“If I could, I would do no interviews. All musicians are probably like that. They would just prefer to let the work talk,” says Björk, settling with her matcha latte into a chair in an empty greenhouse, Reykjavík’s skyline looming against the grey sky through the glass. Ironically, she admits, she has a habit of making things that require explanation.
Björk is here to talk about echolalia, her large-scale audiovisual exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland alongside Metamorphlings, an extensive display of masks by her longtime collaborator and friend James Merry. Though the two have separate names and have widely been referred to as sister exhibitions, Björk is quick to clarify, “For me, it’s not even my exhibition. It’s sort of about the masks.”
echolalia puts two music videos from her 2022 album Fossora, both deeply personal works written in memory of her late mother, together with a version of her new work “Nerve Bloom”, a collaboration with painter Natalia Kleszczewska and CGI artist Natalie Liu. Being halfway through recording her 11th album, Björk admits that the timing of the exhibition felt awkward. “I felt a little bit vulnerable with what’s in the museum,” she says. “I have some of the new album in there, but I left out the music DNA of the album because I want to save it for next year.”
Björk instead focuses on giving older tracks the treatment she always dreamed of, deliberately choosing videos where James’s masks, as she puts it, “can shine.” In the video for “Ancestress,” directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, for example, Björk and the entire cast of the outdoor funeral procession wear custom-made masks and carry ceremonial spoons crafted by James.
Over her 40-year career, Björk has consistently pushed boundaries between music, art and technology. Yet the label she still feels most comfortable with is simply “musician.” When it comes to the visuals surrounding her music, she gives a substantial amount of creative direction to her collaborators in shaping the accompanying aesthetics and atmosphere.
“Musicians usually know very well when they write a song, they’re like, ’Oh yeah, this shit happens in the first verse, and then this shit happens in the second verse, and in the end, they all go to the ocean. Do you know what I mean ?” she says, giddy.
“I call that dramaturgy. I don’t think that’s being a visual artist ; it’s more an extension of a musician, of the music video, which is something I’ve been doing since the 90s.”
With the opening of echolalia, Björk felt the need to directly address a growing assumption in the media : that exhibiting in a gallery meant she should now be considered a “visual artist.” “I don’t feel like a visual artist,” she stresses, hastily adding, “I have no ambition to be a visual artist either. I also get a lot of offers to act in films, but I have zero ambition to be an actress. If I’m lucky, I wish I could live 300 years just to do all the albums I want to do.”
CRAFTSMANSHIP AT THE FOREFRONT
In the music video for “Sorrowful Soil,” directed by Vidar Logi, Björk sings a eulogy to her mother, set against the backdrop of the erupting Fagradalsfjall volcano. Recorded with the legendary Hamrahlíð Choir, which Björk herself sang in as a teenager, the piece is arranged in nine voices instead of the usual four — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — that fade in and out irregularly, making it so technically demanding that the choir spent an entire summer rehearsing it.
Prioritising a sound-first experience, the installation surrounds visitors with 30 speakers, each transmitting a single singer’s voice. But the experience is not sound alone : the score is physically rendered on a knitted textile that wraps around the speakers.
“There is a hierarchy in the art world where crafts and textiles are thought of as ‘women’s’ art that’s not as high up as traditional sculpture and painting — 20th century, white male, that’s very ’yeah, but textiles, like weaving, are like second or third-class,” Björk argues. “We talk a lot about craft, me and James, in our friendship. I spend a lot, a lot of time on my arrangements. I have Sibelius [music software], and I will literally — I mean, I could show you — spend two months just on an arrangement in a song,” she says, tapping on a Bónus string bag with her laptop inside.
“Like now, I’m doing an arrangement, and I feel it’s the same as doing embroidery or when you knit a sweater. I’ve been doing these crafts since I was a kid, and I’ve been working with Sibelius since the year 2000. It feels like home to me.”
Immortalising the scores of her songs in textile is, in Björk’s words, “a handshake” to James and his mask-making, a craft that is similarly time-consuming and detailed. It is also an opportunity to elevate a medium long dismissed as feminine, and therefore lower-class.
Speaking about how textiles are only now beginning to occupy the same position as painting or sculpture, especially visible after, in her words, the “woke [movement] and MeToo,” Björk suddenly returns to the question of her titles in the art world.
“I saw some people say, ‘Now she’s been promoted. She’s a visual artist,’” she says, changing into a mock voice to make a point.
“First of all, I refuse that there is any higher and lower art. For me, it’s all the same — I can be head banging to a rave in Smekkleysa, and the next day I go to Harpa and see a piano concerto. Also, I don’t want to be promoted because I’m very spoiled where I am. Since I was 20 years old, I’ve been very happy just to be able to make albums and music videos.”
“I’m like, ‘yes,’” she says, pumping both fists, “I love it.”
A CROSS-GENERATIONAL HANDSHAKE
Alongside the exhibition, and while working on her new album, Björk is also preparing for a now sold-out rave (held under the echolalia umbrella, with tickets including entry to her National Gallery exhibition) on August 12, the day when the total solar eclipse will cross Iceland. Set at the Víðistaðatún sculpture park in Hafnarfjörður, the location was deliberately chosen for accessibility — close enough to Reykjavík that, as Björk puts it, “you could get an electric bike or scooter and go there and go back.”
The idea for the rave grew out of Manakvöld, a series of popular full-moon DJ evenings that have been running for years at Smekkleysa, the independent record label and shop Björk co-founded in 1986. Together with friends, she has taken to the decks in an effort “to save the record shop from going bankrupt” and “bring the music community to the shop.”
Two years ago, Björk brought Manakvöld to New York, DJing under a bridge in Brooklyn with Eartheater, Jlin, Mun Sing and others. This time, she’s taking the rave “into the nature,” reuniting with international artists she’s previously DJed with, including Arca, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, 33EMYBW, and a lineup of local musicians such as Ronja, sideproject, Knackered, Gummi Arnalds and LOSCABALLOS, who have long been regulars at Smekkleysa.
Manakvöld events at Smekkleysa have always been free to attend, with artists performing for free too. With the rave moving outdoors, Björk points out that “it felt it was right to go to the next stage, where we sell tickets and we can pay the artists. It felt like the right karma,” she says.
“I’m very, very superstitious about karma. I think it’s very much like : you reap what you sow. You have to be respectful of creative energies and organisms.”
The same respect, it seems, dictates how she’s approaching the rave itself. With tens of thousands of tourists expected to travel to Iceland for the solar eclipse, Björk is careful not to overdo it. “We don’t want it to be too packed,” she says. “We want to be respectful of nature there.”
The rave will also culminate in a 40th birthday celebration for Smekkleysa, and while rumours have circulated around town about what the label might do for its milestone anniversary, including a possible Sugarcubes reunion gig, something she participated in almost exactly 20 years ago, also to help the label through financial difficulties, Björk is quick to dismiss such speculation.
“What people don’t know about Smekkleysa is that we have probably released most of Icelandic contemporary classical music of any company here. For 40 years, we’ve released albums by Icelandic composers, so it’s actually around 300 albums, which is crazy.”
She hopes that the funds raised through the rave will help bring some of their back catalogue back into the shop. For example, Björk confirms that the label is re-releasing an album by Magnús Blöndal Jóhannsson, “who is sort of the Icelandic Stockhausen.”
MAKING ROOM FOR SIMPLICITY
Björk’s plan to stay away from more caffeine today fails and she grabs a cappuccino as I prepare to ask one more question — in fact, one of her own, from a 2009 interview with Interview magazine : if she were to build a house, what kind of house would it be, where would she build it, and what would it look like ?
“Good question,” she says, pondering for a moment. “If you had asked me then, I probably would have said people you love, listening to good music and cooking good meals. Sometimes owning a lot of things is just responsibility and hard work because they break, you have to renovate them.”
Her thoughts drift from childhood fantasies of living on some faraway dream island to the simpler pleasures of the life she’s built in Reykjavík.
“I love my community. All my best friends live like a one-minute walk from my house. I love meeting them in the pool and in the café. When you’ve lived abroad, it’s so nice, it’s such a luxury here in Reykjavík. You just think, ‘Oh, I want to go to the movies.’ You text your friend, and five minutes later, you’re both in a cinema. I’m at a place in my life, where I just love that simplicity.
Sorry, that was a very long answer. That’s what happens when you drink coffee. You talk five times more,” she laughs.
“I think I should run and cook.”
She stands, gathers her things and disappears into the streets of Vesturbær.
