Björk calls him and says, “I’m making the music for this movie of Matthew’s, Drawing Restraint 9, and we have a song that we would like you to sing.” And this was very surreal to get this request, and then she sends the song, and it’s really abstract. The song is like an amalgam, or maybe it’s a single letter from people, post-World War II in Japan, [who] I guess, were suffering because there was a whaling ban that was overseen by General MacArthur. That was the lyric to the song.
This has nothing to do with acting. There is no plot in the usual sense. And we don’t play characters with a history, individual crisis and dramatic dialogues. With Lars there were all these workshops and dogma therapeutic psycho discussions. Matthew is a visual artist. He doesn’t believe in drama. I didn’t have to project any emotions and I only do the things I do in this movie.
After shooting Dancer In The Dark you said you would never do a movie again.
Yeah, I know... Matthew Barney and I also swore to each other, when we first came together, that we would never collaborate. And now I’m in his movie. But it’s something totally different though ; I don’t even know if you could call Drawing Restraint 9 a movie at all.
I saw the footage without it being edited and wrote my piece, and then it was edited to the music. But then there was also things where I just saw like a still image, and i went to write stuff. And then there’s also a lot of stuff that was done in April and may, where it was already edited footage that i would write to.
Seeing as you mentioned "Ambergris March" I’ll bring that up. I really like that piece. It’s harpsichord and glockenspiel and crotales and things, and Mark Bell is on it as well. Tell us about the piece, what were you thinking of and how did you put it together ?
Well that particular piece was after the climax of the movie, where out of nowhere it’s nocturnal, and you go outside on the ship and it’s like a dream-like scene, that almost is not attached to the rest of the movie. And it’s basically children, Japanese children, marching on the ship in the moonlight.
And the main star of the whole movie is this piece of sculpture which is based on ambergris, which is what whales throw up after they’ve eaten a lot of shrimp. They throw up these shrimp shells. And if you find this in the ocean, it’s like a really huge cylinder, then you become very rich because it’s precious, used a lot in cosmetics and stuff.
In this particular scene the children are jealous ; they want to be like the whale. So they’ve thrown a lot up in buckets and they’re marching in and they’ve stolen shrimp shells from the kitchen in the ship, and they’re marching with these two buckets. And then they stop by the ambergris which is lying there alone on the deck, and they take a bit of their puke and a little bit of shrimp shells and mash it together in their hands, and add to the ambergris because they want to collaborate with the whale.
So obviously you get a magical scene like that I knew a few things. I knew it had to be a march. I thought maybe a good thing, because the ambergris has a lot of barnacles on it, so actually the representative throughout the movie for the ambergris is actually bells, because I thought they were kind of shell-like and hollow on the inside. So I thought to make beats out of bells would be good, and for it to be kind of nocturnal. That’s maybe why the harpsichord came in there. But I guess I’m the sort of person that when I need a march I e-mail mark bell. [laugh]
Yeah, it’s got a really nice rhythmic track to it. I couldn’t quite work out what the sounds were, but it’s a really nice, sort of rubbery sound or something.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a mixture, because we did actually get crotales, which is actually just live played. And most of the things in the song are actually live played. You know, we started off with the Sibelius files, where everything I’ve written was programmed or, you know, sequenced. But then we replaced everything with either bells, like a bell choir, and crotales, and triangles, and just anything we could think of. I have to confess, maybe a little bit thinking about those Shinto rituals that you see a lot in the streets in especially rural Japan.
As an Icelander, I thought it remarkable that the first thing Matthew thought of was Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It’s similiar to a Dane asking Icelanders to do a project and the first thing "we" (Icelanders) would think of was "we were under their rule for so long". You know that this is such old baggage that it is difficult to shed. I found the work interesting to observe from an Icelander’s point of view.
As an Icelander, I found it strange that five minutes earlier they [the American general] had been bombing them [the Japanese] to pieces and then they thank him oh so much
This was one of the reasons why I asked Will Oldham to sing. He is of course an American and even though he is from my generation and it is so long ago since these things happened, there is still this baggage. You know he was just born in some country called the United States and wakes up in the morning and starts to compose a song and in spite of this, he carries around all this baggage - strange.
I did, you know, just what you do, you go on Google and you just order all the CDs you can find in the world, which actually aren’t that many. And I found out very quickly that the person that was almost on her own reviving that instrument - it almost wasn’t being used anymore - it’s a Japanese woman who’s sort of my age, called Mayumi Miyata.
It was tricky because when I sat down and it was of course, "Okay, now I’m doing a Japanese film score, okay..." And then part of me doesn’t like that sort of stuff because coming from Iceland I’ve always been treated as this exotic elf, which I never really got, but there you go... And I sort of felt that maybe you’ve got countries in the world like the States and Great Britain and France and Germany who are sort of not exotic, and the rest of the world, which is probably 85%, is exotic. And South America’s exotic, and Africa’s exotic, and Asia’s exotic, and Iceland’s exotic, and probably Canada... no, probably not. [laughs]
So I didn’t want to sort of treat Japan like it’s been treated a lot, which is sort of this clichéd, kind of exotic-ness, and tons of shakuhatsi and, you know, that sort of stuff. So i wanted to treat it as an equal, as I would like if somebody from, I don’t know where, Bulgaria was making an Icelandic film soundtrack and they would ask me to collaborate. You know, how I would like to be treated, as an equal human being. "Let’s just write music. And okay, I happen to be Icelandic, but so what," you know ?
So when I started working with Mayumi I was very certain about that, that okay, she plays a 3,000 year old instrument, but she’s a very modern woman, and up for all sort of exciting stuff. Then one more Japanese thing that i thought was very important was the Noh singer, because it’s sort of the climax of the movie where the two main characters start removing each other’s legs and eventually become whales and swim away at the end of the movie. I think both me and the director felt it was very important that that was not violent. It was not literally about removing the leg, it was obviously poetic and more transformational, something shamanistic happening. So I felt it was very appropriate to actually use Noh music in that piece, but not like I would write something sort of influenced by Noh, which is kind of a bit weird.
But actually I got Matthew to write the words of the transformation and they got translated, which is a very very complicated and exciting affair because Noh music is very very disciplined. It’s one of the most restricted musical forms that I have at least come close to. And then we got Shiro Nomura which is probably one of the most respected Noh singers to sing it. So i felt, he’s presenting Noh music himself, nobody’s taking anything away from anybody.
When I ask Björk if Barney was pleased with her soundtrack for Drawing Restraint 9, her guard comes up immediately. She chooses her words carefully.
I haven’t asked him straight out like that, but I think I would have known along the way if he wasn’t happy with it. He says, ’Give me some aggressive shit,’ and I say, ’Okay, I get it.’ I go to my studio, he leaves me to it, I bring the music to him and it’s spot on. That only happens when you know a person really well.
It was really exciting for me because I was obsessed with Japan as a teenager, and then I was doing what sort of teenagers do : I was reading books on Zen Buddhism, wearing kimonos, eating sushi, and reading, you know, Machine Man, something like that. I decided since I’ve got so little time, I’ve got to build on that. You know, that was twenty years ago, because that’s something that’s brewed inside me for a while and got layers to it. Just kind of more like what I like music to be, something not superficial or surface stuff, but like something that’s integrated within you for a long time.
And then, somehow, to sort of connect with that and also to read something I’ve never read, though it was also a bit fresh for me, was the Shinto stuff. And that actually ended up being really really helpful because I realized that that’s maybe the reason why I felt there’s similarities between Iceland and Japan, because they’ve got this kind of pagan religion that is still in the country. You know, we’ve got technology, but when Buddhism came to Japan in the year 800 I think it was the only Asian country that didn’t sort of erase whatever nature pagan religion there was there before. You know, kind of what the English did to the Druids or whatever when Christianity came. That didn’t happen in Japan, and it didn’t happen in Iceland as well, but because of a totally other set of reasons. So I started off doing the Shinto thing, then from that I found the Sho - the instrument.
it’s basically a set of seventeen pipes from bamboo that can only be picked from a roof that’s been above a kitchen for one hundred years. Something about the type of moisture in the wood. And then they pick seventeen pipes and they place them in the shape of the wings of a phoenix bird.
So the length of the pipes goes purely by aesthetics, so it’s got nothing to with what notes you need. But actually two of them don’t work, because some emperor didn’t like them. So you’ve got actually fifteen notes that cover two octaves, but it’s kind of random which notes are missing. So you’ve sort of got three notes and one note missing, and one note and one note missing.
One fan website has already cited her project with Barney as worrying proof that "she’s going a bit Yoko Ono." Did she and her husband have any misgivings about collaboration ?
I guess we had some worries. When we first met one of the first things we said to each other was, ’Let’s never work together.’ We just wanted that boyfriend/girlfriend thing ; that was the priority. But in the end it was easier to do a project together than not. We were going to the same places, meeting the same people, and listening to the same music. In a funny way, the soundtrack and screenplay for this movie is based on those shared experiences, but knowing Matthew I’m sure there are 20 other layers of meaning I’m not aware of.
For those two pieces, it was really liberating to have what was basically a 20-piece orchestra and be able to write five parts for each piece, so in a way you’ve got 100 players on top of each other !
Oh, he sort of plays the prankster role. We have this guy in Icelandic mythology called Loki, and he’s a bit like that. He’s the wild card ; the character who fucks things up. The equivalent in the Tarot deck would be The Magician, I suppose.
Overall, I felt really funny about just copying Japanese culture and putting my name on it. I think it’s like what colonizers do — and coming from a place like Iceland, which was a colony of Denmark for 600 years, it’s something that I’m really sensitive to.
He ( Matthew ) was commissioned to make the film by the Kanazawa Museum Of Contemporary Art, and it’s been interesting for me as an Icelandic person to see how he’s dealt with that. Iceland doesn’t have any guilt baggage because we didn’t treat any country awfully during the Second World War. But for Matthew, a man who was born in San Francisco in 1967 - when he thinks of Japan the first thing that comes to mind is Hiroshima. It made me realise how complicated it is to be an intelligent white American male these days. That was one of the reasons I asked Will Oldham to sing ’Gratitude’. He and Matthew have that shared history. They sort of accept the guilt and sort of don’t, because there’s part of them that respects old-school American values from before the world wars and 9/11 and everything. They don’t want to associate themselves with a lot of American stuff, but are forced to in a way. I thought getting an American to sing the song rather than a Japanese person gave it more power. I mean, why on earth would the Japanese thank MacArthur when the US had just bombed them ?"
A fair and beautiful scene. Up on the deck they cut open the whale, while we cut each other up in the wedding room.
There is no sign of pain on your faces. Everything is very calm.
It’s a poetic transformation, more likely in a fairy tale. And in addition to that you hear gentle Noh chanting. There are always creatures from other worlds in the Noh theatre, humans turn into spiders ; and the core of every play is how to get into another world. From this point of view, the mutilation has nothing gross to it, it’s part of the redeeming metamorphosis. When we cut each other, the cut open flesh is already not human anymore. It’s white, like a whale’s. The legs fall off, we grow fetus-like tails, then we turn into whales and swim towards Antarctica. You’ll do that too one day, when you wake up as a whale. (laughs and hums to herself a bit)
General MacArthur noticed that the bombings did not only kill and melt many people but for many years the conditions were difficult. There was unemployment and for many years people starved. There was no food or anything.
He took matters into his own hands and convinced the Japanese to change their war ships into whale factories, something like freezing plants on the sea. He convinced the US government - there was some regret there which is uncommon among generals - to maybe revoke the whaling ban for them and so they went out to sea and hunted, and hunted, and hunted whale. They ate whale meat and made clothing out the whale skin and sold whale, everything was connected to the whale. And this helped the Japanese economy to recover.
And then the Japanese, like they are, started sending thousand and thousands of packages to the general - letters in childish English.
When Matthew came with the script it was obvious that, because he’s been commissioned to do a piece for Japan, he had to sort of start with the most sensitive subject, obviously the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing.
I guess his angle on it, being Matthew, was just a bit sort of not obvious and multi-layered, as usually, and so what he did was - I don’t know if you know this story, it’s a long story - at that time general MacArthur was the general in Japan for the US, and when he saw the aftermath of the bombing where it was not only all the people who died from radiation and all this stuff, it was also that there was no jobs, no places to work, no food and crazy starvation.
So what he did was he asked the US government to lift off the ban of whaling, and then he approached the Japanese people and asked them to change their huge huge warships, that they had nothing to do with at that point, and change them into whaling factories. And this was done and the area, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, was totally revived and they were selling a lot of whale, and eating whale, and wearing whale, and doing everything whale. It’s basically what got them going back to being, you know, normal, or whatever you call it - at least surviving.
And Japanese people, being Japanese people, they started sending like thousands of presents and letters ; thank you letters. "Thanks for lifting off the ban of whaling," and, "You’ve revived our community," sort of making him almost into a saint, which is obviously a bit peculiar since like almost five minutes earlier, um...
- They destroyed everyone.
They’re the ones who put the bombs there in the first place ! So, Matthew felt that a US person should sing the letter. He found the actual letters that the Japanese sent general MacArthur. And Matthew felt that an American person should sing the words. And we went through, and I think Matthew was very keen on Dolly Parton to do it. And I was trying to work out why, because Matthew’s a mysterious kind of guy. He usually doesn’t know why he wants to do things, he just wants to do them. And I felt maybe it was because she was alive when these events happen, so maybe she could be a spokesperson for all that.
How did you feel about Dolly Parton singing one of your songs ?
I mean, I was thrilled ! I’ve actually asked her before and we’ve talked about doing something together at some point. I think she’s amazing, I’m like her biggest fan. But somehow my gut was saying it should be Matthew’s voice, you know.
Because I just found it really interesting, the last five years living in the States half my time, what’s happening with this Bush-thing, and people, especially my generation and younger, not being particularly proud of what the US stands for. And it’s sort of quite complicated to be a US male these days, you know ? You’ve got like this guilt of your ancestors on your back, and you’re still trying to be free and creative.
And it’s kind of interesting how people tackle it, and I felt that maybe in many ways Will Oldham and Matthew have maybe tackled it in a similar way. They’re not gonna do it by the book, and it’s a bit slippery at times, and still they have a true love for real old school US values, you know.
He sings it very beatifully.
Yeah ! He’s an amazing amazing man. And he was incredible. The first time we sent him the letters through e-mail, and he was faced with singing quite peculiar words, like, "million year old fossil." I don’t think that’s in every pop song you hear.
It’s quite an unusual song in the way it stops and starts, and it seems very sectionalized. How did you actually record it ?
The stopping and starting is sort of how it was arranged, partly because when Matthew first described to me the song he wanted this section to be a box within a box. So he wanted it to be like wrapping up a present. Which is probably the reason why I ended up doing a music box version, because it should be like wrapping up a box inside a box, sort of thing.
So the sort of stopping and starting is kind of trying to exaggerate the, like, sparkles that come off this present that this woman is trying wrap up. So it’s actually a visual decision.
But I had quite a strict melody for Will Oldham to sing. And I sent it to him and he worked on it a lot, at home I think, and when he came to the studio he sang kind of his own version. He did change it, which was amazing. And he did it in one take. He just came and sang - one take. and then we went out drinking for six hours. So it’s just like the right balance of work and fun... nah, just kidding. [laughs]
The short deadlines imposed by working on Barney’s film were intimidating , but it turned out to actually be healthy for me to not be so decadent. And the result doesn’t sound hurried at all—it sounds languorous.
There’s very little dialogue in the film. You could speak to five different people and get five different interpretations. Matthew is first and last a sculptor. He invents his own mythology and looks at his movies as a way to tell the story of why his sculptures got made. It’s not something I would say, particularly, but some people compare his films to stuff like "Solaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky. You just have to enjoy Matthew’s films ; it’s not, ’Oh, what happens next ?’"
I live near the harbour in Reykjavik, and ships are being repaired all the time outside my window. I’ve expressed to Matthew many times that I’m obsessed with ships, and I thought it would be great to make some kind of ship symphony.
That was one of the first pieces I wrote before I saw any footage, and [Matthew] asked me if I could do like aggressive ship music, that basically the baddy in the movie was the hunter, the hunter ship that hunts the whales. And I have to say he did mention Jaws.’ [laughs]
So this is like the baddy music ?
This is like the baddy music.
It was fun to write. Out of all the pieces in this project it’s sort of maybe the piece i probably would never have done for myself. I wouldn’t have sat down and said, "Okay, now I’m gonna be just a bit megalomaniac, now I’m gonna get twenty brass players and they’re gonna make a piece that’s like fifteen minutes and there’s NO singing in it." And you know, it was kind of liberating to have this other agenda.
And presumably it was all scored out for the brass players.
Yeah, that’s how I work most of my stuff. Now actually I’ve become very attached to a program called Sibelius, which you basically have it in your laptop and then you have like sheet music, and then you have a mouse and you draw the notes on the sheet music.
So yeah, I did it. And I actually recorded it twice, funny enough, because first I was being very, I don’t know what, over-ambitious or something, because first I recorded it with six oboes, and I wanted it to be like an oboe techno song. And we worked in a studio in New York and it was a sort of environment that maybe I was not too familiar with, and everything was done really really quickly because everything’s so expensive there.
And after I listened to it I just felt it wasn’t really me music. And also I felt maybe the oboe techno band was maybe more a great idea but maybe not good in practice. Or maybe I’ll have to work on that bit and maybe it will come later, but...
Maybe a b-side on a single or something ?
Yeah... [laughs]
I quite like the idea of oboe techno. [laughs]
But then I went back to Iceland, where I just always go when things get too foreign for me and got a brass section there, where it’s not like this professional classical situation where everybody, you know... But it’s more like you hang out for a day with the people and you just go to a studio and it’s not so expensive.
So I just hand them out the sheet music but with no sort of words that say, "no volume," and "no speed," or like expressive stuff. so they’ll play once through, and after I’ll hear it I’ll go, "Okay, bar 57, make that more like that." And so basically I will make the decision on the expression and volume and speed in the room with them.
Now, are you considering the picture at this point, or do you not know where this is going in the picture ? Is the picture edited to what you do, how does that work ?
Well it was very different from piece to piece. For example, the brass stuff I recorded first and then it was edited to after I had done it, because the brass stuff was just so rhythmic that it was actually ideal to edit footage to.
Life can turn into music anytime. So I try to let the music creep into the frames imperceptible. There is this one scene where the Japanese girls dive for pearls. When they come back up again they breath in and out heavily and fast. And suddenly this multilayered sampled breathing becomes a song.
It was really exciting for me because I was obsessed with Japan as a teenager, and then I was doing what sort of teenagers do : I was reading books on Zen Buddhism, wearing kimonos, eating sushi, and reading, you know, Machine Man, something like that. I decided since I’ve got so little time, I’ve got to build on that. You know, that was twenty years ago, because that’s something that’s brewed inside me for a while and got layers to it.
Just kind of more like what I like music to be, something not superficial or surface stuff, but like something that’s integrated within you for a long time. And then, somehow, to sort of connect with that and also to read something I’ve never read, though it was also a bit fresh for me, was the Shinto stuff. And that actually ended up being really really helpful because I realized that that’s maybe the reason why I felt there’s similarities between Iceland and Japan, because they’ve got this kind of pagan religion that is still in the country.
You know, we’ve got technology, but when Buddhism came to Japan in the year 800 I think it was the only Asian country that didn’t sort of erase whatever nature pagan religion there was there before. You know, kind of what the English did to the Druids or whatever when Christianity came. That didn’t happen in Japan, and it didn’t happen in Iceland as well, but because of a totally other set of reasons.
I’ve decided not to go to like "concept"-something-whatever. I’ve just been in one song there’s vocals and one song is like a ravetrack and the other is kinda like a Noh singer, i’m just trusting my gut.
My last album was only vocal. I was very strict in my sounds, I had to do everything with vocals, no instruments allowed. So it had discipline before I even started. So on this one, I decided not to have any of that, because I felt I’d earned the freedom by five years of silence. It was time to kind of open the door.
When I do my own music, I obviously am very very very deeply concerned that the music I do, that the root is from me, the trunk is from me, the branches are from me - that it’s not borrowed from anywhere else.
Now that I’m doing music that’s set in Japan, Matthew wants the music to be based on original ancient Japanese music. I kind of got a license to go a lot further in basing something on something that musically already exists, than I would ever do for my own albums.
There’s that fine line between using something and making it yours.
I’ve been doing a lot of just layers of my own voice. Kind of attempting to do an oceanic landscape with my voice, since the whole movie happens out on the ocean, instead of having me as a narrator.
If you would ask him what he did for a living he would say sculptor. In the movie he allows himself to create a mythology of how the sculptures were created.
Matthew’s stories are the sort of type that you don’t go "Once upon a time..." and the whole story comes out, it’s just so many layers. I think it’s to do also with, to drop that analytical mind and not insist on an explanation.
All Noh theatre pieces are always about how you enter the other world, and there’s always a spirit that comes, and the samurais change into a giant spider or something, so it’s quite appropriate.
I want closeness, and I want contact. I want a middle. And that was one of the fun things about doing this project : There is no middle. I’m a ‘narrative, narrative, narrative’ kind of character, and Matthew is a ‘no narrative, no narrative, no narrative’ kind of person. I knew from the beginning that we had opposite views, and the challenge was to unite them and prove that they’re the same thing.
Matthew and I talked about [the score] a lot, and we spent a month in the south of Japan last November. But what I did most as a preparation was to read a lot of books on the Shinto religion. Probably the biggest influence from this was how I approached the spacing of the sounds on the CD. There are a lot of silences, and each sound gets a lot of space. That came from learning about the Shinto way, where each object is given its own respect and its own space.
Most of the time we were looking at the picture while we were doing the music — especially the final touches. Sound and picture are on the same page in the computer, so you can rewind as many times as you want, move parts around, and use ’slo-mo’ and precisely place something. It’s just easy to operate.
At this stage in your career, are you concerned at all by critical reactions to your albums ? You’ve reached a status where records will sell regardless of any in-print negativity, that much’s obvious, but on a personal, artist level, have you ever been affected by anything written about one/some of your past albums ? Although it’s not a solo album in a strict sense, the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack album (of 2005) was met with a rather mixed reception, for example…
With Drawing Restraint 9, because it was a soundtrack album, it was such a different project – to enjoy it you kinda had to be into Matthew [Barney]’s stuff, the filmmaker, and see the film as you listened to the music. So I didn’t really take the comments on it that seriously. Also, there are complications where people listen to it in context to my earlier stuff and try to find continuity, which of course doesn’t make sense. But overall I don’t believe in the artist that does what he or she does only for power and people, and to be famous and all that stuff. I also think, though, that it is just as bad to totally isolate yourself from the world and people – then the love starts to go out of it. So I try to be somewhere in the middle ; there is no one answer. You have to tightrope walk all the time, to keep yourself open enough to communicate and retreat enough to plant new seeds and grow.
A lot of the pieces in this movie, because I’ve been hanging out with the director quite a lot, the last five years, that when you know you have so little time the reason I decided to do it anyway was because I knew we had planted a lot of seeds the last five years, just kind of casual stuff that I could go into.
I live by the harbor in Iceland and see ships repaired there all the time, and I told Matthew many times that it would be lovely to make some sort of ship music, you know. And he kind of obviously knew that and then he makes a movie about ships.
The original performances were a pretty analog experience, but I worked on this a lot in Pro Tools. Whatever Leila was doing had also leaked into my microphone, so you had to basically do crossfades to blend the vocal and effects. I think there are ten edits in it, using maybe six or seven concerts. We could have gone back into the studio and recorded it again, but I wanted that live, urgent feeling, because the majority of the movie is very subdued. I thought the mood needed that kind of raw energy.
That’s actually a piece that has a bit of a story. I am stubborn when I write songs that I sometimes don’t find the right place, you know, and I wait for the right moment, and am protective of them like children.
Like for example "Army Of Me," that came out in ’95 on Post that I wrote with Graham Massey in ’91 or ’92. So in theory it could have gone on Debut, which is an album I did two years before, but it just didn’t belong in that family.
So the "Storm" song is a song I did write before with Leila Arab, and was written with Medúlla in mind. I told Leila that I wanted to do a vocal-only album, so she did sample, and I basically sampled my voice. Both stuff I had sung before, but also while I was singing she would both put my voice through effects and also repeat and loop stuff.
Actually this is an edit because we did perform this on the tour I did, the so-called ’greatest hits’ tour, and I recorded all the versions from seventeen countries, so actually this is a live performance. So all the decisions are done live. But then for this movie I edited together from five concerts for it to fit this particular image. So it’s a very peculiar mixture of something that is very very live and raw, and very very edited.
I am no art critic or anything. But for me it symbolizes vital self-restraint or limitation. In the beginning a staff sticks inside "The Field". When it is removed the sculpture runs apart, everything is afloat. This is the theme of the movie : the insolvable tension between limitation and freedom. Without discipline there can be no creativity. Without form or limitation everything falls apart.
There is not just a sculpture on the floor but a story - when this young woman came and turned into an animal and then she went through a circle and then something fell from the air and went up and flew through something else - I am just making this up - talking nonsense - and then you see the picture of it - the film - and then you see the sculpture and this mythology which is the other half of the story and he greatly emphasizes that so in the film you can see a collection of sculptures being made by characters that are all somehow connected. You know this is more like when you read mythology. [Matthew]is making homemade mythology.
All Noh theatre pieces are always about how you enter the other world, and there’s always a spirit that comes, and the samurais change into a giant spider or something, so it’s quite appropriate. But for the rest of the music, I have to say, I thought the Japanese-ness should rather be that emotional state that I was hungry for when I was a teenager, when I was reading those books, and I guess kind of searching for some sort of minimalism, for lack of a better word, or sort of meditative state. And maybe Shinto also is very much about placement of things, and that when I put a glass on the table I put it in respect of the other glass on the table, and that with two musical notes there’s that respect for each other and there’s actually a lot of silences, you know. And I think I try to approach Japanese-ness more from this angle.
It’s a very peculiar instrument, because it only has 15 notes. It’s very tricky to play, and for purely aesthetic reasons, it’s shaped a bit like your hands if you put them like this [makes praying gesture] . It fits in with the ’restraint’ theme of the album title very nicely, actually. After I met Mayumi, I had about two months to write for her. So it was a lot of research, a lot of Google.
Did she have a go on the sho herself ?
Well, I asked Mayumi, but she looked at me like, are you kidding ? There is no fucking way you are gonna be able to play this. Full respect, though : it’s very personal and part of a unique tradition.
I just took the train out to Montauk on my own and sat there in a hotel and wrote the sho pieces in the space of a week.
She then recruited the instrument’s virtuoso, Mayumi Miyata, to perform them.
I listened to everything she had done, and it encouraged me to do the opposite. I was wary of the Japanese stereotypes, and I didn’t want it to sound like some New Age meditation CD.
I started off doing the Shinto thing, then from that i found the Sho : the instrument.
It’s like sort of a Japanese mouth organ, it looks like a sort of beehive, is that the one ?
Yeah, and it’s basically a set of seventeen pipes from bamboo that can only be picked from a roof that’s been above a kitchen for one hundred years. Something about the type of moisture in the wood. And then they pick seventeen pipes and they place them in the shape of the wings of a phoenix bird.
So the length of the pipes goes purely by aesthetics, so it’s got nothing to with what notes you need. But actually two of them don’t work, because some emperor didn’t like them. So you’ve got actually fifteen notes that cover two octaves, but it’s kind of random which notes are missing. So you’ve sort of got three notes and one note missing, and one note and one note missing.
Did you study this instrument to write for it ?
I did, you know, just what you do : You go on Google and you just order all the CDs you can find in the world, which actually aren’t that many. And found out very quickly that the person that was almost on her own reviving that instrument - it almost wasn’t being used anymore - it’s a Japanese woman who’s sort of my age, called Mayumi Miyata.
I guess what was surprising was how much like a game it is, like chess or something. How you hold the objects, with what finger, and where you go, and then you do this... It’s almost one of the tricks, because obviously one of the reasons why you have a tea ceremony is to get a vacation from the busy world, just to clear your mind.
Wagner invented film music. In Bayreuth he hid his musicians behind the orchestra wall so you would only see the singers. The music is hence invisible, just as it is in movies.
In a movie you only see something happening, the sound nestles to the frames. I wanted to take this one step further. The sound comes from the things you see. The ship starts to make sounds.
I recall when the first Greenpeace boats came to Iceland - people from Stuttgart or Frankfurt, areas that were rotten and destroyed. They got out of their boats, onto our clean seaside and explained to us how we had to treat nature. I found them rather weird. Back then, the Germans worked together with the Danish - Greenpeace folks from Copenhagen went to Greenland and told the Inuit to stop hunting seals. What are the people up there supposed to eat ? Snow ? Do you mind if I continue eating my salad ? (laughs and hums while eating the salad)
Nothing. Wonderful. The film project is finished and as soon as this interview is over, I will go to Iceland for two months. Upcountry, just moss and wind. A tent, oat flakes, a creek, that’s all you need. And after that – no idea.
We have known eachother for about 5 years and talked about a lot of stuff, so such a big part of the project is so intuitive. We would go to Japan together and probably found it was a neutral place, that wasn’t the States, because it can be tricky for foreigners like me to be in the States sometimes... and it is tricky for foreigners to be in Iceland too... so it seemed like neutral ground, and I think maybe part of why when Kanisawa Museum asked Matthew to do the project, I can imagine him thinking"maybe this is the one that we do together.
Mark Bell and I sampled a lot of Japanese shakers, bells, and wood blocks that we picked up in Japan. So to start, I might record a track of me playing shakers, and then I would edit that in Pro Tools. I would try to keep longer regions, with movement in the sample — not just a single hit — so it sounds more organic.
Actually, when we met that was one of the first things we said to each other : ‘Let’s not work together. Fuck that. Let’s just enjoy the other stuff, though she has a reputation for “working with 50,000 people, these collaborations have grown out of extended friendships. “It’s about what’s between you, not two separate egos.“
Creatively, Matthew and I take opposite approaches that end in the same point. He enjoys restraint and discipline and thrives on it like a sportsman. Growing up, he had the athlete’s attitude to limits. I was in a punk band, ignoring all restraints and embracing freedom. I still seek those heightened moments of freedom in my work. He does it the other way around, if that makes sense.
It was tricky because when I sat down and it was of course, "Okay, now I’m doing a Japanese film score, okay..." And then part of me doesn’t like that sort of stuff because coming from Iceland I’ve always been treated as this exotic elf, which I never really got, but there you go... And I sort of felt that maybe you’ve got countries in the world like the States and Great Britain and France and Germany who are sort of not exotic, and the rest of the world, which is probably 85%, is exotic. And South America’s exotic, and Africa’s exotic, and Asia’s exotic, and Iceland’s exotic, and probably Canada... no, probably not. [laughs]
So I didn’t want to sort of treat Japan like it’s been treated a lot, which is sort of this clichéd, kind of exotic-ness, and tons of shakuhatsi and, you know, that sort of stuff. So i wanted to treat it as an equal, as I would like if somebody from, I don’t know where, Bulgaria was making an Icelandic film soundtrack and they would ask me to collaborate. You know, how I would like to be treated, as an equal human being. "Let’s just write music. And okay, I happen to be Icelandic, but so what," you know ?
So when I started working with Mayumi I was very certain about that. That okay, she plays a 3,000 year old instrument, but she’s a very modern woman, and up for all sort of exciting stuff. Then one more Japanese thing that i thought was very important was the Noh singer, because it’s sort of the climax of the movie where the two main characters start removing each other’s legs and eventually become whales and swim away at the end of the movie. I think both me and the director felt it was very important that that was not violent. It was not literally about removing the leg, it was obviously poetic and more transformational, something shamanistic happening.
So I felt it was very appropriate to actually use Noh music in that piece, but not like I would write something sort of influenced by Noh, which is kind of a bit weird.
But actually I got Matthew to write the words of the transformation and they got translated, which is a very very complicated and exciting affair because Noh music is very very disciplined. It’s one of the most restricted musical forms that I have at least come close to.
And then we got Shiro Nomura which is probably one of the most respected Noh singers to sing it. So I felt, he’s presenting Noh music himself, nobody’s taking anything away from anybody.
All Noh theatre pieces are always about how you enter the other world, and there’s always a spirit that comes, and the samurais change into a giant spider or something, so it’s quite appropriate.
But for the rest of the music, I have to say, I thought the Japanese-ness should rather be that emotional state that I was hungry for when I was a teenager, when I was reading those books, and I guess kind of searching for some sort of minimalism, for lack of a better word, or sort of meditative state.
And maybe Shinto also is very much about placement of things, and that when I put a glass on the table I put it in respect of the other glass on the table, and that with two musical notes there’s that respect for each other and there’s actually a lot of silences, you know. And I think I try to approach Japanese-ness more from this angle.
