her next album

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

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.

pitchforkmedia 10-22-08