Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.10.2011, Qupperneq 60

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often make the bases for songs by our-
selves, with rhythm and vocals. It’s an
unusual approach to songwriting, voice
and beats—usually songs start out with
chord progressions—but I never related
to that method. Thus, when acid house
and the whole electro movement came
along, it was only natural that I’d jump
right in. It had rhythm and voice, my fa-
vourite elements.
So you started out working within the
confines of rock music because that was
all that was available, and then given the
chance jumped off into more rhythmic
territories?
Yes, that was kind of it. And I don’t
think I was alone. I think it’s maybe a
larger group than people realise, folks
that were into the whole indie scene;
its philosophy and style and spirit, but
not necessarily the music. People that
jumped into acid house and electro
when that kicked in. It has more of a
feminine structure—I am not being
essentialist about gender; men contain
feminine qualities and vice versa—
punk is more macho and electro is more
connected to things like world music,
rhythm, flow and feeling .
thE FRustRatED musiC tEaChER
Through the ‘90s, you played a large role
in introducing the electro revolution to
Icelanders. And through ‘Biophilia’ and
especially its educational aspect, you
can be thought of as introducing new
techniques and ideas to people. Are you
maybe sort of a missionary? Are you try-
ing to ‘spread words’?
Well [laughs], I am frustrated music
teacher, that’s for certain. I wouldn’t
take credit for “introducing Icelanders
to electro”—there were so many great
people working at doing that. I tried to
help out when I could, and my position
granted me some chances to do that.
But I have always had a soft spot
for frustrated teachers. Like David At-
tenborough or Ási [head of Smekkleysa
records, Icelandic alt.godfather] when
he had his radio shows introducing new
and exotic music to Icelanders. I was
all ears. And I am. I like to listen when
people talk. I am curious in nature, and
when people show me what they’ve
been up to, and what they know, I of-
ten get fascinated and I want to tell the
world about it.
I always assumed I’d be a music
teacher when I grew up. Then this whole
pop music adventure happened and I’ve
really liked that . But I still joke about
it with my friends, that year I planned
on moving to a small island and teach-
ing kids to play the recorder flute. That’s
still my retirement plan. So it’s a joke,
but not a joke, y’know?
This is one of the reasons I was very
excited to be able to weave an educa-
tional aspect into the ‘Biophilia’ con-
cept. The thought just occurred to me
when we started programming, I got so
excited. “Wow! I can weave my old pipe
dream of teaching music into my next
album!” I had never thought of that! It
was a moment of truth; initially I had
just planned the touchscreen aspect to
work with writing the album, all the rest
came later. In 2008 I had no idea that
the technology would be so widespread.
bJöRKCoRp, R&D DEpaRtmEnt
(aKa “JamEs mERRy”)
You basically developed instruments to
write this album. This is no mean feat.
Do you have a ‘research & development’
department or what? How does it work?
Hahaha, my ‘research and develop-
ment’ department consists of James
[Merry, Björk’s assistant], he is a one-
man team... I usually don’t employ as-
sistants, I like keeping it real, making
my own phone calls and such. I had
gone three years without one. I was a
year into the ‘Biophilia’ project when I
decided I wanted someone on the job,
and not a usual assistant, but someone
to specifically do research. James used
to work for Damien Hirst, but wanted
a job where he could travel. You could
say he got what he wished for [sinister
laugh], as making ‘Biophilia’ certainly
took us all over the world.
Making an album in this manner
was incredibly fun. ‘Volta’ and the ac-
companying tour, for me, was a sort of
grand finale for me. I thought: “I’m go-
ing to take ten brass girls on tour and
flags and play all the festivals and play
all the old hits that work at festivals and
go out with a big bang!” I sensed that I
would dig a hole after all that and start
from the beginning. At the same time
as ‘Volta’ ended, my contract with Uni-
versal was up, and I found myself in a
similar place that Radiohead were in
four years ago, when they released their
album on-line and people could pay as
they world. I was all PHEW! I was off
the grid, all the companies were sending
me offers and I was refusing them all,
because I knew something good would
come of this..
It was liberating.
You were on your own, no demands,
nothing...
Yes. Initially for this project it was just
me and James and my sound guy-slash-
programmer Damian Taylor doing all
kinds of everything. I intentionally hired
no help, I wanted to keep it that close
and also I had no money to fund it, I
could just scrape together for the next
studio session. After a year of working
like that, I realised I had grown very em-
bedded in the environmental and politi-
cal battle here at home... that and other
reasons led me to just renting a house
in Puerto Rico, we spent a year there; we
created instruments and read five hun-
dred million books and watched a bil-
lion DVDs. Everyone thought we were
mad. It was scary, but at the same time
very exciting.
“...an insanE hEaDFuCK”
We finished that phase and then there
was phase where I was working with
Oddný [Eir Ævarsdóttir, author] at home,
trying to encourage and facilitate green
companies and startups. Kreppa came
along, along with mass unemployment
and I got the idea that my album project
could be job creating; maybe I could get
one of those half-finished buildings and
make it into a music museum for kids,
where every room would teach them
about different aspects of music and
theory and intertwine that with lessons
about the natural world.
There would have been, like, a light-
ning room where you could learn about
arpeggios and play around with light-
ning. Then a pendulum room where
you learn about bass lines and counter-
points... I was thinking of ten rooms, to
fit each song.
I met with some people and started
seriously investigating this, before I de-
termined that it just wasn’t right. It felt
self-indulgent in the middle of a crisis.
The idea was to try and give something
back to my community, a well-meaning
project and all, but there is a thin line...
So by then National Geographic
contacted me and we decided to try and
make a 3D movie. I called up Michel
Gondry and he was into it, then Sjón
and I sat down and wrote a script... or
actually he listened to me talk for a bil-
lion years before writing an amalgam of
my thoughts and his own. But then it
turned out that financing a motion pic-
ture is an insane headfuck that can take
something like a decade to accomplish,
and since making a movie wasn’t a par-
ticular ambition, we dropped it.
The goal was always more along the
lines of creating something that could
help kids understand and engage with
music and the natural world anyway, I
have no dreams of being a filmmaker.
And oddly enough the iPad showed up
around this point in the process. We had
ten songs and had written programmes
for each, so in fact the final lap—trans-
forming the project to iPad—was the
easiest.
RaDiCal aCtiVist/passiVE GaR-
DEnER
I am curious about the songwriting
process, and how it integrates with the
programmes you made. You have a
‘lightning song’, and a ‘moon’ or ‘cycle’
song, and a ‘pendulum song’ and this is
all clearly portrayed in the apps, but how
did it come to be? Was the music a re-
sult of research? Or did you connect the
ideas with the melodies later on?
This project is different from my other
ones. I was in the mood to connect.
‘Volta’ was all about getting on the soap-
box, posturing, complaining loudly and
pointing out stuff I thought was wrong
and evil. Fighting for nature: “you are all
corrupt!”, “Declare independence!” and
so on. I was a radical activist yelling at
people.
This time around was the opposite. I de-
flated and went into ‘passive gardener’
mode. No more macho posturing, more
research, planting seeds and tending
to them, growing things. No two songs
have the same root or were made the
same way.
To name an example, the song
‘Moon’ was made after we got the idea
to create a pendulum programme; a
double pendulum moves a little like
one envisions a bassline and a counter-
point... that was the idea anyway. We
wrote a programme to work with and
then [long-time Björk collaborator] Sjón
had a poem called ‘Solstice’, which is
about cycles, the Earth’s ever-revolving
axis... and Christmas. Which in turn is
connected to the movement of the pen-
dulum. It fit. This is how things evolved
a little, differently with each song but
along these lines. There was no one
method employed.
baCK to sChool!
The unifying factor maybe being ‘re-
search’ or the educational aspect?
Yes, I wanted to go back to school. So
in the process of making this we met
with a lot of scientists, and we read a
lot of books and watched documenta-
ries and thought about a lot of different
ideas and theories. It was a good pro-
cess. After screaming about how every-
thing sucks and needs improvement on
‘Volta’, I felt it was imperative to try and
find solutions, to research new methods
of doing things and presenting them to
the world. Beating on pots and pans can
be important, but only to a certain point.
Eventually, you’ll have to try and think
of solutions and how you would like
things to be, instead of just shouting
that you don’t like their current state.
This relates do with what you’ve been
trying to do with the whole ‘Green start-
up’ enterprise over the last two years.
When we interviewed you last year, you
placed a big emphasis on us printing a
list of ‘green startup ideas’ alongside the
conversation...
Yes, getting involved with nature con-
servation and the like had an emotional
effect on me. The three months Oddný
and I spent every waking hour think-
ing about new ideas and ways of doing
things, after protesting for two years,
I was left with the feeling that none of
the old systems were working anymore.
That it was time to propose something
new.
The time for finger pointing was
through, at some point you need to be
the change you wish for. To practice
what you preach.
And when I saw people all around
me going bankrupt, losing their homes,
their pensions, everything... I felt I sim-
ply couldn’t make a comfortable little
record of music. Something more was
called for.
bJöRK’s toys
I read an interview with you in an issue
SPIN magazine from sometime around
1995 the other day, where you said
you had always been into these geeky,
professor-like guys, naming David At-
tenborough as an example of someone
you’d crush on. And now you’re actually
working with David on the ‘Biophilia’
project... is this your dream project
come true, finally?
Well [giggles]... yes, I have always been
into geeks and nerds and professor type
characters, people that could tell me
about nature and the cosmos and the
universe... David is one of my muses for
sure. So dream project... It’s a little like
that [joyous laughter]. I am very excited
about all of this. Working on this, I was
all holed up with James and Damian for
what felt like a million years, and now
it’s coming out and becoming public,
taking on a new life. It is exciting.
Writing music on the touchscreen,
making new things to create with, imag-
ining how an instrument would sound
and then creating and programming
it, I feel like a kid in a toy store. And I
really look forward to when the promo-
tional aspect of ‘Biophilia’ is behind me,
so I can get back to playing with all these
new toys.
It’s funny, sometimes the dream is
stronger than reality... writing for an in-
strument that doesn’t exist can be a turn
on; then when it’s actually been realised,
when it exists, working on it might be
exciting. Right now I am curious how
that will work out, whether I will retain
the joy of working with these tools. I am
looking forward to sitting down with
all these people I’ve met and gotten to
know in the process, talking and creat-
ing more. I want to create ten more apps
in the next three years. Maybe I’ll make
a song and release it three months later.
Since I am not contractually bound to
a record label now, the possibilities are
limitless. I am very much looking for-
ward to working further in that environ-
ment.
I have been listening to ‘Biophilia’ a lot,
and as I got acquainted with the apps,
the educational aspect and everything
else I started thinking of the project as
a very optimistic, even hopeful, one. I
jotted down ‘techno-optimism’ in my
notebook; for some reason it feels like
we as a culture have been focusing on
the negative aspects of technology for a
long time, whereas ‘Biophilia’ evokes a
belief that a better world may be reached
through technology... Am I totally delu-
sional here?
People tend to forget that technology
is something that we humans created.
It is a tool. And it is a tool that you can
use for good purposes, or bad ones. The
problem has been—in terms of music,
say—that the business guys have mostly
been in charge of how the new technol-
ogy is used and implemented, instead
of, say, people that want to create music,
or listen to it... I believe this is true for
other fields.
“‘Volta’ and the accompanying tour,
for me, was a sort of grand finale for me. I
thought: “I’m going to take ten brass girls on
tour and f lags and play all the festivals and
play all the old hits that work at festivals and
go out with a big bang!””
BJÖRK BJÖRK