working with Timbaland

How did you come to meet and work with Timbaland ?

I wouldn’t describe him as a close friend but we’ve always kept an eye on each other since we met in 1994. He loved "Venus as a Boy," a track I did in ’93 where the tapes were sent to India and had Bollywood strings in it. That maybe started our mutual interest. And then he sampled my song "Jóga" from ’Homogenic’ for a Missy Elliot track. It was that mutual admiration thing going on. Maybe, looking back on it now, it was that we’re both pretty interested in the, *ahem*... silk road, northern African rhythms and Indian music. Which is quite funny for an Icelandic woman and a guy from southern USA. But I think maybe also it’s not literally us being interested in those places geographically, but also scale-wise. It’s very chromatic, things that come from that place. Not the sort of western civilization — classical music, rock and roll — where it is very white and very square. It’s more things that have got curves on it and mysterious. We could probably get musical and sit here talking about it for nine hours, but let’s not go too deep into it. But yeah, there’s always been this talk, "One of these days we’re going to do something." And now, with me coming out of my cabin fever state, I was like, "Okay, let’s have some action." And I contacted him and he was like "Yes ! Let’s do it !" It was actually quite interesting to just go into a room with him and the first beat he threw out I immediately improvised on top of it. Just listening to each other for such a long time, we sort of had mutual little island that felt like it wasn’t Timbaland country, and it wasn’t Björk country, just our mutual little place.

XFM Interview, April 2007