’Ancestors’ was one of the last titles to come. I kept calling it ’Piano II’, ’cause I did some piano experiments and this was one of them, it was a working title. In the end when I was naming the record ’Medúlla’ and tried to work out what was missing, maybe it was the pagan element and the element about this record that is going back to the roots - before time, or civilization, or religion, or patriotism. Because most of the time I’m looking forward and I want to enter the unknown and get as techno as possible, but maybe this album was a bit different, because it’s about me going back to when I’m 18, before I did all the work i’ve done - and also me going two thousand years back, in my head, anyway - to some cave where people sit together with long hair, naked, and they sing disco music or something.
J’ai débuté l’enregistrement avec des instruments et alors que j’avais presque fini, j’ai fait « mute », et que quelque chose se passait enfin. En vérifiant quelles pistes étaient silencieuses, j’ai vu que c’était les instruments. Alors j’ai passé les 3 ou 4 mois à ajouter d’autres chanteurs rencontrés spontanément, et voilà l’album vocal. Les instruments m’ennuient, je pense en avoir assez.
Medúlla is primitive, like before civilisation. It’s the soft squidgy thing in the centre. After Vespertine I was going to do an album with intuition only, no brain please. I was thinking more visceral, flesh and blood, pregnancy… death metal.
Do you ever feel the pressure to make more “commercially accessible” albums ? Like return to the dancy/poppy roots of your first two albums ?
I do dance a lot—I’ve never stopped enjoying dancing. I’ve always been obsessed with pure pop music. There are some real “up” songs on Medúlla, but they won’t be played in clubs. They’re more for dancing around your house, like a domestic rave.
Au final on n’est que huit à chanter sur le disque, je les ai rencontrés les uns après les autres. Après coup, c’est facile de regarder en arrière, et de voir que chacun à sa spécialité. Il y a Mike Patton, chanteur death metal, un personnage macho-rock-experimental, Rhazel, un grand « beat-boxeur » noir, Gregory, un baryton de l’école classique à l’esprit incroyablement ouvert, et Robert Wyatt chanteur folkomantico avec une personnalité incroyable, et puis Slomo, un très jeune anglais beat-boxeur techno qui n’aime pas le hip-hop.
I think I probably learned most from that all-vocal album, because I did the choir arrangements totally myself,’ she muses. ‘Maybe it was easier for me, because I know the instrument much better – I’ve been singing since I was a kid. During Medúlla I sat with the choir working out the music, the harmonies, the Italian – you know, forte, piano, sforzando, that stuff.
Je suis allée dans la forêt m’asseoir avec un dictaphone, et j’ai tout simplement improvisé. Je ne me concentrais pas spécialement sur ce que je faisais. Habituellement, je retravaille les paroles, mais cette fois j’ai décidé de les laisser comme ça.
Lorsque je cherchais un nom pour ce titre, j’ai essayé de de me demander ce qu’il manquait à ce dernier. Et peut-être était-ce un élément païen, ce qui, dans ce disque, replonge à la racine de tout, avant même le temps, avant même la civilisation...
Ancestors’ est l’un des dernier titre enregistré. Je l’ai d’abord intitulé Piano II car il y avait quelques expérimentations de piano, c’était le titre de base. A la fin, lorsque j’ai nommé mon album ’Medúlla’ j’ai essayé de dépister les trucs qui clochait. C’était peut être à cause du coté payen, élémentaire et enracinant (or civilisation, religion ou patriotisme).
Quand il (Ensemble - Olivier Alary) a fait des remixes pour moi, il a échantillonné MA voix et créé un rythme à partir de ces échantillons. Et il ne me l’a pas dit, pour qu’au cas où je ne l’aimerais pas, il pourrait recomposer ce morceau avec la voix d’une autre chanteuse...
C’était une bonne discipline de ne pas utiliser de beatboxer, parce que ça m’a fait faire autres choses pour les rythmes, comme inclure Mike Patton et moi, essayant des schéma et des beats, d’y arriver par un autre moyen. Même les beatboxers m’ont dit qu’ils n’avaient jamais bossé comme ça, je les avais donc sorti de leur habitude. C’était bien.
J’ai, en quelque sorte, caché cette chanson jusqu’au dernier moment parce que je voulais qu’elle soit réservée aux JO. Le dernier jour, j’ai pensé qu’on pouvait y ajouter des voix de sirènes, pour rappeler la mythologie grecque... J’ai donc fait appel à un choeur anglais composé de 16 femmes. J’avais un arrangement au piano sur le pc mais qui n’était pas adapté pour un vrai piano, j’avais donc le choeur pour chanter les sirènes. On m’a recommandé Shlomo, un brillant espoir du hiphop. Je lui ai demandé de faire un "techno tango beat". C’était la partie la plus chouette. Parfois c’est bien de travailler avec un revolver sur la tempe parce que tu ne t’endors pas sur des idées préconçues. Parfois l’adrénaline a de bons effets.
Öll Birtan veut dire « toute la brillance », car une partie de cet album a un lien avec mes 18 ans, à la ferme, écrivant ma première chanson entièrement vocale. C’est la marche qui m’a fait écrire ces chansons. J’étais tellement timide, que je ne voulais chanter que dans mon propre langage, que personne ne pouvait comprendre. La plupart des gens pense que c’est de l’islandais, mais ce n’est qu’un mélange de son, de mot à ma façon. Ça dit "toute la brillance" et moi cassant un mur pour faire pénétrer la lumière, un truc profond et poétique, héhé.
Quand j’ai écrit cette chanson, c’était la première fois que je laissais seule ma petite fille. Je devais aller à La Gomera, une petite île des Canaries - là où ne vont pas les touristes- où j’ai déniché sur internet un anglais avec un studio ; je crois que j’étais sa première cliente. Donc j’y suis allée avec un ingénieur et ma fille (elle avait 14 mois) mais ils partaient 4 jours après moi, comme ça je pouvais prendre une sorte de recul. Lorsque tu écris une chanson, tu es obsédée, tu ne peux pas dormir sans la terminer, tu ne dois pas la mettre au lit et être hyper attentionnée. Pour moi cette chanson, c’est la sensualité de rentrer dans un nouveau bain, juste toi et la musique, rien d’autre, seulement marcher sur les collines de La Gomera et puis chanter, chanter et encore chanter, être obsédée par la musique.
Je pense avoir écrit cette chanson en 99, quand je suis rentrée du Danemark. J’ai écrit la mélodie plus tard, et ce n’est que bien plus tard encore que j’ai mis les deux ensemble. Je sentais alors que j’allais faire un album vocal, c’était excitant, comme si tu avais de nouveaux jouets. Et avec ces jouets, tu dois essayer de faire un maximum de choses - peut être une chanson avec un choeur, un "beatboxer", une "throatsinger" et un chanteur d’heavy metal et la prochaine chanson avec seulement toi et la "throatsinger", et encore la troisième tu fais beaucoup de voix de fond.
Donc je savais qu’une chanson devait être faite que par une seule voix, même si c’est inconfortable. Comme lorsque tu es à une fête et que quelqu’un se lève pour faire un speech, et tout le monde dit « oh mon dieu ! » Tu dis juste ce que tu as à dire et puis tu t’assois. J’avais ce sentiment. Au moins, j’ai essayé.
Il y a un gros tas de poèmes, et celui-ci n’est que l’un d’entre eux. Je pense que ce poème traite de lui-même (l’auteur lyrique EE Cummings) exaltant sa rage, comme lorsque l’on fait des choses qui nous effraient.
Mon comportement très introverti, "sous-marin", est probablement... la part de moi qui compose des chansons, et qui s’est peut être endormie. Cette chanson est là pour la réveiller.
Ce titre tend simplement à célébrer le corps, les cellules qui font des montagnes russes partout dans le corps, dans le sang et les poumons. En chantant.
Cette chanson a une jolie histoire car je voulais la chanter sur Vespertine, accompagnée d’une boîte à musique qui avait créé une bande musicale de 12 pouces où ils avaient fait des trous pour entendre la musique. Ils ont aussi fait ’Pagan Poetry’, ensuite ’Aurora’ et enfin ’Frosti’.
J’ai envoyé ’Vökuró’ parce que le cycle du disque prend une minute, et ’Vökuró’ en a 4, donc ça tombait très bien. Chaque partie allait plus lentement, ce qui donnait du sens, la plupart des chansons commence lentement et finisse vite, mais ici comme c’est une berceuse, elle commence vite et finit lentement. Comme les autres chansons leur ont pris du temps, je n’ai pas pu l’inclure dans Vespertine.
Lorsque j’ai voulu l’ajouter à Medulla, j’ai appelé la compositrice pour lui demander son autorisation et elle m’a répondu :
« Tu es vraiment influencée par ta fille. » « ah oui ? » ai-je répondu. et elle m’a demandé : « elle a les yeux bleus n’est ce pas ? »
Puis on s’est dit au revoir, et j’ai remarqué que cette chanson était chantée pour une petite fille qui a les yeux bleus... Il y a 4 ans, je n’aurais jamais imaginé avoir une petite fille aux yeux bleus. C’est un peu une histoire sentimentale.
On peut traduire Vökuró par « le calme d’être éveillé ». C’est difficile à expliquer. À l’origine, c’est une berceuse qui n’est pas de moi, mais d’une compositrice islandaise Jórunn Vidar âgée de 80 ans maintenant.
Les voix en fait n’ont pas été manipulées, on a juste fait une sorte de shopping, on en a pris des bouts. Le son le plus synthétique est celui de Rahzel, juste en train de faire des bruits bizarres - tu ne peux pas l’imaginer tant que tu ne l’as pas vu faire ! Mais on a fait beaucoup de prises, pour avoir le bon son et bien le placer. J’ai senti qu’avec Rahzel, tu as besoin d’atteindre l’extrême. Sur Who Is It, tout à été enregistré d’une seule prise, sans ajout. L’autre coté extrême c’est lorsque tu mets ensemble ses voix, tu ne peux que le faire avec lui. Le choeur était chouette aussi. Il y a des sections qui sont des échos. Il y a certain "bass sounds" qui sont vraiment forts - ceux de Mike Patton. Il est incroyable, il a l’effet de caisse de raisonnance comme un guitare. Il a fait les basses heavy metal / death metal, en mettant des octaves. J’ai rigolé avec mes compagnons en disant que je voulais vraiment faire un choeur enragé. J’ai donc commencé par arranger le choeur, et puis j’ai trouvé les beats. C’était fun. Ca m’a fait penser à une ’Bohemian Rhapsody’, il y a un peu de respect pour Freddie.
C’est une chanson que j’ai écrite à la fin de Vespertine, mais je ne l’ai pas incluse dans l’album car je sentais qu’elle ne faisait pas partie de la même famille - Vespertine était plus introverti et timide, pas très physique alors que cette chanson est très physique, quand je me sentais plutôt forte. Les mots sont une sorte d’auto explication. Matmos y a contribué (ils ont fait les bruit de machine à fruit que l’on entend dans le refrain). Comme lorsque tu mets une pièce dans une machine et que tu obtiens 3 framboises. Ils ont donc créé ce son, que j’ai imité vocalement plus tard. Je tiens vraiment à remercier Matmos, merci beaucoup. C’est aussi la première chanson où Rahzel chante, et il a fait les beat en une seule prise. Nous sommes tous tombés à la renverse, c’était incroyable. Il n’y a aucun arrangement, amélioration, rien. Je me sentais assez fière d’avoir un "beatboxer" humain et de faire de vrai choses.
Il vit à Louth où il a une chambre équipée pour enregistrer tout seul et faire ses albums. Nous avons apporter un G4 et Pro Tools pour enregistrer tout en une après midi. C’est vraiment un chanteur extraordinaire. Avant qu’il ne parte, il a insisté pour nous donner un échantillon de sa voix, où il chante toute les notes - et il a une variation de tons surprenant, genre 5 ou 6 octaves. Ce qui est vraiment intéressant c’est que chaque octave sonne totalement différent. Nous les avons notamment utiliser pour ’Oceania’, et on les a appelé les "Wyattron".
"Nous nous sommes littéralement télescopés lors de l’un de mes concerts, je sautais verticalement, en essayant de renverser les tables je planais un max... et apparemment elle aussi", se souvient Bogdan. Quelques mois plus tard, Raczinski et Björk se revoyaient à New York et composaient le morceau intitulé "Who is it ?".
I chose them specifically for different reasons. First I worked with the throat singer, then with Tokaka from Japan, then Mike Patton from Faith No More and Mr. Bungle who is kind of the experimental metal guy, then with a classical guy named Gregory, and then Rahzel - the beat-boxer king of the universe, so it’s just impossible to compare because they are so different. But it was amazing how everybody was so into it and ready to try anything. It was great that everybody was into trying things that made them vulnerable. I think I’ve only touched the surface of what can be done with voices.
Even now doing 90 percent of the album on my own, for the last 10 percent I have to communicate it or it just becomes some weird disease or something, it’s so wrong. For the last month in New York, I got this classical singer and this beat box guy, and suddenly the whole thing became healthy. Just to get a conversation going.
Olivier Alary (Ensemble) had sent me a CD with a few sketches, and said "if you ever feel like using those, please do." A year later, I wrote this melody and was singing it in a cabin by a lake here in Iceland in january 2004. That was like the first little trips away from my little girl - I would go three hours a day to this cabin by the lake and do whatever I could and then drive back to town. I would sing several versions of this melody, and then I would say "wait a minute, this is this thing that Olivier gave me a year ago" so then I sang it to that and it fitted perfect together, it was really incredible ! Then when I came back from the tour and discovered that the whole album was gonna be a vocal album, I thought "wait a minute, what about this song here, I really like this song and it should be on the album". So I started doing choir arrangements for it. I did a really complicated choir arrangement, for like a sixteen piece choir, and recorded it three times doing totally different things, and it was like 50 tracks of voices, but it just wasn’t right, so I kept editing it on and spent like days and weeks editing it, and it never was right. Then I emailed Olivier and said "Listen, I’ve tried everything with this track, but I can’t just be dogmatic about this album. At the end of the day, the best music’s gotta win. So I think I’m just gonna stick to your old version, because I think that’s still the best one." And then he just said "Guess what ! I made it out of your own voice !" So he actually took a voice of mine, saying "I’m not sure what to do with it" from Hidden Place and did a song out of that ! And then he sent it it to me, and didn’t tell me, just in case I didn’t .. you know, whatever... it was just a secret !
When you are touring it kind of interrupts the writing process, so because I did two tours in a row - ’Vespertine’ and ’Greatest Hits’ - I am going to reward myself and do two albums in a row. I’m going to try it for the first time just to see, because I always do an album, finish it, mix it, then go on tour and I’m always wondering "what if I had of stayed home one more month ?" Because sometimes you do your best stuff after you have mixed, when you are just lubricated.
Did you encourage the other vocalists to improvise as much as possible ?
I used different methods with each person, but I encouraged everyone to express themselves and imagine they were a human drum loop or bassline. I also got the Icelandic choir to pretend to be insects and birds and other ancient creature. The difficult job was sitting at the computer afterwards deciding what to edit. I had so much material I’d say 80% of the time spent on this album was pure editing. Sometimes I just needed to swap chunks around, other times I had to add vocals from one track to another or strip everything down to a couple of notes. As much as everyone delivered live performances, there was a lot of weaving and layering needed to bring the whole album together.
Mark Bell, Mike Patton, Robert Wyatt, Japanese accapella Dokaka, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis and human beatbox Rahzel all guest on the album.
Yeah, they all fell into place one by one. I’d already worked with Tanya and Mark Bell on the Vespertine tour and Mike Patton introduced me to Dokaka and Rahzel. When I realised the album was becoming a vocal record the musical fascist in me decided using any MCs or vocal percussionists would be too cheesy. I changed my mind when I saw Rahzel freestyle a whole Kraftwerk track without pausing for breath. He came to the studio to lay some beats a few days later and ended up singing on the whole album. Everytime he tried to leave I’d beg him ‘Just one more, just one more !’
I’m quite inspired by my iPod. Shuffle, it’s the new big thing. I’ve got Missy Elliott, Peaches and John Cage. It’s not exactly the songs, it’s what’s between them. [laughs]
It means "All the brightness". Because a lot of this album is a touch to when I was 18, on that farm, writing my first all-vocal songs - this is a step to how I would do those songs. At that point I was so shy, I wouldnt even sing in a language, I sortof had my own gibberish language. So a lot of foreigners probably think it’s Icelandic, but it’s not true, it’s gibberish. It says "all the brightness" and me trying to break through a wall for the light to shne in - that sortof deep poetic stuff, hehe.
DD : We had a piece from that album where Martin had strung dental floss through the piano and we made beats and rhythms out of that, and we sent it to Björk and we were like, ‘Oh Björk, will you sing on this ?’ and Björk at the time was working on… was it Medulla ?
MCS : The all singing one ? Is that Medulla ? Yeah.
DD : Yeah. And so she ended up writing her song, ‘Mouth’s Cradle’, originally written to go with our dental floss song…
MCS : … and then she was like, “can I just keep this song ?” And we were *resignedly*, ‘uh, okay’.
DD : So she didn’t use any of that music, but she put that melody along to our thing. And so basically this piano album that could have been and wasn’t, we got The Civil War out of it, Björk got her song ‘Mouth’s Cradle’ out of it. So I feel like everybody got something cool, it just went in some other directions.
Your albums have always been balanced between the physical and the cerebral. On medúlla, the last one, the cerebral seemed to win.
For me, it’s an incredibly physical album, I was feeding while psalming, it was very hard. I was literally exploring my body like if it was an instrument. I wanted to move away from rhythms…It was the end of a circle, the primitive beats, a very complex computer editing ; I wanted a "voice" record. In the small world of rhythm programmers from all over the planet, I sorta became like "the award" one would like to win : They were queing before me to pick them in order to decide what will be the “thing“ for the upcoming months.. My rhythms almost became a fashion accessory, and as a reaction to it , I made a record based only on vocals with absolutely no rhythm. It was my rebellion : a big finger thrown to IBM and the “ intellectual dance-music“. I quit that wave in order to make some kind of Manhattan Transfer record (laughs)…
Do you ever feel the pressure to make more “commercially accessible“ albums ? Like return to the dancy/poppy roots of your first two albums ?
I do dance a lot—I’ve never stopped enjoying dancing. I’ve always been obsessed with pure pop music. There are some real “up“ songs on Medúlla, but they won’t be played in clubs. They’re more for dancing around your house, like a domestic rave.
I just nicknamed it "Miðvikudags", which means wednesday...s, it was basically because I did it on a wednesday — sometimes you don’t know what to call them, you know. This is similar to me with "Öll Birtan" — that it’s like a little interlude and maybe shows where this whole tree came from, that it’s from me being 18, or even younger - being ike 10, and having two rubbish tape recorders and recording my voice into one, and then recording on the other one, the tape recorder and me, adding a voice on top, and then back, playing with a teaspoon on an ashtray or something. Kind of just back to that, and there’s no words in this one either, it’s just gibberish.
mouth’s cradle is about breastfeeding
a foetus ghost arriving with the prangsta energy infants have
the humour is super strong but enormously gentle
i wanted the arrangement to sound playful and was trying with
the irregularity of the frases to represent a newborn
it’s spirit to be still liquid in form and not having coagulated yet
soi was trying to catch that brand new feeling
but most importantly it is an anthem for nourishment
celebrating that mouth and the teeth that are a ladder up to it
and last but not least
the nourishment you are receiving
the breastfeeder that is
Obviously the line about Osamas and Bushes was a bad joke. But I guess it’s sort of partly true, because it insterests me a lot with western civilization, that someone as passionate as Osama could be such a threat, and it seemed to me at times to be almost passion versus logic. I found it really interesteing that it could be so un-understandable for some people that somebody would do something like that, and how unaware the western civilization were of how annoying they are sometimes — I’m obviously not justifying what he did. But after that, it just totally took over - it was all about arabs and americans, and if you were pro or against or whatever. It just seems curious to me, where obviously both were right and wrong. It seems like the whole world has been talking about it for the last three years, not only me. All unbelievable people are suddenly interested in politics. And maybe me in the end wanting my music to offer something else, and saying I want to look for a shelter with an altar away from the Osamas and Bushes. And maybe these politicians think that they are 95% of our lives and that we should all just worry about if Bush gets re-elected or not and what’s gonna happen to the muslims or whatever. And I think it’s about 5% important, and 95% is like... children going to school, the latest breakdancer, people starving and people losing their jobs and people telling awful jokes, and all these other stuff, you know. People in space, and jellyfishes in the ocean having affairs with other jellyfishes. I’m inventing marinal soap operas here, sorry. But there’s just a lot of other stuff, and it just got boring after a while. So maybe this record is partly an attept to say "wait a minute, there’s other stuff out there you know". That’s it.
It’s very simple. A little Justin [Timberlake], a little Karlheinz. But not world music. And not pop, and not avant-garde, and not classical, and not church music. Don’t you see ? Kind of—“ She gave out a little roar, with her hand held out in a stylized, iconic gesture.
“Slavic ?“ Spike asked.
Exactly. ’Slavic’ is the word. But wi’ a li’l bit of David Beckham.
[David Beckham’s allegedly troubled marriage to Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham was all over the English tabloids at the time, and Björk professed to find the story riveting.]
My grandparents had a diamond wedding anniversary a few weeks ago. They wanted all the family to go camping for the weekend. In the evening, everybody would sing together. I’m used to no instruments.“ To Björk, the melding of unaccompanied human voices can be a powerful communal experience, like when “you go into a club and you’re feeling really up, and then they turn off the sound system and people just sing together. For me, this is sort of a back-to-thepeople record.
I liked all of us to make any special noises we could. Sometimes there’s a kind of weave or blend where nobody is more important than anybody else ; other times, I wanted each singer to have a sort of solo.
I was thinking, What the f— am I going to do with this melody ? So it was perfect when they (Olympics) asked me. I mean, how grand can you get ? The Olympics, right ? But I tried to write the lyrics and I couldn’t. I just came up with rubbish like ‘Pull up your socks and run through the ribbon,’ ‘All the nations hold hands,’ and stupid stuff like that. Pathetic ! So I ended up asking my friend who’s a poet [frequent collaborator Sjón] to write the words.
oceania was written for the olympics .. so my odd
sense of humour went directly to tom and jerry
competing on 2 pianos , as if it was sport. so those
extreme runs in between my phrases , were first
piano runs and then later, when the focus turned to
greece, i decided to make them into nymphs and
syrens flying in the sky, wailing
i asked sjón to write the lyric, and since i am not the
sporty type, i asked him to do it from the point of
view of the ocean that surrounds all countries and
unites them
still feels lush to sing his sentence : " your sweat is
salty, i am why*
...!! (from the point of view of the
ocean talking to all humans )
those long belted fermata notes were me going
mediterranean (i am phoenician, 2000 years back
though so it is a bit of a stretch...)
It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and people that aren’t beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - trying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to do things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. It wasn’t til the last day of mixing that I though - oh ! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology ! So we called up an English choir, and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit like sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno tango beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it’s good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing.
The song you sang at the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics, "Oceania," has a great line : "Since you left my wet embrace and climbed ashore, every boy is a snake, a lily. Every pearl is a lynx, a girl." I love the image of mankind crawling from the sea.
That lyric was written by a friend of mine. See, I was supposed to write some sort of Olympic lyric and I kept making stupid jokes-writing words like "Pull up your socks and carry the torch." I can’t really take the credit for that one.
"Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of ’Ebony and Ivory’ or ’We Are the World’ type song. Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, ’Maybe there’s another angle to this.’ When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing.
The Olympic version will be a little different. But it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn’t see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjón came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land. He has The Sea saying, ’Your sweat is salty / And I am why / Your sweat is salty / And I am why.’"
Both ‘Vökuró’ and ‘Where Is The Line’ sound so layered and dramatic, they verge on operatic...
I kept hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in my head when I was editing those and I think they have the same epic playfulness. I don’t know if other people will detect the humour, but I think they’re both really funny songs. There’s something impressive and ridiculous about them.
When I made this track, it was the first time I left my little baby girl. I had gone to La Gomera, which is a small island part of the Canary Islands - one of the islands no tourists go to - and I’d found on the web this English guy who had a studio there, and I think I was the first client or something. So I turned up there with an engineer and my little girl, and then we planned it that — she was like 14 months old — and they were gonna leave four days before me, so I could for the first time jump off a cliff — obviously not literally. Like when you’re writing a song and you get possessed and you can’t sleep for 40 hours ’til it’s ready, and you don’t have to worry about putting her to sleep and just be totally self-indulgent. So this song, for me, is really about the sensuality of just jumping in that pool again, of just you and the music, nobody else, and walking on the cliffs in La Gomera and just indulging in it, and then you can go in and you’re singing and singing and singing and be obsessed with music.
Medulla was recorded in eighteen different locations including New York, San Francisco, La Gomera, Venice, Reykjavik, Salvador and Chateau Marmont.
It sounds complicated, but it was actually really simple. I had an engineer with me most of the time and we just set up a portable computer wherever we went. Ninety percent of this album was probably recorded in bedrooms and hotel rooms between cooking and talking and chilling out with mates. It wasn’t until the mixing stage that we actually went into a fancy studio and started messing around with Pro Tools.
Medulla was my way of pulling out of that, refusing to be categorized as ’Oh what rhythm is she going to do next ?’ Just feeling the pressure of all these young drum programmers or producers or whatever you call them contacting me, like, who was going to be the flavor of the month. It had become this kind of fashion statement, it just wasn’t right.
I mean, I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It’s common, it’s in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who’ve got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it’s fun when it’s impulsive and it’s about fun. When it becomes clever, when it becomes more of a left-brain, who can mathematically out-do the other, it’s not so fun anymore. And maybe I just sort of pulled out and did a whole vocal album.
This album was supposed to be a response to 9/11 and all this rubbish and me thinking about a time before religion and patriotism. I wanted to show those gentlemen that there are still insects crawling, people jumping in swimming pools, building houses, having children, making songs and having abstract thought processes or whatever. That’s at least 98 per cent of what humans are doing out there.
It wasn’t like I had a set of rules and had to follow them. That is not liberating. I was just playing with the buttons on the mixing desk and thinking, ’Oh, this sounds better,’ and I found I’d taken out all the instruments.
I was really spoiled rotten with the project I did before, "Vespertine." On that tour, I had, like, 50 people in the orchestra and 20 in the choir. I mean, how far can you go ? I just OD’d on instruments. Plus I started making my album three years ago when I was pregnant. I just couldn’t believe the miracle of the body. You say, I don’t need food, it’s right here in my breasts. You’re superwoman, but just for a little bit. That’s another reason it became a vocal album-it’s like celebrating the body.
I wrote the words probably in 1999, back when I was working in Denmark, and wrote the melody much later, and it wasn’t until a lot later that I matched the two together. But I felt that I was gonna do a vocal album, and it was exciting because of how few toys you have. Then again, with the few toys you have, you have to try to do as many different things as possible — maybe one song with a choir and a beatboxer and a throatsinger and a heavy metal guy, and the next song with just you and a throatsinger, and in the next song you’re doing lots of backing vocals. Just to try to get all the colours. So I always knew that one song had to be just one voice, and that’s it — with the uncomfotableness of that too. Almost like when you are at a party and somebody stands up to do a speech and everybody is like "oh my god". You just say your bit, and then you sit down. So it has that feeling. At least I tried to do it.
i guess this song is kinda self explanatory.
... hmm ... the lyric
kinda says it all
and i feel i knew pretty much from the start that it shouldnt
have any arrangements or instruments so no score stories
here
a part from in the inner structure, where inferior matches
with interior ?
and that i wanted the melody to be a ball that falls up and
down so there is like a stretch in the first note
then gravity pulls it down and then it rolls up again
perhaps similar to the melody of "utopia" and several other
songs of mine ...
i wrote all of the melody of sonnets in a hotel room on my dictaphone in one take. just following ee cummings poem
(i feel out of all my melodies, it is probably the most jazz ? i guess i have had a fantasy of hearing it one day in this style ? ) it is such an odd thing to sing about worst case scenario in a lyric. .….. when the total opposite is true. you are completely safe in a relationship and then you imagine the horror of it ending. the carrying-a-precious -vase-across-a-street-syndrom ... 10 years before it actually happened .….. on "vulnicura"
Basically, there’s ’Sonnets’, and they have many unrealities, and this is reality number 11. It’s like a chunk of poems, and this is one of them. It’s kind of him taking the piss of himself, when you make up things that scare you out of nowhere - you’re just paranoid. In this particular case it’s about him being madly in love with a girl, things are totally euphoric and couldn’t be more perfect, and then his mind starts playing games on him. He starts imagining, what if, in five years time or something, she sould meet someone else, and how he would deal with that. He asks his girlfriend then ; in five years time, when she meets and falls in love with someone else, and will smell his hair and kiss him and be naked with him and all these things - could she please tell him gently, and then he would go up to her new lover and wish him good luck with his new girlfriend, take his hand and wish him all the happiness in the world, and then walk away. It’s sort of "how hard can you make it on yourself", you know ? I just think it was sort of funny, because it happens - the few times in your life when you feel you’ve got it right, your mind start going off on "what happens if this goes wrong ?" and this feeling of carrying a chinese vase across a motorway... "oh it’s definitely gonna break, I know it’s gonna break", and you make it up in your head when everything is actually OK.
He lives in Louth, and he has equiptment in his bedroom where he records himself and his albums. We brought a G4 and Pro Tools and recorded it in like one afternoon. He’s such an extraordinary singer. Before he left, he insisted to give us a scale of his voice, where he sings all the tones - and he has the most amazing range, like 5 or 6 octaves. What’s really interesting about his range is that each octave is of a totally different character. We actually ended up using that later for ’Oceania’, we used what he calls the "Wyattron". Maybe this isn’t a secret, but when I was pregnant and breastfeeding - what is great is that your nature tells all your cells to go on vacation now that the baby is the most important thing. It’s a very humbling and gorgeous thing and a very healthy experience. But slowly after 6 months or so, the baby wouldn’t mind being without you for an hour a day, a couple of month later two hours, and meet other kids and have relationships with other people than you. And mothers kinda have a hard time to let go too. It’s an interesting stretch. And with my "submarine behaviour" ...the part of me that writes songs had gone dormant, and this song says it’s time to wake it up and say "hello ! wake up" - it’s been hibernating, so it’s a little bit of an alarm call.
Medúlla is primitive, like before civilisation. It’s the soft squidgy thing in the centre. After Vespertine I was going to do an album with intuition only, no brain please. I was thinking more visceral, flesh and blood, pregnancy… death metal.
How did having Isadora affect how you make music ?
[Chuckles] I don’t know if you’ve ever had to deal with pregnancy, breastfeeding and female hormones during pregnancy, but I became a librarian of my music when I was pregnant and for the year [following Isadora’s birth]. I decided to archive stuff. I had put it off for forever, and I was getting a lot of pissed-off people nagging me about it. I listened to all my live shows and picked the best versions. That took a while, like half a year. I also listened to all of my b-sides and alternate recordings—I knew I could be the only one to do it.
You sound like you got pretty organized.
I did. [Giggles] I was putting everything in alphabetical order, cleaning up my attic. I’m not an organized person, but somehow pregnancy made me become that way.
Was this album a response to all of that ?
When I started doing this album, I felt like I was holding my breath for a long time and I just wanted to just go, go, go. You know, fuck the librarian that I had become and just have fun.
I guess my head was sort of between Iceland and New York, then I escaped to an island in the Canary Islands where not even the tourists go. It’s really small, and this guy lives there and he’s just opened a studio in his living room, so I went there and I was walking a lot. I don’t know why I have to walk as I write - it’s the ocean air, the dodgy fishing village, the dodgy food. I probably needed to get away ; I had just become a mum and stuff.
Everybody was going, ’Oh she’s making a vocal album, it’ll be a horrible Yoko Ono experience.’ But I wanted to show that a vocal album doesn’t have to be for the chosen few. It was just about working with the instrument I know best, my voice.
She’d laid down the initial vocal tracks in a spontaneous rush, standing over the mixing board with a handheld mike—“a big old nineteen-fifties thing,“ she said—while electronic mockups of the harmonies and beats played on Valgeir’s computer.
I didn’t want this to be some cute vocal album with no balls, a New Age kind of "la, la, la." Probably the hardest thing to do was make sure it had something that was quite male and brutal because it’s easy to do pretty stuff. But I don’t believe in shock for shock’s sake. I thought punk was a bit too easy-throwing up and swearing ? C’mon, you can do better than that. I’d rather be shaken gently out of my habits to feel that I’m awake and alive.
It was where I was at ; enjoying the domestic bliss ; nurturing and being nurtured. The horizon on that album is quite narrow. It is a very cozy album. Let’s all sing together at the fireplace kinda thing.
14 months after the last time i gave birth, i gave
myself a gift, a trip to a studio in la gomera, a rain
forest island in the atlantic. i wrote pleasure is all
mine", about generosity of women, if you would
tune selflessness and generosity up to a million
what would that be ? like the guitar solo of the
hostess !!
so this song is about the ego of the selflessness of
womanhood (myself included ) if that makes any
sense. and i wanted the choir arrangement to feel
almost haunted with femininity, possessed as in
wuthering heights. and i remember being on that
island drinking my first coffea for forever , after many
oceanswims and breastfeeds, standing infront of the
microphone, opening my mouth, tilting my head
back slightly and trying to make sounds that connect
most to my core. letting the air run through me
who gives most ?
One of the recurring themes throughout the album seems to be the quest for love.
I wasn’t aware of that when I was recording it, but I guess ‘Triumph Of A Heart’ and ‘Pleasure Is All Mine’ are about love. The rest of the songs are about ancestry and trying to go back to the core of civilization before religion and terrorism and George Bush. Living in New York post 9/11 I was repulsed by the racism and patriotism that swept through America and the way I survived it was by encouraging my friends to switch off their TVs and stereos and just sing together. One of us would do the beat, another the bassline and so on. It sounds naff, but it felt very liberating.
Basically, it means ’marrow’ in medical language, in Latin. Not just your bone marrow, but marrow in the kidneys and marrow in your hair, too. It’s about getting to the essence of something, and with this album being all vocals, that made sense.
Something in me wanted to leave out civilisation. To rewind to before it all happened and work out, ’Where is the human soul ? What if we do without civilisation and religion and patriotism, without the stuff that has gone wrong ?’ I was going to call the album Ink, because I wanted it to be like that black, 5,000-year-old blood that’s inside us all ; an ancient spirit that’s passionate and dark and survives.
I met this girl who lives really far north in Canada in a town with only 200 people and she invented her own style of throat singing. It’s supposed to be totally with no emotion, but she’s like Edith Piaf or something, totally emotional, so I got her to do beats to quite a few songs. That was fun.
Everybody involved seems to be up for it, so maybe they’ll all come on the road. What I’d like to do is make another album like this and then tour for two of the at once.
I guess the lyrics are probably about, just celebrating the body, you know the cells, doing all sort of coaster rides, up and down, your body and the blood and the lungs, basically singing ,beatboxing ,throat singing or yodelling or body slapping, whatever you do. It sort of celebrating that really.
I was really happy to hear the word “kidney“ on “Triumph of a Heart“ [Björk laughs], and all of these great body parts like the teeth. I loved the choice of words-just very abstract.
I always think I’m saying something really upfront and direct. I guess through the years, I’ve probably done a lot of alternative medicine like acupuncture. I’m probably interested in the Chinese things overall. But that song is actually about that because—I don’t know if you understand this—but I have a tendency to finish my kidney energy. It’s my weakness. And if you kick your heels into the earth, you send back the kidney energy. So I was trying to have one verse about that, and one verse about oxygen, and one verse about the nerves.
What inspired you to use the timbres and textures of the human voice as the main instrument ?
It wasn’t planned. With Vespertine and some of my earlier albums I set myself certain goals and objectives, but with this album the only plan was to do what I wanted and have total freedom. I started laying down some beats and melodies with Matmos, but for some reason they just sounded flat and one dimensional. It wasn’t until I stripped the songs down to the raw vocals that I realised they worked better without the instruments. After that, I decided ‘Fuck strings and synthesizers and sixty piece orchestras, I’m going to make an album that’s made entirely from voices’.
When I did my last album, I only listened to micro-beats for three years. Nothing else. All my friends were really worried about me. Now all I listen to are vocals, anything vocal, from yodelling to Greek choirs to hip-hop, just anything vocal.
I’ve been recording with a lot of vocal people, so I ask one person to do a bassline, another to do drums. It’s been hilarious. Some of it is really rubbish.
The album is about voices. I want to get away from instruments and electronics, which was the world of my last album, ‘Vespertine.’ I want to see what can be done with the entire emotional range of the human voice—a single voice, a chorus, trained voices, pop voices, folk voices, strange voices. Not just melodies but everything else, every noise that a throat makes.
It probably means "Calm of being awake".. it’s hard to explain. But it’s basically a lullaby, and it’s the one song on the album that is not by me, it’s by an Icelandic composer who is like 80 years old now. There’s a funny story for that song, because I wanted that song first to be on Vespertine, and there was this music box company that was making 12" copper plates where they drill holes into the plates that is the song, and it takes forever to do them. I got them first to do ’Pagan Poetry’, then ’Aurora’ and then ’Frosti’. Then I sent ’Vökuró’ for them to do, because the cycle of this disk takes one minute - and ’Vökuró’ has four verses which each take one minute, so it was perfect, and each verse goes slower and slower which makes sense, because most songs start slow and then go fast, but since this is a lullaby it starts fast and goes slower. But it takes them so long to drill the holes in the copper plates that I still haven’t got it - so it missed Vespertine.
So then we did this song for this album, and I called the composer and go "I just recorded this song, is it OK with you that I put it on my album ?" and she goes "Yeah it’s OK. You’re obviously very influenced by your daughter." ...I go "...Yeah ?". "Well she’s got blue eyes, doesn’t she ?" and I couldn’t really work out what that had to do with anything. Then we said goodbye, and then later I worked out that the song was actually sung to a little girl that has blue eyes. Four years ago when I wanted to do that song, and was having the battle with the musicbox-makers, there was no way I could have known that in four years time I would have a little girl with blue eyes. It’s a little bit of a sentimental story.
there is a pattern in my melody that reveals an icelandic dna
the snake like pattern and irregularity me and the bass singers will sing tonight
reminds me of some of the wood carvings on bedposts in the national museum here
it is quite common in icelandic folk songs to have irregular time signatures (5/4, 4/4, 3/4 and more, back and forth ) but also this song is some strange kinda music-joke to mix together death metal and techno and the choir tradition from my home
the lyric for me is about the absurdity of telling someone else off (when you are no angel yourself) and i guess the strange humour in merging wrong music genres
together is supposed to represent that absurdity ? plus the person im telling off is a metal kinda person...
The vocals on this track actually aren’t that manipulated, but they’re edited alot. A lot of chopping. The sounds that probably sound most synthetic are actually Rahzel just doing those crazy noises - you don’t believe it until you see him. But we did a lot of editing, we would get the noises and then place them in this track. I felt that with Rahzel, you need to do both the extremes. There’s one song - ’Who Is It’ - with him doing a live take through the whole song, nothing’s edited or added on top, it’s just one take. The other extreme is in this song, where you take Rahzel and edit him all the way and make some sort of collage that only could’ve been made with him, no-one else. The choir was fun too. There are sections in this song that obviously have reverb, but we didn’t take it any further than that. There are some bass-sounds that are so heavy - that is actually Mike Patton. He is incredible, he has these effect boxes that usually guitars have on the floor and you step on them. He did the bass sort of heavy metal / death metal, then he put Octaver on it to make it an octave lower. So there’s a bit of that too. I’ve been joking with my mates that I really wanted to do a headbang choir song. So I started this song doing the choir arrangements, and then I had to find the beat to match it. It was fun. It sorta made me think of ’Bohemian Rhapsody too’, there’s a bit of respect to Freddie. So people should be headbanging, then my dream would be fulfilled.
Quite a lot of people said that’s their favorite track. I wanted a head-banging track, like Goth, gory horror music. My splatter B-movie. But it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, like "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. It’s about that complicated voices thing [she sings the Queen song] "Galileo, Galileo, Figaro !" For some reason I find it hilarious. I just piss myself laughing.
This is a song I wrote at the end on Vespertine, but I didn’t put it there because I felt it was from a different family - Vespertine was introvert and shy and not very phycisal a record, and this was a very physical song that I wrote when I was feeling quite strong again. The words are kinda self-explanatory. This is the one song that Matmos helped me with - they did fruit-machine-noises that are in the choruses. Like when you put a coin in slotmachine and get three strawberries. So they made those noises with synthesizers that I later imitated with my voice. So I would like to thank Matmos very much for that input, thank you very much. That was the first song where Rahzel sang, and he did the beat in that song in one take. We just all fell on the floor, we couldn’t believe it. There’s no overdubs, no treatment - this is it. I felt quite proud — if you’re gonna have a human beatboxer, at least get the real thing.
is about the celebration when you have found love and it
completes you,
make you back into what you were intended to be
therefore "gave me back my crown"
... i was going for grandness in the arrangement
trying to make it big and simple
to match that mood
I love the little things you’ve put on Medúlla, with synths and stuff—it was really great that you didn’t do that very much. And what was that bass line ? That was such a great one on “Who Is It ?“ It just links through like another character, but it sounds like a vocal. It’s really amazing.
It is a mix between two things. There was a baritone called Gregory Purnhagen. I think he sang with Philip Glass and Meredith Monk, and he was really precise ! It was exciting to work with someone so professional. He did the drone almost like, you know—what do you call the people in the Himalayas ? The monks ! So he did that noise, and then we put it down an octave. Then there was Mike Patton, whose voice is a roar. He’s got many foot pedals when he sings. He would do some of this bass line, too, where he would actually put it in some sort of harmonizer.
It was to counter stupid American racism and patriotism after 9/11. I was saying, "What about the human soul ? What happened before we got involved in problematic things like civilisation and religion and nationhood ?"
I’m learning about funny comedy noises and I just got really into yodeling ! Fierce ! I can see some trips to the Alps happening. Maybe I’ll make a yodeling rave album - there’s a time and a place for that.
I just got really bored with instruments. I started doing everything with my voice. Then suddenly I didn’t want to work with any musicians, which is a bit weird. I only wanted to work with vocalists.
I wanted the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh. We could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and another person would sing a beat and then the next person sing a melody, and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave. It’s quite rootsy.
I didn’t start off thinking that was what I was going to do. I was just writing songs with instruments, but I’d listen to them and think "This isn’t really good, is it ?" I’d start muting certain things and it would sound better, so I thought maybe I’d just take more away and see what happened. It just kind of happened. Looking back on things, it’s always easy to be wise afterwards, to sound clever, but it wasn’t like that while I was doing it. I was just kind of tired of instruments, bored a bit, and I’d been backing with them a lot the last few albums, arranging for a huge orchaestra- the "Vespertine" tour had 70 people on stage. It was kind of like "Fuck that !" and just let’s do something completely different. There was one track where these German guys did a whole rave sounding track with just their voices and that really helped me see the possibilities. It wasn’t like they were beat-boxing ; these are really white Germans. It just cracked me up and seemed so fun. I was just into having fun with something new.
