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Flipside  1999-06-12

By Robert Heller


"Björk Loved Up!"


   'All Is Full Of Love' is the closing track on Björk's 1997 Homogenic
   album. It's also her new single, released this month. Flipside hooked
   up with the leftfield queen of Iceland on the set of Lars von Trier's
   latest film, Dancer in the Dark, somewhere in the middle of a grand,
   empty Scandinavian forest.


"I'm a Czechoslovakian chick and I've always been very poor. Today I got 
invited to a real American house where people have really flash things 
and I got offered some chocolates. It was one of the most happiest days 
of my life, to be offered real American chocolates."

It had been a simple enough question: "What have you been up to today?". 
But then, the answer was given by Björk, Iceland's premier musical 
export, the eccentric owner of a unique and distinctive voice capable of 
both wooing the most conservative and commercial of pop listeners, and 
rooting around in the most wilfully obscure experimental techno sounds. 
Between Debut, Post and Homogenic, her three solo albums proper (as well 
as Telegram, her remix album), Björk has plunged head first into the 
beats, feelings and euphoria of club culture while sounding like the 
house diva from Venus, she's also charmed the nation's grannies with 
grand orchestral showstoppers and Shirley Bassey meets William Boroughs 
meets Zoe Ball moments of alternative but infectious pop magic, and 
probed delicately opaque emotions with the aid of an Icelandic String 
Octet and some seriously experimental electronics.

'All Is Full Of Love', her new single, is a case in point for starters, 
it's a Zen-like meditation on red, raw, intimate emotion, studied, 
precise ambient calm spiced with barbed and unruly human feeling. It's 
also an excellent accessible pop track especially when perked up with 
beats from remixers µ-Ziq and Plaid, and comes accompanied by a video 
from Chris Cunningham of Aphex Twin infamy (whose work is banned almost 
as often as it's praised. Which is a lot). She's a bona fide 
international pop star who's made it completely on her own terms, and 
still manages to get away with musical ideas that should be far to 
awkward and outrageous for any normal, persistent chart worrier. To add 
to it all, she's now gone and diversified again. Björk is sat somewhere 
amidst a huge forest in Sweden (enchanting birdsong rings out from the 
treetops) on the set of a film entitled Dancer In The Dark, a musical 
from Lars Von Trier, director of Breaking The Waves and the man 
responsible for the sex and Spass-ing controversy of current art house 
hit The Idiots. Björk is still half in character, still half 'Czech 
chick'.

"I think mine's the main role, actually" Björk sounds surprised, as if 
this had only just occurred to her. "I'm a complete nerd you know, one 
of the ones who can't talk to humans but can only listen to music."

Björk is still talking about Selma, her character "I say sentences and 
stuff and I have to wear some very odd clothes. I wouldn't buy any of 
these clothes, I can tell you. I've got really thick glasses, bottleneck 
[sic] glasses... just a complete nerd." Björk speaks like she sings: 
bright, unexpectedly guttural consonants roll and ricochet around 
twistedly chiming, Technicolor, cockney-Icelandic vowels, abnormal 
pauses and stresses punctuate innovative turns of phrase, every syllable 
bursts with careful thought and boundless, gloriously childlike 
enthusiasm.

"Lars had this musical - and I've been offered to do a lot of films - 
and I just said 'no' to it all... because I don't even have the time to 
do the things that I want to do myself. But as doing a musical was 
something that I always wanted to do since I was a kid, I said 'yes'." 

That's not to say Björk is a fan of musicals. "I think most musicals are 
crap. They still haven't done one that's really good. I'm not saying I 
can, but you might as well give it a go because you don't have the right 
to moan unless you do"

"I always felt it was really awkward to talk especially when you have to 
take part in small talk. As a kid, and now, I feel that communication 
between humans is just unnatural and uncomfortable. It's just a 
compromise. In general, I feel that if people would just break out into 
a tune, it would solve all these problems because music is such a 
natural place, you know?"

"In real life, I've walked into rooms with several people who I really 
like, and none of them is communicating; but in a song, everything would 
become more natural, more real and more truthful. I don't know. Maybe 
I'm just ill! I just need help." She breaks off with a peal of laughter 
"I'm taking the piss! But that is what I thought when I was a kid and I 
promised myself that, one day I would do a musical where inside the song 
is the natural place and outside the song, everything is awkward."

Lars Von Trier and Dancer In The Dark, it would seem, gave her the 
opportunity to fulfil this ambition. Originally, Björk was involved 
simply in providing the songs, on which she worked with Mark Bell (of 
Sheffield techno pioneers/Speak And Spell-wielding electronic terrorists 
LFO), the guy responsible for the gritty electronic textures and 
intricately angular beats of Homogenic. Just as Von Trier isn't exactly 
the world's most conventional film-maker, so Björk's efforts won't 
result in the most conventional soundtrack.

"A lot of the beats in the film are taken from locations, from noises in 
the film," Björk explains. "It's like, the girl in the film, things 
around her become music - so if someone's using knives and forks, then 
that becomes a beat... or if there is a factory or a flag pole where the 
wire is banging against the pole in the wind, that becomes the songs. 
I've just been running around the set recording all these noises with my 
Minidisc."

To begin with, the music was all that Björk was to contribute. Then Von 
Trier started with his antics and had his wicked way. "He fooled me into 
it. He told me I wasn't really acting, I was just being a spokesperson 
for the songs. I guess I have some sort of religion - even though I 
never mention it to anyone - but I guess I belong to a secret cult of 
music-obsessed people who think that music is more important than 
anything, including humans... which is pretty sick I have to admit but 
I'm guilty. And so he pulled me in on those terms."

"It's weird because I never, ever had any ambition to be an actress. 
It's a really odd job, innit? A lot of the time you're just hanging 
about, not really doing anything - and then you go in there and you get 
all emotional, like the director pressed those buttons. It's like a 
colourbox, all these different buttons for colours, for emotions, and 
he's just able to press the one he wants."

The job has turned out easier than Björk expected. "It's definitely a 
lot to do with Lars. He hypnotises you. You just fall into a trance or 
something. It's like a drug or something, he can just make you do 
whatever he wants." This, of course, isn't her only foray into the world 
of film. There's also the video to 'All Is Full Of Love' where Björk is 
transformed into an android via the magic of computer animation and 
director Chris Cunningham's dubious imagination. "I noticed Chris' work 
quite a while ago but I guess I was waiting to have a song he deserves, 
a song that would stimulate him, something that he can flourish in the 
maximum. This song came up, I asked him to do it, and he was up for it."

"I think Chris has got an outrageous sense of beauty - and not only 
beauty but hyperbeauty' a heightened sensuality - but, at the same time, 
his work can be quite morbid, quite dark. It can be like the highest 
state of poetry, like water lilies and hams, lyrical and romantic and 
very very dark and sincere." Björk pauses for a chuckle. "That's a very 
complicated explanation, but I think that's the place where Chris and I 
have got something in common.

Once Björk had chosen Chris for the video and talked to him about the 
song, Chris was pretty much left on his own. That's not to say that 
Björk wouldn't have spoken out had she felt he was taking a wrong 
direction. "I make music, not videos. But, to me, it's like when you 
take your kid to the doctor. He's the professional and he goes. 'Oh, 
your kid's got flu,' but I know my kid and I know this ain't no flu. 
It's instinct. But I felt that Chris understood the nature of the song. 
I think he took it and added much more to it, which is magic. The 
video's definitely got that 'hyperbeauty'. that sensuality in dead 
things. I guess. All my friends say they touch toasters differently 
after they've seen that video."

There is one downside to all this celluloid activity "One minute, it's 
liberating; the next it feels like I'm being held away from all the 
things I love. When this film is over in the autumn, I just want to do 
something I've never done before. I've written sketches of, like, ten 
songs but I've no idea where I'll take them."

Until the cameras are packed away, Björk will have to rely on her 
voracious appetite for listening to CDs to satisfy her musical needs. 
"I'm the music fan who hangs around in record shops and carries a 
ghettoblaster with me everywhere and has to hear a new song every day or 
else I die and has to hear my favourite songs every day or else I'll 
die. I guess most of the songs that I listen to now are really really 
quite happy but very quiet. They're like micro. They're, like, so little 
and tiny and really really humble. You just go through these things, I 
guess. Three years ago, I was going through this stage: the grander 
everything was, the better It was, like, everything on 11, you know? 
Both emotionally and musically and romantically - a sort of overload 
distortion switched right up... and now everything, I guess, is on minus 
11. It's quietly euphoric. It's really really quietly happy and very 
humorous but really really secretive. It's secretive music I'm into now.

This, it transpires, involves a lot of classical music and a lot of very 
obscure experimental electronic records. "I've been listening to this 
guy called Chris Watson who's obsessed with microphones. He's recorded 
things around the world, the mic really close up. It's more like a 
documentary of noises, a landscape of sounds. There's a band called 
Matmos who play acupuncture machines on members of the audience. I love 
most of the things on the Warp and Rephlex labels - Squarepusher, Plaid, 
a lot of electro-acoustic stuff, John Cage, Ravel, Debussy Mahler"

For all this high culture and taxing esoterica, Björk remains firmly 
committed to the divine cause of pop music.

"I still look at myself as 'pop'. Even though the most gorgeous thing I 
can think of is people making music in their own bedrooms, their own, 
secret science fiction, virtual reality musical worlds that will never 
enter reality - I'm the complete opposite. I've ended up being the 
translator between the two worlds; the person who can bring weird techno 
trainspotters from Germany and play them to my grandmother and prove 
that they are alright, you know? I love introducing things to people 
that they haven't heard before, putting together tapes for friends of 
songs that they've never heard before but will become their favourite 
songs. I believe in pop music that everybody can relate to."

"A good pop song has to have that moment when you're lost inside it and 
it grabs you and instantly enters you into the unknown. There's got to 
be surprise. Maybe I'm naive but I believe in the same ecstatic state 
that Michael Jackson gets into; he believes in the magic."

On which predictably unpredictable note, our time is up. Björk heads 
back on set, bottleneck glasses back on, to sing an eccentric's vision 
to the world... in the middle of a grand, empty Scandinavian forest.