i-D 2001-08 By Nick Compton Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin "It's Oh So Quiet..." If it's the swirling, whirling dervish you're expecting, prepare for a small surprise. Björk is back and this time she's whispering. It's all about finding paradise under your kitchen table, apparently What you really want out of Björk, face to face, is the freshly-minted; the tangential and the tangential to the tangential and the tangential to that. You want that loopy lateralness that seems to spin out of an understanding of the world and its workings that you and I don't have. What you want is an explosive generosity of the self, beatnik automatic thinking - a tumbling, stumbling head-long head rush of big or strange or silly ideas that can illuminate and energise (that, above all else maybe, is why she has been such a treasure). But Björk doesn't seem to do that anymore, not with people like me anyway. She's become withdrawn, boundaried. She seems obsessed, no not obsessed but maybe governed by ideas of introversion and extroversion, about ballooning big and compacting flat, of levels and layers and levers of connection, a strange bio-mechanics, like the heart. Where there was openness and almost total disclosure, there is now a kind of thriftiness, emotional emission controls. She has flowed and now she ebbs. And it means that the Björk we know - the fizzing, dizzying, whirling, swirling Björk - may not be the real Björk at all. "I moved to London in 1993 and I made this effort to be communicative," she says slowly, always intent on accuracy with dates and places and sentiments, a precise honesty. "It was the classic rural girl goes to the city thing and it was so much fun. I just went for it. And when you open yourself up so much, some very explosive things happen. You take a very introvert person who turns herself inside out and ends up being completely extrovert and she becomes confrontational and also almost aggressive." Björk uses the words introvert and extrovert repeatedly (always with harshly Arctic inflections which make her accent suddenly morph from Dick van Dyke cockney into Checkov from Star Trek). "By the end of 1996 I had become as extrovert as someone like me is ever going to get. And then I crossed a road where it wasn't being fertile anymore." Homogenic, her last album if you ignore SelmaSongs, the soundtrack to Lars Von Trier's Dancer In The Dark - though there's no reason that you should - was the last shout (for now) of the extrovert Björk. Vespertine, her new album, is quieter, a whisper, and so, she says, more "true". "Vespertine is like when your shell closes! again. And you are kind of happy to be home. Or it's like being at home and suddenly being told you've got the week off so you can stay at home alone and read the books you've never read." Björk has described Vespertine as a "cocoon" which is a very Björk thing to say. It is a far quieter thing than we are used to. There are still the lithe loops and beats - beat surrenderers on the album include Matmos, Matthew Herbert and Thomas Knak, alongside long-time collaborators Guy Sigsworth and Mark Bell. But the dominant backdrop on Vespertine is really the harp playing of Zeena Perkins. There are orchestral sweeps but they are calm and contained. And where Homogenic saw her show a new command of every, yelp, howl, bark and boom in her vocal armoury, on Vespertine Björk rarely gets beyond a perfectly modulated whisper. Such is the delicacy of Vesperting that Björk is planning to take the live show to opera houses instead of trad rock venues and sing acoustically rather than miked up (a voice trainer had helped add power and precision to her vocals). Vespertine is an album of details, stuck in a mono-mood groove, self- contained and happy but not at all violently. "Everything is very fragile and very happy and maybe where Homogenic was unforgiving and about wanting something from somebody, this one is completely content. It's about finding paradise underneath your kitchen table, as I always say. It's as internal as I'm going to get. "There she goes again you see: always with this introvert, extrovert, internal, external, big, small, inside, outside, at home, out to lunch things. She is such a (bi)polar creature. And today she is a small almost blue thing. Björk now lives in New York, in the meat packing district, which still smells of meat but is at least near the river which is almost like the ocean. But not really. But it will have to do. She has left things behind. She has left London behind, which seems a shame because she fitted in so well and she was such a joy to have around and it seemed right that she should land here and do her thing here. But London was really just something she had to do, get into her system. It had a function. London helped her unleash something. "I wrote all these tunes but I never intended to share them. And then at 27 I decided OK, you've got to share those secrets. I went to London to become like the other half of myself." She had to leave behind all that sneering' prohibitive clever dickness of the Sugarcubes and the trad pop-combo format. Ironically, she also had to leave behind a place of vodka and volcanoes for the flat beer and flat earth of England, to let herself go. And try out somebody else for size. Does that mean that the London Björk, the Björk of Debut, Post and Homogenic, the big bubble Björk we took to our hearts, was just a lie, or a deceit, or something merely strategic or mechanical or medicinal maybe. "No, I think I was completely honest because I always stayed in character," Björk says. "These things are necessary. It's being in an environment, being in a situation where you can test how far you can push yourself, to see where that line is. And I think I was completely honest. And things came out of me that were more me." Björk has a place for everything and everything in its place. Nick: "Do you think quite visually... do you see pictures?" Björk: "Yeah, I think so. But it is quite abstract. Music is like a mark too. It's kind of about an emotional location. I think maybe over all, we have 100 emotional locations that we keep going back too. Like a mood, there are roughly 100 moods you can go back to and there is like a mood for each song." Nick: "So do you say: 'right, in this album I want to stay with these ten emotional locations? This album I'm going to be in emotional locations 13, 85 and, say, 56 and so on? Björk: "Well, this is a fun game to play. But perhaps I'm more interested in climaxes. So say if every week you get two, three maybe, emotional climaxes that last maybe five hours each." Nick: "A week? Five hours?" Björk: "Yeah, three times a week, roughly. Three very different kinds of moods. So a song is an attempt to describe being in that kind of mood. So if you're working in mood A, something from mood C would be out of place. So I have to stay pretty focused." Nick: "You have to be pretty disciplined to remember where those places are... that's a weird discipline?" Björk: "I guess it's 'cause I've been writing songs since I was a kid. And I didn't want to put them out till I was 27. So for so many years I did it without thinking it's a duty or it's work or even that someone's going to hear it. It was a secret. So it was more about my necessities as a human being. It's like tidying your room. It's very natural. Maybe it is easier to compare it to friends. Say you have ten best friends, you have a friend called Tom. And you go out with Tom and you have a great time because of the thing you have together. And you go out with Sue the next day and it's a completely different thing. And then you meet Tom again a week later and you continue where you left off. You can go straight back to that place. You wouldn't continue with Tom from where you were when you left off with Sue." This is probably the only way you can make sense of things and keep things sorted and stacked and logical when there is so much to do and so little time. Björk only has another 30 years or something before it will be time to rest and reflect. There is no time to waste and she will not let things divert her from her course. I am, like everything, on a timer. I have some value so I'm allowed that time. But you can see her making those calculations in her head, her strange mathematics of emotional locations and human connections, of time past and time left, of how much to offer and for how long. She will be honest and try so very hard to give you what you want and be courteous in a way that almost nobody is anymore. But you are still a diversion. That is always clear. "When you have been in the studio as long as I have and you know what is possible, you know what the options are and that you have only done a little, little, little, little, little bit, you can definitely feel the clock ticking. I want to get on with it, you know. I do have a strong sense of mission. I've got so many songs to write, you see, and I have to be somewhere I can write. For the 50 years I have left, I mustn't get sidetracked. Then, at 85, I can say I did it." And it's not that, at 35, she feels in any sense past it, popped out, unsure in her grasp of beats and currents. Far from it. Indeed, she imagines a Sinatra-size career stretch. "A lot of people I admire did their best work when they were 45 or 50 so I still have a long way to go. And I come from Iceland where the only heroes are authors and they peak when they are 45 or 50 or something, right. You have so many cultures, African cultures, Cuban cultures, where you have people writing music till they are 70 or something and it is still relevant. More relevant. In terms of pop music, or maybe I should say folk music, music of the people, there is no real history of having to be between 15 and 25 to have anything relevant to say. That is just an English thing and only of the last 30 years." That is another part of her mission, this conviction that she is making music for the people, a folk music. However much she flirts with the avant-garde - and that is so crucial to her appeal, that sense that she listens to and understands the cleverest sort of music, that she hums Cage and Stockhausen in the bath and collects beats and loops and atonal hums and hisses and sonic-squiggles with a curatorial passion, which she does and does all that so we don't have to - Björk insists that unless her music is understandable by a mass of people (she probably has some equation that deals with acceptable acceptance levels) then it is not valid, it is not a proper song or her kind of song. "I would find it hard to make an album. that I couldn't play to my family afterwards and they wouldn't get it," she acknowledges. As you would expect though, Björk has a conviction that the public, her public, can stomach more challenging and just more new things than the commercial machine imagines/computes they can. "Around 90 percent of the music I listen to you would call avant garde because that is what nourishes me. And so I tend to be a link between pop and the avant garde. It's not that this was ever calculated but it's where I seem to end up. And I do think that people are adventurous. If you take somebody and he's been driving three hours in the car and something came on the radio that he had never heard before, he would be so excited. People want to be taken somewhere, to hear the unknown." Beyond all that though, Björk has a conviction that the song, the song form, has a holy sort of relevance, that it demands reverence, that working on and around the form is worth everything, a lifetime's effort, steering clear of all diversions. Björk says she can only listen to two or three songs per day, because she listens in ways that we probably do not: as a pop professor and priestess might. "I worship singing so much, respect the narrative so much, that I will only listen to it once a day, like two or three tunes. And I will give it my full attention. It will be so important to me. And so for the rest of the day I will be playing some drones or something, which is more like architecture you know. I quite like music that is a space that you live in; ambient for want of a better word." For Björk, the song is something that we need - as mundane and magnificent as that - it has functionality. "I'd be fucked without people making food, books, aeroplanes. And music is just like that. I think that it is a place that people go when they have nowhere else to go. And it is so abstract that it fills up little cracks that no one else understands. Otherwise there would just be canyons. And you would just be fucked. I think there is a reason for it - it is very functional." The shame about all this introversion and shrinkage is that Björk was such a great, big public persona. She was such a welcome addition to the shallow celebrity pool. And, God how we have need of her now. Björk has this speech about her brush with tabloid celebrity status. It sounds well practised but it bears repeating. "At one point there was a slight chance I might be offered a role in that particular farce. And obviously I am very honoured because I am a foreigner and to be offered a role like that by a nation, it is not a joke, it is an honour." She says this as if it is not a joke and indeed an honour. "And it made me understand that celebrity status is similar to being Mother Theresa or something. It is self-sacrificial. You hand over your personal life and everything to serve your nation. It's a public role, a service, like the police or an executioner maybe. Some people are really born to do that and they are generous and they do it with grace. But someone like me would not be having a swell time doing that." As if to prove her point, a middle-aged lady approaches our table outside a diner in New York's Chelsea. She tells Björk how much she loves her music. She is really very polite and genuine and disappears quickly without asking for autographs or pictures or elaborating in any way why and how she loves Björk's music. Björk thanks her politely but returns instantly to our conversation. Björk just doesn't like that kind of diversion, a diversion from a diversion indeed. There are those that have said Björk can be a disappointing live performer, that despite the big voice and the clear charisma she sometimes fails to connect. You've got to wonder whether introversion - Björk's existential lighthousekeeper kind of shtick - is really workable for someone who had made a lifetime's commitment to making pop music. I ask Björk whether making music is a generous or narcissistic pursuit. "I change my mind about it all the time. It's both, isn't it? But it is definitely a selfish thing. I would be silly not to admit that. It's like when a friend calls on a Saturday afternoon to see if you want to go out, and even if you have nothing to do, you say no 'cause you want to be by yourself. Music is a bit like that, I guess." Perhaps she should get out more. Perhaps she should try to re-connect and come out of hiding. But you can't help feeling that, with Björk's extrovert experiment seemingly behind her, this quietly, tightly focused new model is the Björk we never get to see: the part she's been hiding ever since those early arty shouty days with The Sugarcubes. She's turned from a scream to a whisper - and maybe only now will we hear what she's really got to say. Vespertine is released on August 28 on One Little Indian.