.

http://www.factmag.com/2017/11/24/bjork-utopia-interview/

Björk’s constellation in the clouds: The Icelandic superstar unravels her Utopia

BY AL HORNER, NOV 24 2017


Her new album Utopia imagines a better world, while our own plunges into darkness. Why? Because nihilism is not going to save the planet, a fired-up Björk tells Al Horner, in a conversation also spanning nights in New York with the Wu-Tang Clan, self-care canal walks in London, a near-collaboration with Jay Z and her anger for Spotify and Apple Music.

“You know when you should go home from the bar? But you just stay for one more drink and one more drink and one more drink…” It’s early November, and Björk Guðmundsdóttir is searching for the words from her Icelandic home to describe an addiction she recently threw herself into: texting. “Oh, I was texting people like borderline crazy,” she laughs. “If I was with people in a room, my heart would be 51% with the people I’m texting and only 49% with the people in the room.” After a period of gloom following the breakdown of her marriage – distilled into stark, stormy audio violence on her last album, Vulnicura – the 52-year-old found herself drawn to the giddy thrills of shooting messages back and forth to friends and new acquaintances in her life. The puzzle of what they’d text back, the suspense of when or even if they’d reply, was a strange rush. “I really enjoyed it, but it was kinda fucked up!”

This, it turns out, is something Björk does a lot: finds a pastime, then takes it to an almost obsessive-compulsive extreme till she can bottle its sensation in musical form.“The same way I would obsess over an album or a lover,” she explains. During the making of 2001’s Vespertine, she didn’t just watch the TV trial of Michael Jackson: “I followed it manically. I just binged. I totally binged, curious to see how civilization would treat a creature like him.” Then there was her late introduction to Facebook. “At first, I didn’t want it in my life. Then when I did, I went really extreme. If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it with gravity and obsession, like it was the ocean,” she says. “I wanted to make it a feeling.”


There’s an argument to be made that this, above everything else – her constant search for innovation; her immaculate, instantly recognizable voice; the devastatingly beautiful visual worlds she builds around her music – is what has made Björk one of the most unequivocally singular artists of the last 30 years. Björk is a translator. She scrounges in all corners of the human experience, finding the feeling of nuanced, often unspoken situations, then translates them to melody, to the adoration of hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide.

In March 1997, when the Reykjavík-born artist won the first ever Nordic Council Music prize, a jury member compared her to the Norse god Heimdallr, guardian of Bifröst – a burning rainbow bridge linking the realms of god and man. Raised on classical piano and flute, baptised with punk in her teens then revealing herself to be an avant-pop marvel as her career took flight, the implication was that she bridged the gap between “the classical and the cutting edge,” as Emily Mackay puts it in her 33 1/3 book on the star. Two decades of trail-blazing later, you could push the analogy further: the most significant gap she bridges is between the emotions we all experience (and sometimes have never thought to articulate) and the melodies that truthfully, authentically best represent them.

Like, for example, the multiple mini emotional rollercoasters that spring from your phone’s messaging apps daily. “There are some songs on there about texting and over-texting,” she beams of Utopia, her ninth album, and first full-length proper collaboration with new musical soulmate, Arca. The Venezuelan producer had a pivotal role on Vulnicura, but only began contributing in its final stages. Here, he was so deeply involved, “we kinda wanted to (title the album) ‘made by Björk and Arca’ because the mode was so intense between us,” Björk reveals.

The album was billed half-jokingly in an interview as her “Tinder album” and understandably so. The airy and light exhalation to Vulnicura‘s asthma-attack panic-grip of grief, it’s a harp, flute and romance-filled voyage to a peach-pastel paradise, in which Björk is learning to be intimate again. On lead single ‘The Gate’, the titular gate is the one in which you let someone in, and let love out in return: “If you care for me, I’ll care for you,” she sings over the sparsest of orchestral blossoms. “Didn’t used to be so needy.” She is, critics have been in a rush to point out, full of love again.

21 years ago, in Martin Aston’s Björkgraphy, she likened releasing an album to “putting your diary out for everyone to read.” Has that sensation intensified, I ask, over these last two albums, on which her personal life – the grief of divorce on Vulnicura, and the excitement of meeting new people on Utopia – has been such a public part of those records? “Yeah… but in a good way,” she smiles, and our conversation – touching on her long lost Wu-Tang collaboration, her frustrations with streaming services, our obsession with the end of the world and much, much more – gets underway.


Do you still get nervous before a release?


Björk: I still get nerves when I release an album. It’d be odd if I didn’t, you know? I’d be worried if it was like, drinking a glass of water. It’s also a good feeling, like AHHHHHH. There are two different things: making an album with your friends in a sort of protected cocoon, and then seeing it venture out into the light outside. I’ve done it long enough now to know that people will react to it differently than it felt inside the cocoon. What I hold my breath a little for is that it’s the right proportion: that they don’t take one element and exaggerate it into something huge, or take something that’s a big deal for me on the album, but be like, “forget about it!” So it’s like that. Accepting that people are going to see it different from what I see, but hoping that they see something close to what I intended.


Was the lightness of Utopia, compared to the darkness of Vulnicura, something you consciously set out to do, or something you gravitated towards naturally?


Björk: Because it was such dark subject matter with Vulnicura, we were definitely keen on lightness. I guess we’d just been listening non-stop for two years to really grim lyrics and rough string arrangements. And when you’ve been at the bottom of the lake for so long… eventually you’re going to float up to the surface. It’s like physics. So I was really excited by things really fluffy and airy and floating and, like, fireworks!

The first song we did was the first song on the album (‘Arisen My Senses’). I actually found a loop of a mixtape or a SoundCloud thing that (Arca) had done three years prior. I just thought it was the most happiest firework that he’d ever done. I didn’t tell him about it – I just sampled it, sang it to him and he just exploded, you know? I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing. I was reaching for the most euphoric, antigravity moment that he’d done, and then I exaggerated that by looping it and writing a harp arrangement around it and singing on top of it these ecstatic lyrics. After we’d taken the saddest coordinates of each other and combined them into Vulnicura, we were doing the opposite now. And that was kinda the starting point.


So ‘Arisen My Senses’ became the blueprint for the rest of the album?


Björk: After that, the songs would just roll out. You know, we didn’t really know how to credit this album. I think we managed with what little logical sides of our brains are left – and there’s not a lot, by the way! – to write on a piece of paper the different (ways) we wrote this album. One is: he’d send me music that he’d made, then I would pick a bit, like I just described to you, in ‘Arisen’… I would edit it on ProTools, because all the songs on my albums are edited by me on ProTools. That’s one way.

Another way was more similar to Vulnicura: I would write a song like I normally do – I’d do a flute arrangement or a harp arrangement then sing – and then he would come and make a beat to it. There were a couple of songs like that: ‘Blissing Me’, ‘Body Memory’ and I think like five or six songs like that.

Then there were songs he would send me (complete) songs and I’d write over the top of it, which I’ve never done but I’ll do with him. ‘The Gate’, the first single, that was that sort of song. He sent me the instrumental and it was so perfect, it didn’t need any editing. Actually I take that back – it did need some editing (laughs). So I wrote the flute arrangement and my vocals. ‘Painstaker’ was also like that, the second last song.

Then there were songs similar to how we did ‘Notget’ on Vulnicura, where I took a song he’d already written, and a song of mine that I’d already written, and we’d do a mash-up. I just choked them to pieces and made a new thing out of two songs that already exist.


Was writing something that was lighter less of a strain than mining the darkness that you did on the last record?


Björk: Yep, absolutely! It couldn’t be more extreme. I think something about grief of Vulnicura, which was so sad, made the melodies like they were just lying on the floor. They don’t move a lot. The strings were very heavy and the beats were very heavy. There were no plants: it was just a barren landscape. And so I think we wanted to do the opposite. To make melodies that were like constellations in the clouds.

I think for me, in the beginning of Utopia, I was very excited to break away from the narrative on Vulnicura. It was so heavy and “me me me” and “poor me.” I just wanted to disappear and become one of the instruments and lose that heavy narration. All the first songs I wrote (for Utopia) had three or four lead vocals and not one of them was in the front. Part of it was because I was doing a lot of VR and I wanted to do something where my vocals were around you. But also emotionally, I’d just OD’d on the self-importance of the narrator. So a lot of the melodies have like five vocals and none of them are lead vocals. They’re like musical statements.


You mentioned in an interview last year that you and Richard D. James swap tracks via email. Did Aphex get a sneak peek of Utopia?


Björk: Hah, no. I was kinda blushing that that was blown up… Back when I lived in London, we did. If we hear a track we think the other one is going to like, we send it to each other. But other people’s music. Everything I find I really try to share.


The album is titled Utopia. In literature, in film, in TV and in video games, you’re much more likely to encounter savaged worlds and post-apocalyptic tomorrows than futures in which humankind has got its shit together. Do we as a society fetishize dystopia?


Björk: Yes, absolutely. Utopia is a political statement for me. I’ve had enough of western civilisation feeling sorry for themselves and being paralyzed and not acting. Western civilization thinks their story is the only story in the world. The self-importance of the west makes them think they’re having this tragic, Titanic moment where they want the rest of the planet to hold their breath and feel sorry for them while they sink. That’s okay for a little bit when something sad happens, but not like for like 100 years. We can’t spare any time. We need to go into action. We need green energy. We need to react.

We don’t have the luxury of indulging in this “poor me, the world is going to die” dystopia stuff. I think we have to get up on our feet and act. And I think the entertainment industry should feel responsible, definitely. Maybe I’m being too much of a mum but 90% of material that is coming from the (western entertainment) has normalised killing. It’s okay if it’s an aesthetic of a singular artist who wants to be nihilistic or dystopian. That’s one thing. But now our survival of the human species is at stake and I’m not being dramatic, unfortunately. I think we need to kick into action and come with solutions. And we need to do it now.


What do you think is the first step?


Björk: I could cry all day about the fact that the majority of the animal species are disappearing and my grandchildren might not see a lot of them. That’s tragic beyond words. But we need to ask ourselves: how can we make the best out of where we’re at right now? That has to be green energy solutions that are functional.

I’m not a megalomaniac. I understand that utopia is not singular. But I think there has to be a mass that stand up and do stuff. Seeing what’s happening online, especially after Trump got elected and resigned from the Paris Climate Accord, I really think it has to be ground-up. I has to be DIY. It has be grassroots, the people. We cannot rely on governments to go green. And that’s where popular music comes in. It’s always been the voice of the people. So yeah, that’s how I feel about that.


That paralysis you describe – where people are so overwhelmed by the negativity that they’re incapable of acting – is a really tricky thing to overcome. How do you stop yourself becoming overwhelmed by negativity? How do you avoid that paralysis point?


Björk: I go for walks in nature. Outside my window now, there’s a beach. I need that nature connection. I think there’s something in the molecules of nature that just brings equilibrium through the elements. When you move through it, it balances you. And you’re not meant to do it on your own. That’s not how nature designed us. You’re not supposed to go into an isolation tank. (laughs) If you go for a 30 minute walk every day through trees, or a river, or whatever natural elements are close by, it’s really very healing.

When I lived in London, I walked around the canals a lot. It’s maybe not like the highlands of Iceland, but the elements of water and the fact they are not straight lines… something magical happens. (Science is) proving more and more that nature harmonizes between your mind and your body. The three things are not separate. I find very often when I go on walks, whatever is making my mind busy or is causing me frustration after 20 minutes will show its face, and usually, by the time I’m back home I have a plan of how to deal with it.

I think something in our survival mechanism likes you to walk and find a rhythm. So, walking. But also, have you tried kundalini yoga? I just find it on YouTube. There’s a lot of breathing and if you have anxiety, the best cure for it is that amount of breathing. If you wake up with anxiety, just find a 40-minute kundalini class on YouTube and you’ll be amazed. The anxiety is just gone. And sometimes before bed – if you’re finding it hard to sleep at night, that’s a really good trick.


As well as nature, you’ve long been an advocate for the positive power of technology. Have the changes in the way technology has impacted our lives over the last few years – fake news, Russian bots, the dark side of companies like Facebook and Google – threatened to make you reevaluate that positive belief at all?


Björk: Yes. I think we have to readjust all the time. Progress is going to happen if you like it or not. We don’t live in caves. So it’s like, how are we gonna live with it? I’ve said this many times before, but every invention of the human race, it’s always been incredible and miraculous. But then the aftermath is always: well, okay, how do we adapt morality to it? How do we adapt this to the human soul? It’s always the same question – whether it’s fire or the radio or Facebook.


Homogenic recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Here’s something I’ve always wondered about that era in your career, as a big Wu-Tang fan: RZA is said to have recorded with you around that time, but the sessions never saw the light of day. What happened?


Björk: Ha! You know… I don’t know! I think what happened was… I wanted these kinda Icelandic, volcanic beats, and I was kind of struggling with it. I had done beats on my albums, but it takes me a long time to make them. And sometimes I get impatient and I want other people to do it, so I sit there and describe to them what I want them to do. So, I was in Spain, and Wu-Tang Clan were supposed to come to Spain. RZA was supposed to come. But then months passed. Then the album got finished and I delivered it. Then RZA was like, “I’m ready! Shall I come to Spain?”

Instead, I went to New York. We wrote a couple of songs together. And I just felt… sometimes when you do things and you don’t plan them it’s magic. And I really think what we made was magic. But I think because it wasn’t part of the whole Homogenic thing and it wasn’t part of what Wu-Tang were doing at the time, it was better as an idea, if that makes any sense?

We met a few times though – my favourite moment was when I did an in-store at Tower Records. I’d never done anything like that before. I turned up – and seven of the Wu-Tang Clan turned up to, like, protect me! I was signing books for an hour, and they sent some of their team, standing there with me. That was one of my all-time favourite moments: I had been on my own, so when they turned up I felt very protected. It was magic. In my eyes, they’re punk. We are definitely (similar) – we do things in, like, a ritual way. The good thing was that I got to hang out with them. I got to see Wu-Tang’s version of New York. Which was pretty cool. A very specific angle on that city that I feel very blessed to have experienced.


I also once heard a whisper you recorded with another New York rap luminary, Jay Z. Is that true?


Björk: There was, perhaps… He asked me to write for one of his albums. It was a section for a song. But it just didn’t happen in the end. Wasn’t meant to be. I’m always flattered when people ask me. There’s a lot of things that I like about him.


I wanted to ask a question about streaming. You’re a great believer in technology and the idea that progress is going to happen. But you’re also someone who makes very complete bodies of work. How do you reconcile those two things when the nature of platforms like Spotify and Apple Music means a lot of people will probably experience tracks from Utopia on playlists, rather than as a whole?


Björk: I’ve always been a great believer in polarity. Polar opposites. We don’t have to choose nature or urban, that’s not the point. The point is, how can we make them coexist? I think the same with men and women, pop and ‘serious’ music… Why choose? Eliminating things is not natural.

So same goes with this. Albums can be albums, but songs can exist on their own. I’ve been making playlists of a sort more or less since I was a teenager, for DJ sets. It’s one of my favourite things actually – being able to take three minutes of that song and three minutes of that song, complete opposites, and putting them back to back. Completely different musicians. If we say we can’t do that, we’re limiting the powers of music. It’s one of the most powerful things that music can do.

I’ll tell you though, hand to heart, I think streaming (platforms) are taking the piss. I think we need more fairness. I’m okay – I sold CDs in the ‘90s. I’ve got a house. But kids who are now in their 20s, I’m seeing it seriously affecting incredibly talented musicians, who could become really really incredible and grow into beautiful artists, but they can’t do it, because everything they make, they have to give away for free.


So they tour more.


Björk: Exactly. It tears them away from their family and uproots them. Streaming has exaggerated that. Kids in their 30s now have been on the road for 10 years. You know? With no breaks. I’ve toured a lot, but I would tour for a year, then I would be somewhere for a year and a half and write an album. So you could lick your wounds and heal and get your shit together and be with your family members. Now, you don’t have that. Streaming is not fair. I’m hoping it will change. Maybe we are slowly figuring out a way that is going to be a solution, so musicians get paid for their work.


You mentioned your DJ sets a few moments ago, which give fans real insight into the music you like that maybe isn’t represented in your work as Björk. Lil Yachty for example. How do you stay across new music in 2017?


Björk: It’s a combination. I have websites I go to where I find things. I’ll spend days online looking for inspiration. It was real fun when I was mixing my album. I couldn’t take in any more music. So I was listening to a lot of spoken word for like a month or two. Once I delivered my album, I was so ready for new music. And I’d put aside all these links. Then I spent two or three days on these links. Being away from it for two or three months meant there were tonnes of amazing things.


You’ve dropped Rihanna in quite a few sets.


Björk:I just think what I find most exciting about her over the last two years is how she’s grown vocally. Like, her voice in ‘Work’, it’s so present. It’s like right there with you. Right next to you. But still the most relaxed way possible. I love the emotion of her beats. I think it was really brave on her last album not to think in singles. She did the songs she would listen to herself and dance to herself and you could really hear that. It’s in the tone of her voice. That’s what’s amazing. It’s about sound. But I don’t know. I just like it, it’s that simple.


Coming back to Utopia: does the mood of your next album depend on how much of this album’s message humanity chooses to adopt? Do we have it in us to make your fantasy a reality?


Björk: Hmmmm. I think fantasy and imagination are just as valid as reality. And I think that’s maybe what Utopia is also tapping into: how our fantasies are just as valid as reality. It’s kinda curious how the two things then try to coexist. When you want that fantasy to come true, if half of it comes true, that’s good going, you know? But how do you execute that? I find that fascinating. It’s a beautiful thing.

Al Horner is the editor-in-chief of FACT. You can find him on Twitter.

She sounds like a five year old girl who ate some edibles and is just freestyling on the edge of her bed...holding a cat...that wants to leave.

I loved the Sugarcubes, I like her early (not super techno) stuff, I like "Where Is The Line" a lot...but she is not writing songs anymore. It's just pretentious cooing to me.
i feel bad even saying that, but yeah.

s.blak
Aeroplane