Reykjavík Grapevine - 12.12.2016, Blaðsíða 33

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two robots for “All Is Full Of
Love.” Last year, the MoMA in
New York exhibited a retro-
spective of audios, visuals, ar-
tifacts and everything quintes-
sentially “Björk” from the past
two decades.
“When I write a song it’s al-
ways very visual and very phys-
ical,” Björk says. “I think most
people who write music are
like that. For example, I might
be writing and all of the stars
above me are shivering, and I
want to make a sound for that.
When you say that to someone
it’s kind of like: ‘Okay, you’ve got
a problem.’ But in VR you can
just make the stars shiver, and
match it to the song.”
Ten points for
heartbreak
VR opened into another unfore-
seeable expanse for Björk. “After
Björk Digital in Australia and
Tokyo I found a nice surprise:
that there was quite a feminist
statement here,” she says. In
September, New York Magazine
featured Björk in their cover
story “In Virtual Reality, Wom-
en Run The World.” The field,
still in infancy, has no bound-
aries, no systems, and no hier-
archies. This creates an oppor-
tunity for a high proportion of
women to enter the notoriously
male-dominated tech world in
positions across the board—fi-
nancial, technical, and design
alike. Similar to the way the
‘Vulnicura’ and Björk Digital
tour are developing, the virtual
reality world is being created as
we speak. Organically. At Björk’s
command.
She grew up “rolling her
eyes” at her radical feminist
mother who “was always moan-
ing about how guys were horri-
ble,” she relates. “I was just kind
of like okay, that’s great. You
did that for your generation. My
generation is not about moan-
ing, it’s about just going out and
doing things, and then present-
ing it once it’s done, so you can
be like: ‘Look what I’ve done, I’m
equal to the guys.’”
In the past two or three
years, however, Björk noticed a
new place to voice her feminist
concerns. Or, rather, to un-voice
them. A place in the music. “One
thing I can do to support young
women in the music industry,”
she says, “is to adjust how we
talk about what we do apart
from just being singer-song-
writers.”
Recently Björk was talking
with fellow singer/producer/
mix-master-badass-lady-musi-
cians M.I.A. and Peaches, won-
dering: “Why do people think
that some guy turns up and does
all the studio shit, and then we
turn up and sing?”
“Maybe it’s because we don’t
talk about it,” she answers.
“There are no photos of us at the
mixing desk.” She decided that
her “way of being a feminist”
would include speaking more
blatantly about the music she
composes. And also getting a
photograph of M.I.A. at the mix-
ing desk.
‘Biophilia’ and ‘Vulnicu-
ra’ were released a few years
apart. W hile ‘Biophilia’ re-
volved around her interests in
musicology, technology and
education, ‘Vulnicura’ sprang
from heartbreak. “A lot of jour-
nalists didn’t know what to do
with ‘Biophilia’,” says Björk.
“Because I didn’t write about my
boyfriend or not-boyfriend, they
were like, ‘Uuuh, this is a fail-
ure. She didn’t score any points
on the emo-love-affair scale.’”
‘Vulnicura,’ on the other hand,
has been one of her best-re-
ceived albums. It’s a fact that
she doesn’t dwell on, but at the
same time, can’t tune out. “The
little prankster in the back of
my head goes: ‘Okay, so if I sing
love and heartbreak I get a ten,
but if I sing about crystals I’ve
failed,’” she says.
The planetary scheme
For the London premiere of
‘Vulnicura’, Björk performed,
for the first time, without any
beats or outside production.
‘Vulnicura Strings’ is an or-
chestra and voice version of
the album that she composed
and released in November of
last year. “I was really bless-
ed in England,” she says. “I
got really good reviews of the
shows—but not one person
mentioned the arrangements.
All of the emphasis was on my
divorce. That’s kind of typical.”
She plans to perform ‘Vulni-
cura Strings’ for her Airwaves
shows as well.
But Björk is not ungrateful.
In fact, she mentions repeatedly
how “spoiled” she is with atten-
tion, and how lucky she feels to
have people interested in her
work after all these years. The
longevity of her career speaks to
her instinctive curiosity to dis-
assemble and reassess the world
around her; the Sugarcubes’
1988 “Television Talk” footage
provides a testament to the for-
mer, her voyages into virtual re-
ality a testament to the latter. As
long as there is the universe to
be examined—whether on the
sub-atomic level of heartbreak,
or the planetary scheme—Björk
remains curious, and creating.
So while syncing up with the
moon is romantic, maybe it’s
more in her nature to make the
stars shake.
Björk plays Harpa Eldborg on Nov
5 and 8. Additional tickets are re-
quired.
“With a tool like VR the
person listening to
the song is sewing up
his or her own chest
and somersaulting
and flying through
the sky. That's pretty
powerful.”