As previously reported, all proceeds from "Náttúra" go to the Náttúra Campaign, the Icelandic environmental movement co-founded by Björk. Náttúra’s original mission was to protest the construction of foreign-backed aluminum factories in Iceland, but in recent weeks, the movement has taken a dramatic turn. In the month of October 2008, the Icelandic economy has crumbled under the weight of massive amounts of debt (sound familiar, Americans ?), resulting in a government takeover of its largest banks. As the value of the Icelandic krona plummets, businesses find themselves unable to take out loans, and the cost of importing goods to the small island nation becomes prohibitively expensive, people are getting angry. And they’re looking for quick fixes. One popular proposed quick fix ? Building more aluminum factories.

Over the weekend, while in Reykjavík for the Iceland Airwaves festival, we sat down with Björk for a lengthy chat about "Náttúra" and the Náttúra Campaign. In the process, she outlined Náttúra’s plan for the development of a new, independent, environmentally friendly Icelandic economy. It isn’t a quick fix. And it isn’t going to be easy. But when has Björk ever taken the easy way out ?

Pitchfork : How did you become involved with the Náttúra Campaign ? What is the organization’s mission ?

Björk : I kind of founded it. In a way, it’s just me and four other people who share a Google group. [laughs] The other people include Andri [Snaer Magnason], who has written this book [Dreamland : A Self-Help Manual to a Frightened Nation] and Magga Vilhjálms, who has been my friend since I was 11. She’s an actress, and she organized a concert called Hætta !, which means "stop," two years ago.

When I did the gig in the summer [the Náttúra concert] with Sigur Rós and 30,000 people came— which is 10% of the [population of Iceland]— we wanted to raise awareness for the environment. We did that and it was amazing. Then for six weeks, I was in hotel rooms and dressing rooms thinking fuck, that’s not going to do shit. I’m gonna have to have one more whack at it, and try to be functionalist and not just ideological. As much as I don’t want to get my hands dirty— I would rather just do music— I have to follow this up, or it was totally pointless.

I don’t know where to start. If I spoke to you in a week, I would say something different, because every hour there is new information. It’s so complicated. I think after Iceland’s independence in 1944, we were not very sure of ourselves and our confidence was really low. It took one generation to sort of get over that. I’m second generation. My parents were born in 1945-46. Our movement at the punk times was like, we can sing in Icelandic, we are strong.

What’s happening now is we grew and grew and grew from being one of the poorest nations in the world to being one of the richest. And then within the past 10 years Iceland discovered the stock market and it just went, went, went, went, went. I think it hit a roof and it’s just crashed. Just a small percentage of the nation did a lot of damage.

Pitchfork : The same thing seems to have happened in America as well.

Björk : It was a combination of these people from my generation who went crazy on the stock market— obviously I am simplifying very, very much— and then the people in power, similar to your country, who were born in 1945-46. They are conservative capitalists who were supporting these guys, the free capitalists. They just let them loose. And all of Iceland’s money evaporated.

Pitchfork : That’s exactly what a lot of people in America have been saying as well, that the Bush administration’s lack of regulation on business caused our current crisis.

Björk : Yes. A lot of working-class families are going to suffer, and unemployment hasn’t even surfaced yet. What our movement has been more worried about is that many surveys have been done and the majority of Icelanders don’t want [American aluminum company] Alcoa and these big industries to come, but they still just do it. And they don’t give the nation any chance to vote for it or have a say in the matter.

In the last election, which was two years ago, everything that was talked about was green issues. Are you going to dam every single river in Iceland ? There is literally a plan for every waterfall, every thermal energy place. In order to make two more aluminum plants, they have to dam all of them. They were just going to do it.

The winners of last election was this group called Samfylkingin, similar to the social parties in Scandinavia. Everybody voted for them, for the first time they won the majority. The conservative party in Iceland— not far away from the Republicans— for 80 years, they have had [majorities] in every election. But for the first time this party won, mostly because of green issues.

But then when all these people for the first time got into government with all of these kind of like Dick Cheneys of Iceland and George Bushes of Iceland— you know what’s going to happen. Maybe they just got the glow of power, but they were suddenly like, "Let’s build an aluminum factory !"

Now the minister of industry, ministry of environment, and minister of foreign affairs are from this particular party. When they had the election, they had a list they put everywhere in the press, saying, "We are going to protect the country." You can take everything off the list. I think it’s because these characters in government, these conservative capitalists born between 1940 and 1950, they are just so overpowering. It’s always the same thing. And then this crash happens.

Pitchfork : How has the crash affected the environmental movement ?

Björk : The minister of environment, she was supposed to stop an aluminum factory by the international airport by insisting that environmental value would happen, similar to what happens in all European countries. In Iceland they have just been like, "Who cares, let’s just build the dams." She said, "It’s gone too far with the planning, I can’t stop it." And everybody was just like, "What ! You were voted in to stop this !" Then they want to build another one up north, which would be the hugest one in Europe, if they get it built. She managed to stop it. She said we need environmental value, we are sacrificing too much. And now, after what happened last week, everybody in parliament, the right, they are saying, just ignore the environmental value, dam everything.

You know, the Russians are loaning us a lot of money. Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who bought [the soccer team] Chelsea in London, he got rich by aluminum factories. Now the news says that he is going to buy a lot of aluminum factories and make Iceland the biggest aluminum smelter in the world.

Pitchfork : Do the people of Iceland think that this is the answer to their economic problems ?

Björk : The country’s really split. I personally think that it’s the generation that was born in the 40s that only sees very right-wing free trade. It’s like they want to catch up. Iceland missed out on 600 years of industrialization, which was a bummer, but they want to catch up. They want to be like Germany, like, now. They want to build all these 19th century huge factories that eat up the environment. They think that’s the only solution.

The extreme right-wing think environmentalists are just people in woolen sweaters who want to live in a cave and go back to medieval times and sing hippie songs. This is so not the case.

So I came two months ago and I started meeting with all of the job development centers in the countryside and saying OK, what are people suggesting in the countryside ? Because there, a lot of them are like, "All the fish is gone, what should we do ? Oh, Alcoa ! They’ll just build a factory and I just need to turn up." No, you have to grow from the roots up, you have to start small. It takes forever, two people are working at the company, and in ten years, maybe you can have five. We need to see what Iceland can do.

What I’ve discovered by talking to these people at the University of Reykjavík is there are so many companies that are amazing here, that are world class in biotechnics, in high-tech stuff, in computers, in artificial intelligence. These people have been on the verge of starting companies. They’ve got business plans, they’ve got everything, but they’re not getting any support financially from the government or the private fundraisers. Because all the money went to this stock market roller coaster ride.

We’d been working for eight weeks, and then suddenly this thing happens a week ago. I was like, whoa. We were going to investors, setting up workshops, and introducing people to each other. We got the MBA students at the University to make business plans for the companies in the countryside who don’t know how to make business plans but have amazing ideas. This is what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks.

This has to be our answer. What’s really important now… it’s such a moment of danger. All the people who are losing their jobs in the banks, who are going bankrupt, we are hoping they will get into these industries, believe in this, build this purely Icelandic thing up with Icelandic money, Icelandic companies. Icelandic people are really educated. But maybe we are at where the people in the States were 50 years ago, where they think that stuff that isn’t done with a hammer or physical power is not a job. It’s that backwards.

For example, there’s a company here in Iceland called CCP. They made their own computer game and now they have 400 people working for them here in Iceland. We’re saying that’s the same manpower that’s in an aluminum factory. And it’s not just working class low paid jobs, functioning as a third world country for Alcoa, doing the dirty job for them, taking all the pollution and all the shit and just moving it somewhere else. We should make companies here made of Icelanders, both working class and the brainpower, discover new things that stay in the country. This is a problem on so many levels.

We’re having it again tomorrow. We are going to try to make the MBAs make business plans for groups tomorrow. Because the groups need to work together. We’re going to try to make a center for all the high-tech companies that are just ideas. It’s one big institution where everybody who has a good idea goes and they all work together and help each other and then companies start to come out of there. But it takes like eight years. For me, it’s sort of like a record company. It’s like an indie label in a way. It’s grassroots, where all these people can come and feed off of each other and get support. Where if one person gets a good idea, the other five will help them..

Another example of where we have to work together as a group is the health spas. [laughs] (I know, what have I gotten myself into ? It’s hilarious.) Iceland is only 300,000 people and there is a health spa here and another one here and they are in competition with each other. There are all these little swimming pools. We need a map of all of those and present it as one thing.

Tomorrow there’s a workshop on clusters in Iceland. We’ve got the possible high-tech cluster, the possible health spa cluster, the possible culture cluster, possible travel business cluster, possible biotech cluster. It’s especially for the rural areas, they need to work together. They’re going to discuss how it’s going to help us to work together, and how it’s going to hinder us. Maybe the high-tech cluster needs a totally different support mechanism than the food cluster, for example.

I don’t have answers to those questions. I work more as a medium to link these people together, and asking everybody to stop this competitive whatever. My motive was I don’t want more aluminum factories. And now my motive is a lot of other peoples’ motives as well. A lot of people in Iceland are saying what we need now is support for sustainable seed companies for a lot of different reasons. A lot of people are doing it because they’re bankrupt and they can’t go abroad and get more loans now because nobody will loan Iceland money. So that’s where it’s at now.

Pitchfork : Will these initiatives have a chance to get off the ground before there are more aluminum factories ? Or are they going to take the crisis as an opportunity to ram this stuff through ?

Björk : For the last two weeks, Icelanders are getting a crash course in economics. I mean, I didn’t know about these things two weeks ago. The news is full of right-wing guys saying, "Stop the environmental value stuff ! We should just build factories everywhere now, because that’s where the money is !" And the thing is— sorry I’m going to sound like a politician now— but they’re putting numbers in the papers that aren’t true, saying that what we are getting from the fish industry every year is this much, and then just a little bit below that is what we’re getting from aluminum. They’re saying that aluminum is almost is as big as fish today— that we are getting 100 billion [Icelandic] krona a year from aluminum. The thing is, the energy companies who built those dams— the biggest aluminum smelter in Europe today that was built in the east, that was built two years ago...

Pitchfork : Wait, you already have the biggest aluminum plant in Europe and they want to build a bigger one ?

Björk : We already have three. They want three more. They built a dam for Alcoa that cost $3 billion. They took that loan abroad to build this dam. Alcoa didn’t pay anything on that. Iceland paid for that dam, and then they are selling Alcoa energy at a discount...They want to take more loans to do the same thing again.

The thing is, in the aluminum factories here, there’s not many Icelandic people working there. There’s mostly Polish immigrants. If you are from a fishing village with 1,000 people or something and everybody’s leaving the town to Reykjavík, and you’re 18, and there’s an aluminum factory coming, is that very exciting ? I mean, some people, of course, want to work there. But not all people, and especially not women. There are also numbers from Alaska and remote areas that have said, OK, big industry is our answer, and then nobody wants to work there.

These aluminum smelters, nobody wants to build them in Europe, because there’s so much pollution. So it’s like, "Oh, just go dump them in Iceland." We are getting them energy for so cheap that they are saving so much money by doing all this here.

Instead, what we are saying is, we’ve got three aluminum factories, let’s work with that, we cannot change that. Why not have the Icelandic people who are educated in high-tech and work already in those factories in the higher paid jobs, why not let them build little companies who are totally Icelandic with the knowledge they have ? Then they get the money and it stays in the country. Then we can support the biotech companies and the food companies and all these clusters. I think that if you want to be an environmentalist in Iceland, these are the things you’ve got to be putting your energy into.

A lot of investors [are] coming, and I’m hoping they will want to invest in the high-tech cluster. There are money people here that did not lose a lot of money. For example, here is one investment company in Iceland only run by women. They are doing fine. [laughs] They aren’t risk junkies. They just made slow moves. The people who are crashing, they took a huge loan and then another huge loan, and so on. And it’s all just air. But these women didn’t build on air.

Pitchfork : When someone purchases the "Náttúra" single, what exactly is their money going towards ?

Björk : Right now, it’s to support seed companies in Iceland. I don’t know what that literally means. It also depends on what sort of money you can get from one song. Maybe we can help some company start off, or we can continue to have these conferences where people meet. In this situation, every day is different. You just gotta take it one day at a time.

Iceland could be so amazing in these kinds of things. We are really good at computer programming, Silicon Valley types of things. In Iceland, we are the ones who wrote down the sagas. I feel Icelandic people have those genes. We are really good at gathering together information and brain power. We’re better at that than some kind of Las Vegas money gambling. I mean, I really admire the characteristics in Icelandics, this adventureism. We are famous for it. We are addicted to risk to the point of being foolhardy. And I think that is great in brain power stuff.

Pitchfork : And art !

Björk : And music. You want people to take risks, and OK, they fail, but you don’t get the great stuff unless people are willing to risk and not play it safe. And maybe the Icelandic characteristic is better harnessed in these places than on the stock market.

Pitchfork : Let’s talk about the song itself. How did it come together ?

Björk : It came from my frustration after doing the Náttúra concert. I felt, wow, this all went really well, but it was just one more environmental event that wasn’t going to change anything. The aluminum factories were just going to stick their fingers in their ears for five minutes. I was touring, in hotel rooms, dressing rooms around the world, with a lot of spare time.

I had all the files from Volta on my computer. I was really excited by sort of tribal drums, and felt maybe if I had spent another year on Volta I would have gone further into that sort of stuff. I took Brian Chippendale’s drums for "Earth Intruders", which we actually didn’t use ; we used him mostly on "The Dull Flame of Desire". So I started editing that like crazy in the hotel rooms, and not in a 4/4 way, which a lot of beat editing is usually, but rather in clusters. But it didn’t have to fit to a grid or Logic or all these software programs that are all about the Lego. So I took Brian’s drums and made this new song out of his drums. I think the beat from "Náttúra" would be really hard to play live, even for Brian Chippendale. I mean, he does incredible things, I don’t mean it like that. But it sort of was harnessing his energy and taking it in more organic units than grid units.

Once I had that, I sang on top of it. I just sang it in one take. It’s just a celebration of nature and how unpredictable it is and you cannot control it and you just have to kind of like let it fall all over you and go with it.

Pitchfork : How did Thom Yorke get involved ?

Björk : I’ve always been so against this kind of, like, send to someone and they sing and then they send. I was like, fuck that. Actually, this is the only song out of all of the collaborations I’ve done over all the years. But I was like what should I do ? They are going to build those aluminum factories oh my god and I am stuck in a hotel room in Singapore ! What can I do about this ?

So I emailed Thom Yorke. He was in another hotel somewhere, I think in Germany or something, and he just sang on top of that into his computer and emailed it back to me.

Then I was with Mark Bell, he was with me on tour, and he programmed these little things to support what I edited from Brian’s drums. Just put sort of like Photoshop on the bass drum, because it was all taken it out of context, what I edited. So like the bass drum, where the one is, needed accents, so he did very subtle stuff like that.

I think we all had a go at the bassline. I knew I wanted a huge, rude bassline. I tried a few and they were either too rude or I don’t know what. I wanted it to be the main thing. Then Thom Yorke tried a bassline, Mark Bell tried a bassline, everybody had a go. And then I was in London and I called my friend Matthew Herbert. I said, "I am in a hotel room and I need a bassline now ! They are going to build the aluminum factories ! Come quick !" [laughs] It was hilarious. He’s one of the funniest people I know. He just came with a suitcase of gadgets. He was like, "I feel like the bass doctor ! Emergency ! Save the planet !" Just then and there, with headphones and mini bar biscuits, he did a bassline on it. Then I had the song ready. And Mark "Spike" Stent mixed it for free.

Then I came to Iceland eight weeks ago and I was like OK, let’s put it out. But then I thought, let’s face it, it’s gonna get all this media attention. I can use it as a torch to put that light on the problems. But I can’t do that now. So that’s why I ended up going to this eight weeks of going out there and meeting all the job development centers in the countryside, reading every single suggestion of a seed company there ever has been in Iceland that I know of and meeting all the companies that are doing that anyway. I don’t want to take too much credit, there are a lot of people out there doing that anyway, but maybe what I did was more just bring them all together.

And then suddenly this depression or whatever it is, it doesn’t have a name yet, this crisis. It happened to be that what most people are saying is that we in Iceland have not been doing our homework. This is why we have just been jumping for Alcoa and jumping for this and that.

I’m sure this is something Pitchfork understands. I mean, I understand it. I started going at age 16 in a van driving around Europe playing, not eating for a few days and sleeping on peoples’ floors. You cannot just buy a package deal. Everything that’s good takes a long time to grow.

Pitchfork : What is next for Náttúra in terms of music ? Are you going to record more benefit songs ?

Björk : I don’t know. I have mentioned to Sigur Rós, maybe they will give the next song, and maybe it will continue that way. There have been so many articles written in the papers that want to just eliminate the environmental values business and just build aluminum factories now. But there have been an equal amount of articles of people saying listen, you just went on a money binge, are you gonna go on another binge now ?

Pitchfork : It’s kind of like the debate about off-shore drilling in America.

Björk : Right ! Like wait, wait, slow down. So there’s a lot of debate now. As always, there’s too much duality, too much black and white. I think there’s a middle. There are some amazing biotech companies. ORF Genetics, they are a very good example of something that has taken ten years to build from the ground up and is working well now. They are just starting to see the light now. I think Iceland could be really good in stuff like that now. They are doing stem cell research in plants, not in humans or animals. They’re growing plant protein that can fix organs inside the body. This is the future.

I think that a lot of companies like that in Iceland right now that are on the brink just need a little support. So instead of taking another hundred million pound loan abroad and building a dam for Alcoa and Icelandic taxpayers pay the bill, why don’t you use those hundred million pounds and put them into these companies and build them from the ground up and trust it even though there’s no one there with a hammer and a sledge and a drill ? Icelandic politicians of that generation still think that anything that’s just done with the brain is just air. I think everyone who was born 1955 and after that gets it.

Pitchfork : So what’s next for you, in terms of your music ? Are you working on any other projects, or is Náttúra your only focus ?

Björk : Well, this has been taking me two months now. I’m staying maybe one more month right now. I’m not very good at doing two things at the same time. I’ve never been good at the walk and bubblegum thing. I’ve been doing this 16 hours a day. I haven’t had a day off. But it’s very exciting, too, just to meet all these people doing really fertile stuff. It’s sort of where I come from anyway, hanging out with people who believe in something incredible. DIY kind of. It’s really exciting. I’m also meeting a lot of people that sort of have to do with what I want to do next anyway, but sometimes it’s good not to plan too much, just kind of jump in there and see what happens.

I’ve also been trying to get someone to Iceland to suggest green industries to Icelanders and introduce us to the companies that haven’t even been built yet in the world. This man Paul Hawken, who is famous in the States, he has agreed to come here in November. He’s supposed to be a green capitalist. He’s a functionalist, not just an idealist. I’m hoping he can unite these two polarized groups in Iceland. I’m setting up a meeting with him and the people in power. Because I think private money people can put money into those seed companies, but most of all, the government has to do it. It has to be a mixture of two things. It cannot just be visionary money people.

I know very well inside me what the beginning point is. There’s going to be a lot of craftsmanship involved, similar maybe more to Vespertine, which took me like three years to make, and a lot of it was just me sitting around with a laptop, making microbeats. There were like from 40 to 120 tracks of noises on every single song, it was like mosaic.

Volta was very immediate, a very physical project. I knew when I was making it, I could have spent probably three more years on it and do it much better, but I just needed to be spontaneous and physical and go out. Because I hadn’t toured for four years, I had to nourish that side of me, to be on stage in front of a crowd, more visceral. Maybe it was after having a baby, you sort of go in a cocoon, you kind of go less physical, more programming. [Björk’s daughter Isadora is six years old.]

So I think I’ve come around and I want to make an album now that probably will take me four years to make or three. I think it’s too early to talk about the details because it will jinx it. But I know sort of what it’s about. And in a funny way, it’s not that unrelated to all the people I’m meeting here in Iceland. That’s how things are sometimes.

Pitchfork : Are you planning on releasing anything else related to Volta ? Are there more singles in the works ?

Björk : I think my record company in London, One Little Indian, wants to make a package where all the videos are included together with the live concerts. We filmed Paris, and we also filmed a concert here with a choir and a brass quartet, so it was a mixture of songs from Medúlla and Volta. Because I never really toured Medúlla so we never really filmed that. So I think there will be some wrapping up of everything from Volta in one box. Also remixes.

Pitchfork : You are known for putting out a lot of releases to accompany each record.

Björk : They are really good with that. For my tastes, I think sometimes, they release a little bit too much, I’m like waaait a minute. But I’ve got to respect him, he’s very supportive of what I do, Derek [Birkett, One Little Indian co-founder]. We both come from a sort of punk rock background, where we were trying to do the opposite of what the huge record companies were doing, where nothing was released except greatest hits or something. We come from another standpoint.

I mean, I’ve never been thinking that if you’re a fan you have to buy everything that somebody puts out. I mean, you’ve got a choice. If you don’t want it, just don’t buy it. It’s also a reaction to YouTube and sharing of files. A lot of it is really bad sound, really low quality. So the librarian in me wants it at least to exist there so that in 20 years when I’m sitting in my rocking chair, it will still exist in the best sound quality possible, even though it only sold 1000 units or whatever. As much as I love the whole pirate kind of thing, the quality suffers.

interview