Fader 2001-06 By Eddie Brannan Photography by Phil Poynter "Home alone" Björk has an interesting way of speaking. I'm not referring to her accent: by now her peculiar admixture of British colloquialism and Icelandic diction has ceased to be quite as remarkable as it seemed in 1993 when her first solo album, Debut, was released. It's now a familiar wrinkle on the cultural landscape, like Truman Capote's lisp or Hunter Thompson's terse staccato, her trademark, her voix-d'art. No, the far more telling characteristic of her speech is the strikingly unusual and unexpected phrases she utters, the tangents and constructs she employs to explain and describe and relate. It's utterly fascinating, in that there seems to be something in her hard-wiring that's almost preternaturally free-associative and whimsical. Describing - an unfortunate example I'm afraid - her feelings to the assembled British press after a deranged fan mailed her a letter bomb and then committed suicide, she explained that she wouldn't dream properly for some time. It's as though some random deconstructivist synapse kicks in at the first sign of a cliche or conventional turn of phrase - I'll probably have nightmares about this - and reroutes that banal remark through a capricious subset of her mental apparati that refashions it into something entirely original, iconoclastic, a mode of expression that is thoroughly personal to Björk Gudmundsdottir - I probably won't dream properly for a while. In this mode there's the poet's ability to draw out, experiment with and sublimate language, but there's also a childlike fascination with the particular, the specific and the orderly. From the song "Hyper-Ballad": We live on a mountain/ Right at the top/ There's a beautiful view/ From the top of the mountain/ Every morning I walk towards the edge/ And throw little things off/ Like car-parts, bottles and cutlery/ Or whatever I find lying around/ It's become a habit/ A way to start the day I go through all this/ Before you wake up/ So I can feel happier To be safe up here with you And "The Modern Things": All the modern things/ Like cars and such/ Have always existed/ They've just been waiting in a mountain/ For the right moment/ Listening to the irritating noises/ Of dinosaurs and people/ Dabbling outside In both these examples, from her second solo album Post, key Björk themes are iterated. There's the geographical specificity that occurs in many of her songs, in these cases referring to mountains, and in others to oceans or forests. These are natural, fundamental, geophysical phenomena, yet they don't seem to indicate any hippyish pseudonostalgia on Björk's part for a greener globe untainted by technology, for on her first mountain there's the detritus of modern life, car-parts, bottles and cutlery which she cheerfully tosses off of the mountain-top as a type of totemic ritual to ensure the security of her love in the clouds. In her second all those things that now surround us - cars and such; childlike, almost random specificity - have been waiting for their time to come, charmingly irritated by the sounds of dinosaurs and people dabbling their way through the evolutionary process whilst they sat and waited. This fascination with technology's relationship with the natural world has been ascribed by various commentators over the years (at times including herself although she no longer feels the same way) to her Icelandic inheritance. She is instinctively responding, it has been stated, to the spectacular violence of the Icelandic landscape, reflecting the preoccupation a people tend to have with nature when the climate can actually kill you; and the tradition of recitation of the sagas (at a time when singing was outlawed by Iceland's Danish colonizers) which relied on a half-sung, half spoken style of oratory to relate mythical, legendary tales. It's certainly a compelling theory, for the Icelandic landscape is a harsh, bizarre and jarringly beautiful one. Lava, ice, steam, boiling mud, volcanos, oceans, and of course mountains, are the dominant features. This, when considered alongside the extremely rapid development of Iceland from a country where, as Björk explains, people of her grandparent's generation lived in sod huts, to one of the most prosperous and developed nations in the West, might well inspire such a duality of the ultramodern and the primitive that Björk seems to manifest. Of course, as she sensibly points out, if that were so then every musician in Iceland would be like her, and while there are many musicians there, she is thought an eccentric. In fact her singularity seems to derive more from a fundamental inability to repeat anything, the conviction that there is always a new, different way to say what needs to be said. A couple of times during our interview, when she was battling with a heavy dose of the flu, she apologized for saying something that she had said before. Not that she was trying to be inconsistent, rather that she felt it her responsibility to refashion the thought, and was disappointed that the flu was preventing her mind from doing what, clearly, she believed it to be there for: to think, always, originally, and certainly honestly. "I could only approach something the way I would approach it," she says. "If you take a person who was born in 1965 in Iceland and put them through ten years of music school then they're like a vessel. If you ignore certain aspects of that it's lying, so I just try to, instead of sweeping it under the carpet, confront it. I don't think I have it in me to want to repeat things, but if you look at that sort of education as planting of seeds then this is harvesting them 20 years later." Thus each of the solo records she's released, Debut, Post, Homogenic, Selmasongs (although this is in a different category) and now Vespertine, the new album, is built around another component from the vessel; is yet another harvesting of the many and diverse seeds planted years before. But each release, it goes without saying, is intensely bound up with her circumstances and environment, so that each subsequent harvesting is done differently, is done anew. As the linguistic deconstructivists used to say, if the act of reading is to decode text, then each decoding is another encoding. With the music of Björk, you can never escape subjectivity. Her first record, entitled Björk, was released when she was 11 years old. Her parents were hippies, she tells you, and she had grown up listening to Jimi and Janis with them, and then Ella, Billie and Louis with her grandparents (in their sod hut, perhaps?), and it is clear that she was a musical prodigy. She attended, as she says, music school from young childhood, and was exposed to pretty much the entire history of Western music, from Bach and Beethoven via Stockhausen to pop and punk. She has said of the first album, which was a hit in Iceland, that it exposed her to public acclaim long before she sought it, whereas most musicians seek it for a long time before they get it. "I guess I'm lucky in the sense that because my record became big in Iceland when I was 11 I could sort things out very quickly in my head," she explains. "Sometimes kids are better at sorting these things out because it's more from your guts than your head and you don't have to have 500 sessions with a shrink or something. So when I was 11 and I had all the attention I was sort of like I don't want it. I want to make music." So she refused to make the follow-up album that the record company wanted from her. This pragmatic withdrawal from the limelight has been something she's resorted to several times since; paradoxically, given the intensely personal music she makes, she is not an attention-hungry artist and certainly doesn't want to be considered a celebrity. "I think some people are born to [be celebrities] and I think it's a very necessary thing in society. They basically sacrifice their personal life and their souls because their souls become a public place. It's a very important role to play, as important as to have doctors and taxi drivers, but I think if you do that you can't make music. If you're the kind of celebrity that I'd become in England with paparazzi following you all around you can't sit down and write a song because you're not here anymore. Your extended - every finger is ten miles long and each leg goes all the way to Glasgow, and for that person to write a song, it's too much." It sounds almost preposterous, but one imagines that it seems to Björk an awful inconvenience that she has to make records and deal with the inevitable publicity that arises from it in order to be free to make her music. She joined a punk band when she was 13, then a group called Kukl, made up of six "equally-strong characters" and did that for three years before joining the Sugarcubes, the group that brought her international attention. The character of her collaborators has always been of great importance to Björk. "It's sort of in the air," she says. "Then it's a sort of one-plus-one-equals-three thing, a link between you and that person. It can only happen if both people are completely equal and that moment when you sort of forget who you are and both the energies kind of mix. That doesn't happen very often, but when it does the only thing you can do is to document it." But despite the closeness of the Sugarcubes, their success altered the dynamic of the members, who had all been friends before being a group. There were members who were poets but hadn't written a line in years, and Björk herself by now had a backlog of personal work she needed to do, so before the pressures of the group could spoil the friendship, they collectively decided to nix the Sugarcubes. So she went to London and got busy. Gravitating instinctively towards the underground dance scene (she has mentioned being drawn towards similar characters to herself, who were plotting uncharted musical territory), she hooked up with producers like Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey, Howie Bernstein - essentially the old guard of British electronic dance music. These were guys who were linked with Soul II Soul, the Wild Bunch and Massive Attack, had been around the block a few times and weren't just trying to ape the latest trend; thinking-man's beatsmiths, if you like. Hardly any need to describe Debut, since you probably own it, yet important to recall the utter clarity and confidence of Björk's synthesis of pop elements and club beats, and the stunning force-majeure with which she swept to the forefront of British music, so often hamstrung by a typically crippling ambivalence about unabashed statement-making. A paradise of introspective yet liberating lyrics delivered in a voice that inspired one to weep at its power and beauty, over savvy beats and multiculti musicianship and influences, the album was all of a piece, and utterly, utterly striking. It sold two and a half million copies world-wide and established Björk as not just a pop sensation, but also a significant cultural force, and furthermore a sonic experimenter, an artist who looked beyond the traditional parameters of music, both stylistically and in the process of recording. Dance music is traditionally tribal, with clear demarcation lines that one crosses at risk of being dismissed as a dilettante. Björk unhesitatingly mangled those lines, making music that completely defied stratification, juxtaposing house bangers that really were bona-fide house bangers with harp-backed jazz standards and avant-garde dissonance. Furthermore she was also quite prepared to completely fuck with the way her music was recorded, laying down the vocals to "There's More To Life Than This" (so appropriately) in the toilets of London club the Milk Bar while the backing track played over the sound system in the main room. The resulting lo-fi experience was a perfect depiction of the coke- fuelled ennui of the London scene (where running in and out of the bathroom was something one does any number of times in a given night) and that track is a delightfully barbed compliment to a particular moment in time. Funny as shit, once you get it. Post, her second solo album, showed a stronger, more iconoclastic Björk. Increasingly impatient of the stylistic rigidity of dominant club sounds, the album was painted with a broader brush, and displayed less vulnerability in the lyrics, and more of what might be described as a personal credo. Exploring music that ranged from techno to big-band swing and to what later became termed the Asian underground, Post reinforced the impression of an artist whose breadth and competence was breathtaking, one whose significance as a cultural and artistic force was becoming unarguable. That conviction was, for this writer, cemented with the release of Homogenic. The previous albums had been effective largely through the combination of Björk's vocal skills and song writing with the beats and culture of the London producers she was associated with. Homogenic, recorded after the crazy fan and other shit had compelled her to leave London, was a far more personal work, and an extremely assertive one at that. Built largely around a string sextet laid over raw, distorted, intentionally-unpolished electronic beats, it has a cinematic power that belies the delicacy of the lyrics, and relies less than any of her previous albums on the automatic emotional triggers inherent to established dance music. Recorded in a residential studio in Spain, with an Icelandic string quartet arranged by Brazilian master Eumir Deodato (crazy levels!), it was what she refers to as her "macho" album ("It was a lot of testosterone going on: the beats were distorted, all the strings were like on 11, the lyrics were on 11, the emotions were on 11"). Most significant was her production; without the rigidity of her collaborators it was amazing to hear the deftness and skill with which she referenced the prevailing styles of dance music production (the time-stretching and quantizing of drum & bass for example), without falling victim to their restrictiveness: it was pop music, after all, yet a reading of pop that was symphonic in its power and tear-jerking in its raw honesty and sublime imagery. It was an original masterpiece, a landmark work, and she produced nothing more for three years, until Selmasongs, the score to Lars Von Trier's harrowing film Dancer In The Dark which was released in 2000. More than enough has been written about this particular collaboration, which clearly wasn't one of Björk's happiest. However it is pertinent to mention that despite her much-publicized decision to never act again (she says she hates to do it, and can't do it, yet won the Palme D'Or for doing it), this album is significant in its display of her ability to act musically; that is, to write and compose entirely from another's view point. And also for the restrictions she placed upon herself in its making. "When I did the film," she says, "I could be like a craftsman. It was liberating because I could do it without my own diary emphasis; it wasn't about me. The craftsman in me could just go all the way." So she relied heavily on ambient noises to build the sonic experience of the film out of its visible elements, a hugely effective technique, and one that owes much to the avant-garde composers of the mid-20th century. The album was as dark as the film, yet much less didactic in its emotional wrangling, and an impressive demonstration of orchestration and structure. It was the perfect preamble for the new album, in that it provided a shift of focus away from her own personal motifs and themes, and a strong shift at that, one which allowed the new work to exist in its own space, rather than being seen purely as a follow up to Homogenic. When I conducted the interview I had heard six finished tracks from the album and it was then entitled Domestica. Its theme was, as Björk put it, about "becoming euphoric under your kitchen table, being humble where Homogenic was sort of arrogant." The idea was about music made at home, in a domestic environment, "in bedrooms and hotel rooms ... in evenings and on airplanes ... I wanted literally to have people making pasta next to me while I was doing the vocals." Where Homogenic had relied on a small string section playing loud, the new album used a 60- piece orchestra and a 60-piece choir, but so quietly that the effect is almost ethereal, synthesizer-like, because the album was supposed to be about small sounds. "I guess I was very influenced by my laptop," says Björk. "And about people being obsessed by Napster and saying it compromised sound and me thinking that was rubbish. A lot of the beats were influenced by me thinking someone could download it and it would sound great. I used acoustic instruments that would sound good once they'd been downloaded like harps and celestes." The idea was to record as much of the album using fragments of sound off of normal household gadgets, making "a symphony with a teaspoon," as she puts it. It's "about survival and not going running around like a crazy person looking for happiness because it's actually in your living room," and that "you can go on the net and get access to anything in the world. [Meanwhile] you're surrounded by the people you love - your family, your children, your lover - and it's sort of about that cocoon you can create in your house. To a certain extent it's artificial, but it's very self- sufficient." So she collaborated with Matmos, a San Francisco group of intellectuals who use only ambient noise for their sonic experiments, and made an album composed of dozens of "plucky small sounds," up to 80 elements instead of the few large ones used on Homogenic, set against the fluidity of the voices and strings to weave an intensely complex yet subtle sound environment. What she had in mind with the new title - which means night-blooming in flora and nocturnal in fauna - I don't know. We never got a chance to speak about it after the change. Nonetheless it is clear that Vespertine and Homogenic will most likely work as a diptych, as a contradictory yet complementary pair, and songs like "Unison" and "Hidden Place" will be the emotional counterparts of "Joga" and "Bachelorette", superlative articulations of Björk's artistry. Vespertine will, no doubt, be one of the year's best records. All of its predecessors were, and as Björk's career progresses she seems to have an ever-clearer idea of how to articulate her ideas, a marvellously clear sense of herself as an artist above and beyond all else. As she gets older she seems to be taking a role in society that hasn't really existed for some time; that is, the serious artist as popular personality. Picasso, Dali, Gershwin, Warhol, Rivera, Kahlo and Kerouac - all of these are artists who have captured the public imagination at various times, but the pop era seems to have been unfortunate in not having had such a wonderful balance between true creativity and wide appeal. Until Björk.