Quotes

I’m not sure if ’Hope’ is about feminism. It is trying to understand how a pregnant suicide bomber feels, more than about he cause she is fighting for. I don’t take a stand politically. I write about emotion.

With the humour, I said it a few times now but it’s strange because I think it would be obvious. I think eight out of 10 of my lyrics are like self-parody. Most of my friends I’ve had for like 20 years know this but I think when you talk about me in the context of other pop, things go a bit pear-shaped. It’s all supposed to be very serious and there is just not a lot of room for humour. I also so think it’s the times. Things are very conservative in the Bush years. Unfortunately, the older I get the more I realise that the President does have a lot of influence culturally across the world. It’s a pain in the ass but it’s true.

I just think it’s a fear of death. People don’t want to be deep, it has to be superficial so it’s dressing in armour with black sunglasses, very cool, but not revealing, not thinking. But you know, people may misunderstand me but that’s OK, I get enough appreciation. But I hope that when Bush leaves people will loosen up a little bit.

I am actually quite conservative about a lot of things. People only seem to see me as weird but there are a lot of things about me that have never changed. People also seem to notice the difference in my albums, that each one is totally different, which is only partly true. There are many connections on Volta to two points in my musical life : when I was in KUKL between 1982 and 1984, and the electronic years 1992-1994. Those are the two most cathartic music styles for me — the cacophonic energy of KUKL and the trance-like fuel of rave. Things go in circles like that. “Wanderlust,“ for example, is a sort of continuity of “Hyperballad.“ When Timbaland came up with the beat for “Earth Intruders“ it reminded me of KUKL’s years. But I don’t think of it so much as being nostalgic. It’s sort of weaving in time. Life is just like that, nothing to do with me really. It is not like I have a choice. But I feel it is OK to have a couple of reference points like that from the past if its purpose is to catapult you into the future. You just have to add stuff to it.

On ’Innocence,’ you sing about embracing and even enjoying fear. What is it that you fear ?

Fear of losing energy. Sometimes, when I have a lot of ideas and I want to do a lot of things, or when I’m traveling, I lose energy and I can’t do as many things as I want. So I have to plan days when I’m not doing anything. I find that a bit boring, but it’s necessary.

While making the album, I read Leonard Shlain’s book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,“ which propounds a theory of history shifting between dominant brain hemispheres : right and left, image and word, intuition and logic, natural and manmade. It doesn’t have to be right ; it’s just an interesting speculation.

I didn’t start off with a musical rule. It was more emotion. I asked myself : Are you playing it safe here ? Are you actually being impulsive or are you totally subconsciously planning every moment ? Are you really allowing enough space for accidents to happen ?

On Declare Independence, Earth Intruders and Innocence, I did something I haven’t done for like 10 years. I wrote the melody line on top of a rhythm. Usually the melody comes first, then string and brass arrangements and so on, and then the beats are done last.

I was working for a few years with the luxury of having a laptop and not having to be in studios.If you’re having a child, it’s very convenient, you travel a little bit and you work a little bit, so you don’t have to leave, you know ? So my driving force for the beginning of this album was maybe I had a little bit of cabin fever. My girl was going to kindergarten, so I was ready to get out a little bit.

I started doing upbeat stuff [on computers], but it wasn’t until the end when I managed to make a family out of all the beats, unify them. Then I asked Chris Corsano and Brian Chippendale to play [drums]. They spent a day each improvising on all of the tracks, and I then spent a month editing and looping [parts] into the final stage. We used most of the beats. The ones we threw away were the white noise, static. ... They sounded too pretentious for this album. The beats weren’t meant to be too clever. They had to be impulsive. So they ended up being a mix of tribal acoustic rhythms and lo-fi drum machines.

It’s like I’ve got my body back, all the muscles and all the blood and all the bones. It is definitely in your face, but I feel it overall as being quite happy.

Have you seen images of the location in Ferropolis, where Melt ! takes place and have you already heard of it prior and if yes, did it influence your decision to perform there ?

I almost knew nothing about the location. We were looking for a fitting place to perform in Germany, because the Volta tour still hasn’t been there yet. In between i googled the location and was very impressed by it.

Why do you only play one show in Germany ? What made you decide to choose Melt ! Festival for this exclusive performance ?

Things simply developed that way, the line-up, being near Berlin, the date.

I definitely missed my rhythms. I mean, I love rhythms. I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14 and I was the drummer, not the singer. I’m very, very, very picky when it comes to rhythms. So it was fun to approach it from another angle on this one.

I guess that particular song I wrote to my son. It was one of the first songs I wrote for this album. I bought a clavichord, which is a plucked string instrument from medieval times. It’s quite unusual because when you press the notes you can keep on pressing them and make it do vibrato. So it goes like, "Drrrrung ung ung ung ung..." That kind of stuff. I wrote it on that and had already sung the vocals that Antony’s singing there. So we ended up for whatever reasons in my cabin in the mountains, and I asked him if he would replace those vocals. Because it’s sort of a conversation with myself, about my teenage son and how proper mad it is for grown-ups to let go of their children. For me it’s really like slapstick comedy, because they’re really good about it, but the parents are really clumsy, they just don’t know how to let go. So Antony’s kind of being Jiminy Cricket and I’m Pinnochio. And he’s saying, "You did your best, don’t worry about it, your intention was pure, you meant the best possible way." So that’s how it ended up.

You sort of let go too much when [your children] they’re 14. And then suddenly when they’re 16, you behave again like they’re 8. And then when they’re 18, you think they can fly across the world on their own. And then when they’re 20, you tell them off because they’re wearing a dirty jacket. It’s clumsy.

The world of experimental pop is one of great freedom and celebrations of sonic juxtapositions ; if you listen to Björk’s I See Who You Are from her album Volta, you hear Min Xiao-Fen, the Chinese pipa player, unfolding long tremolo lines over a syncopated but buoyant electronic beat. Later, at a darker turn in the song ("Later this century / when you and I have become corpses"), a brass choir creeps into the background, distant and ominous. This is not, however, east-meets-west "fusion" anything, but instead, Björk’s compositional agenda at work ; the pipa was the right vessel to carry the emotional content of the song, and so it appears in that spirit. The brass choir slides in to underline the lyrics ; you see it in Mahler, you see it in Brahms, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t see it here.

What motivates you in selecting the few songs from your wide range of music when you perform in concert ? Are there particular sounds and instruments that you value above others for large outdoor performances ?

Well on each tour you have certain musical instruments. On this tour I have 10 brass players, a drummer, a keyboardist and two guys on electronics. So I have gone to my eight albums and picked the songs that will suit best. But probably at the core it is most motivated by an emotion. On this tour I was feeling quite festive, raw, tribal and muscular. So I picked those kinda songs.

I try to take in the place, the moment, what mood everybody is in, what shape the room is, what’s going to sound good.

When people describe me as girlish, I’m never happy about it, put it that way. But I’ve been in this long enough to know that what I do and how people perceive it is different. And I think Alice in Wonderland might be a side to all of us, which we like to keep pure, a fantasy. The Del Toro film ( Pan’s Labyrinth ) - I was surprised by the girl character. She’s so determined by her fantasy world that it was real right to the end. It really got me. I walked straight home and wrote ’Pneumonia’.

Other songs are messages to herself. The elegiac “Pneumonia“ uses only French horns, building up slow-motion chords behind Björk’s voice, as she reflects on a bout of pneumonia she had in January and on whether she had made herself too isolated : “All the moments you should have embraced/All the moments you should have not locked up.“

Björk says she wrote the song at the piano in one take, after seeing the film "Pan’s Labyrinth" — and after having pneumonia for two weeks.

There is a physical sadness to wheezing away with that disease. That, coupled with the determination of the little girl in that film to believe in her imagination, whatever it took, even though no one believed her, struck a chord with me.

A few days later, the song was recorded with seven horn players.

I had just seen ’Pan’s Labyrinth’ and I had two weeks of pneumonia. It was really frustrating because I was trying to finish my album. I just had to sing one song and I had several choices of what would be the last song on the album. I try not to take antibiotics, but then I gave up after two weeks and took them and immediately got better. So, I went and saw the movie, came back home, and for the first time I wasn’t feeling quite as ill. I was feeling a little bit out of the thick of it. The song sort of came out of one take and ended up being that last song on the album. The album needed to go to that sort of emotional, soulful place.

Volta wasn’t so techno. The only thing I remember [in preparation for the album] is that we spent some time doing show-off, kinda filigree Pro Tools beats à la Vespertine [Elektra, 2001], but we threw them all in the bin. They were just too pretentious for this album. The beats had to be effortless, primitive, lo-fi style.

We try to take in how everyone is feeling in the band. Our first show here (in South America) - an hour before we played, our keyboard player found out that his father had died, so the show was really sombre and quiet. It was one of my favourite shows of the tour. But then three days later we played a completely different show, totally different songs and some people who saw both shows couldn’t believe it was the same band.

There wasn’t any precise event—just tiredness. I had just finished recording three albums in my room, after having discovered that it was possible to work with a laptop—and maybe I abused this. For me, it’s wonderful to record at my own rhythm in my privacy. That allowed me to both work and have a baby ; I hired a babysitter and had a sound engineer at home at the same time, so I was going from one to the other. But after a while, I started to suffocate, to feel secluded. It was time for me to go out, to meet people, to become a bit more physical again. I had to put myself in danger and let the unknown come back to me. For months, while I was breastfeeding, I didn’t see any further than the top of my breast (laughs)…

I guess it was in Autumn 2005 after I spent a year working on a soundtrack album. I finished that in spring, and then I decided to take two months off, just camping in Iceland, doing nothing. Then I just started coming in — I’m lucky because I work at home, so it’s not like I’m sitting a nine to five or something. If an idea comes, I document it. And then I just mind my own business, you know. I mean, always in the beginning of the writing process, you just kind of have to do other totally different stuff, and you never know when an idea’s going to arrive, and it just sort of arrives. And sometimes a week or two will pass without anything really. So, it’s not like it was literally, "Okay, it’s first of September," sit down in front of a desk and, "NOW !" [laughs] That’s sort of where it started.

I started on a new rhythm discovery trip with Volta, that I feel I have just begun

I had made two albums at home at that point, had a child, breastfed and so on - which was all very magical, domestic bliss. But in the beginning of Volta I had a bit of cabin fever and was up for some adventure. So I ended up travelling a lot, meeting a lot of people, recording in Africa, on a boat and so on.

I needed, like every time, about a year and a half. I need months because most of the time I do nothing at all. I have the privilege of being my own boss ; if I don’t feel inspired, I don’t work. Even before, when I was a teenager and I used to play in punk bands, I couldn’t stand wasting my time for the rehearsals. This makes music stiff and heavy. I’d show up at the studio, write a melody really fast, a structure, and then I was off. The other members from the Sugarcubes were constantly making fun of me because I always kept yawning all the time in the studio… That’s got to be why things so really fast when I find myself in the recording studio with guests/collaborators—I want these encounters to be intense and brief. Even if it means after, staying a year on my computer to cut, paste, reorganize... For me this work isn’t tedious ; it’s relaxing, like doing embroidery... It’s an ideal mix : rough, instinctive energy is on tape. For me to play with.

I was a bit confused first, because I got a lot of stuff of his and was maybe expecting him to arrange his noises. It ended up being quite a good thing for me, because apparently he never gives other people stuff and lets them complete it for him. So he actually trusted me to do that.

"Earth Intruders" was a 12-minute jam. I made a structure and shortened it into 3 1/2 minutes, and added Konono and Chris Corsano on top. I didn’t change Timbaland’s stuff, really. "Innocence" we edited more, exaggerated all the stops and starts, tightened it up, and I wrote the middle eight into it. ... "Hope" was just the beat. I then added the bass line and the structure. And then Toumani Diabate played on top. Many takes, which I edited in bundles. This album had to be raw and immediate, so I didn’t want to work too much on it.

This time, Björk chanced upon the twitchy, nervy avant-dance rhythms of Timbaland. What does the appeal of those beats say about us ? "Are you trying to say they’re Toxic ?" she laughs, referencing the Britney Spears single - and no, contrary to current rumours, Britney isn’t moving to Iceland to live with Björk.

I think there’s a lot of humour in those beats, unlike a lot of today’s rock’n’roll. I was so exhausted with rock as a teenager ; every aesthetic, even the minimalists like Philip Glass, come from that box, and I was really tired of it. The good thing about that beat thing you’re talking about is it establishes a new sort of blueprint. Maybe I was born 20 years too early..."

Coachella was our first show and it was a bit of a rehearsal. We were a bit wooden and nervous and I think we are more flexible now. We have rehearsed more songs now so every show is different. We can be calm and poetic and then we can be hooligans or we can do a mix of the two.

Coachella was probably a hooligan show because we were playing really late and it’s hard at a festival to play a lot of calm songs because people have been there a long time and the concentration is different so you end up playing a lot of hooligan songs.

For Post you were photographed in a London backstreet with 50 giant postcards being blown about by a wind machine. Now it would all be done on computers. Is something lost when everything becomes computerised ?

I don’t agree with you on that one.The Volta cover is a sculpture that took ages to make and I was inside it dancing during the shoot. There is nothing computer generated on that cover. I did way more stuff on computers visually ten years ago than now.

It’s supposed to be a humorous electro-pagan thing. Kinda neo-nature. If it stimulates the imagination of people : great. If it doesn’t : stagant.

The album artwork also has photos of you wearing tribal face paint and a crocheted costume. What are you trying to portray ?

Perhaps a more feminine version of the neo thing.

I still feel that the imaginary place that Volta is… I still have a long way to go to get there. But I feel like that with most projects. The good thing about that though is that during the year that is left — I’ll tour for another year — I will still have food for touring, videos, photo shoots and such. The album is only a piece of it all. I’ve recorded all the gigs so I will probably release live stuff. You’ll be able to see how it has changed. Songs like “Wanderlust“ for example have grown a lot since we started touring.

Has interaction – with the large band, the Konono percussionists, with co-vocalists like Antony – given you another way in to the material ?

Me and Antony had to develop a new way of singing it on stage. It took a few runs. But at the Harlem Apollo we mashed it in ; took a different angle than the CD. It was fun, too, to play with Min Xiao Fen. She added a rawness to the song live. But overall, since I’ve been touring for so long, I’ m aware that the album version is often a work-in-progress, on purpose. So leave it that way. We still have a long way to go. I’ve always altered the songs live, all the way up to the last gig : new arrangements, overall molding of the thing. We noodle in hotel rooms and have long sound checks. We rotate 40 songs. It keeps the show alive. Stagnation’s less likely. I don’t decide on a set-list for each show until after sound check, see what sort of venue it is, what sort of mood we’re in. Be in the moment.

There were some misunderstandings created by the press that I was going to do a hip-hop album, ad then when that was not the case, some disappointment. But once that got cleared out — by the way, that was never, never my intention — everything has been good.

I haven’t read all the lyrics over yet. I’m still too close to the album and can’t see the whole picture. Especially with words. I’m better with music- I intuitively know the path of the piece and its sounds. More than anything I’m a real music enthusiast, I guess. I’m surprised that I ended up in the pop-star role because as a teenager I was the drummer in the band. I’m more of a nerd than a star. I didn’t do my first solo album until I was 27 ; I was quite happy being in bands until then.

If you look at the lyrics on a piece of paper, it’s not about politics. Not one politician is mentioned. As a singer-songwriter, what I do is write about how the human feels. You could call [this album] more personal politics — how a person, in their closest environment, has justice. That you’re not abused by your friends, or you’re not abusing your friends, or you’re not manipulating anybody and nobody is manipulating you. That you are making people laugh or people are making you laugh. Maybe on this album I got quite interested in justice. I wanted justice for people. For example, the track ’Declare Independence’ — the part about running on top of a mountain with a flag and a trumpet, and declaring independence. It could be about the girl next door or someone in a terrible marriage.

People interpret lyrics in different ways but most of the songs on Volta were definitely a reaction to the current state of the world. Seeing the number of suicide bombers increase and visiting Indonesia after the tsunami both stirred all kinds of emotions in me.

The Volta chapter is very much about justice. Justice for women, the female spirit, nature and people in need in general. Perhaps having a little girl influenced me in a way that I felt I needed to update, to educate myself on the state of things and how I was going to explain it to her.

Because I’d done two or three projects in a row that were quite serious, maybe I just needed to get that out of my system. All I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something really up. It’s about wanting to go out in the physical world and experience stuff.

After your last album, Medulla, you said that it was a reaction against what was happening in America after 9/11 and that your next album would be something to do with feminism. Is it ?

It’s funny because, in a way, you should always do interviews about your albums three years later, because I could talk really well about Medulla now, but I didn’t know jack shit about it after I had just done it. Looking back on Medulla I think it was also a reaction against this over importance of beats and the whole IDA [intellectual dance music] thing. It’s like "What beats are next ?" and all these programmers were contacting me and going, "Who’s she going to pick now ?" and it became like a fashion statement. So I was just like "l’m doing a vocal album !" Part of it was a rebellion against that so... [looks down, confused, then steels herself] but let’s move into the question because that was not the question... So what is Volta about ? I think it ended up being about the feminist thing a bit. I think having a daughter was a surprise te me how much affect it had on me, because I had a son [Sindri] before. l’ve heard other women describe how when they have a girl it opens up a channel, like the daughter, you and your mother and her mother and her mother. Suddenly it’s about this ancient link with your ancestors. But my mom was quite feminist and she was always preaching about this stuff at home and I was so bored by it, so I think I was just really interested in how she’s [Isadora] like, "Oh I wanna watch Cinderella all day" and all these Disney movies have them looking for their prince. I never realised how bad it is. I thought the `70s feminists changed it all... It’s such a big thing, the Volta thing, it even links into the Iraqi war and... I tell you what ; I read this book called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess [by Leonard Shlain] It’s all about the two hemispheres [of the brain] and before the alphabet came, Mother Nature was the Goddess and things were very fun and then in medieval times when they had print machines everybody for the first time was getting bibles to their own homes. So they switched people into their left [logic-driven] hemisphere. Then they just went out and burned people who were being more impulsive and in tune with nature like ’witches’ and women who were using natural medicine. For the sake of my daughter I was trying to bypass these thousands of years since the Bible happened. Maybe it was not such a good idea, organised religion. It’s very left hemisphere, religion, and il becomes stuck in conflict and arguing about things that are not that important. This record for me is about Mother Nature and a letter to my daughter. There’s one song on the record called "I See Who You Are" which is written for my daughter and another song called "Vertebrae by Vertebrae" where there s an image of the earth mother rising up from the grave like a zombie on ils back feet like "Raaaoooowwwww ! l’m back !" It’s almost like a fairytale to my daughter. So in that sense, Volta is about that.

I knew from the start I wanted the album to be bloody, physical and urgent. But then trying to work out how you do it is sometimes like solving a murder mystery thing. But that’s so fun. I love solving riddles. So this one got solved with the use of either tribal live drumming or 808s, 909s, the old-school drum machine noises. Or the mix of all those. The rhythms were actually some of the last things we worked on. The melodies, clavichord, the pipa and kora and the all the brass came first.

Volta is ... shaman, voodoo, and big strokes of red and neon colours. It’s harsh, almost brutal. It’s very physical, almost butch.

There are lots of different instruments on this album, from the African harp to pipe organs, but the thing that brings it all together is the rhythms. It’s been interesting to play these tracks live because to me they’re very earthy and paganistic. It there’s a recurring theme on Volta, it’s that we’re all part of the same tribe and we should start coming together and celebrating that.

This is really poetic too, but we’re made like nature. We’re made like mountains, made of the same elements, cells go in circles, whatever. And in this world, it’s easy to be on your own. That’s what Volta was about, and when I think of the world today, art, the internet, you know, EVERYTHING, it’s the same. The trick is to break that wall through and make a connection. And it’s hard. But I think that’s our challenge. For everyone !

Not political, not as I understand that word. It’s an emotional album ; it is about justice. ’Declare Independence’ could just as well be written to a girl in a bad relationship. It is not about party politics. I’m not sure if ’Hope’ is about feminism. It is trying to understand how a pregnant suicide bomber feels, more than about he cause she is fighting for. I don’t take a stand politically. I write about emotion.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no negative reaction from the audience that night. I’ve heard that I offended and upset a lot of people but I didn’t feel any hostility from the audience. I think the reaction has been completely blown out of all proportion. I didn’t give a long speech about human rights or suppressing overseas territory, I literally chanted the word Tibet three times at the end of the last song.

I think what I tapped into in Shanghai, without knowing it, is China’s determination to be the world’s next superpower. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the run-up to the Olympics because they’re still learning how to communicate with Western civilisation and I think having thousands of visitors who are used to freedom of speech will be a big challenge for China.

I think it was more about China’s sensitivity than my rebelliousness. When I was in Denmark I mentioned Greenland and The Faroe Islands and there wasn’t one complaint. In Shanghai I was just documenting an emotion that most people can relate to. I feel sorry for China, actually. The Olympics are coming and how will they deal with the protests there ?

Some newspapers said I screamed ‘Tibet ! Tibet !’, but if you watch it on YouTube you’ll see I just said it in a normal voice. There was no reaction in the room whatsoever ; it was only later that people started to complain. I think it was the Chinese government going on to teen websites. They were trying to speak the kids’ lingo and writing, ‘She’s not cool’, or whatever – I mean how sad is that ?

I’m always looking for a word that has some sort of energy. Usually the name just comes, from a newspaper or something. I had been working for a year on the record and no name. In the text, the name "voltage“ and "voodoo“ are mentioned, what I thought is overused. I’ve always tried to pick titles from latin or something. But I thought Volta… I can’t remember how it came up, but then I googled it and found out that it means a name of a scientist in Italy that discovered the battery, and also a river in Africa and a lake that has the name Lake Volta. And other stuff came in there. I’m not going to name anything but people can guess what it is. Also there is a dance that has this name. So I had many things for that name : dance, river and the battery. So okay- it fits.

I thought about calling the album ‘Voodoo’ or ‘Voltage,’ but both words felt too cliché. I liked the sound of ‘Volta’ best. It just sounds like energy.

I am looking forward to playing live. For every different sound world I’ve created a new band, and that’s been really exciting. Because for me, a record and live are two different things. But at the same time they’re both serving the same heart, so we should be loyal to that heart. I guess the last time I did that was for ’Vespertine,’ which was a long time ago for a tour in 2001-2002. And we ended up playing in opera houses with huge orchestras and choirs, with sort of 5.1 glitch rhythms, and speakers spread around the room. Then with ’Medúlla’ I didn’t do a tour, because for obvious reasons. There was like ten of me in a lot of the tracks, which would’ve been tricky. Obviously I did a ’Greatest Hits’ tour somewhere in there, but that felt a bit like cheating. But now I’m ready again.

So now I’m putting together a ten-piece brass section with ten Icelandic girls. And Mark Bell is coming with me on this tour, which he hasn’t done since ’97 on the ’Homogenic’ tour. Damien Taylor, and Chris Corsano the drummer, and Jónas Sen whose like an Icelandic Chinese concert pianist. And we’re sort of rehearsing right now as we speak, and I’m quite excited. I think to a certain degree I wrote this album thinking how it would be live, which is the first time I’ve ever done that. I mean, part of it feels really healthy because it balances at the end of the day. I started singing live when I was a little girl, and I did that for a long long time before I even became a studio buff. [laughs] It was later in my life that I became a studio buff. So it felt like this album would be a very live experience and not with 57,000 studio tricks

Is it true you’re designing your own stage set ?

Me, when I go to live gigs, I kind of want to exercise my ears. I’m not too excited about things being too crazy visually. You know, there’s not going to be groups of people doing aerobics, or you know... I also feel sometimes if you have huge screens with things happening — because it’s much easier for people to use their eyes than their ears, including myself. Like if there’s a TV on in the room, I can’t even listen to the people talking to me because I’m just looking at the TV screen. I kind of wanted it to be more an audio experience for people. I wanted it to be about the musicians and music, so I think the visuals are actually going to be minimal.

We’d almost planned the tour before the album release,because I was excited about forming the band and playing live and just physically being with the musicians around me and feeling it with my body, as opposed to being in a room and noodling with something forever, and putting musicians in a song that I’ve never actually physically met.

It’s quite spontaneous,. I like to exaggerate the atmosphere of a place : sometimes we [Björk plus musicians] play the more elegant songs, sometimes the hooligan ones. It varies.

I started with arranging my old stuff to brass,seeing what of it would work. A lot of the songs that were previously done with strings turned out even better with brass. Having a keyboardist means I can do songs with harpsichord, clavichord, celeste and voice only — the more lyrical side of my songs.

But having two guys on electronics and one drummer means that I can go as macho as it is possible for me (and) do the hooligan songs. The brass helps out, with that obviously being quite ’butch,’ but also makes it easy for me to do musically complex numbers. So overall the importance is on dynamism — really, really quiet songs and really, really loud ones.

Hilferty : Is each stop along the tour the same or tailored for each city ?

Bjork : We have 40 songs to choose from, so at sound check I will take in the shape of the room, the mood, the weather or what happened that day. I usually write the set list only like an hour before the show.

I feel Volta live is much better than the album so Volta the album is almost like the rehearsal before the tour. The tour is where it all comes alive. For example, Vespertine is the opposite, very delicate, pretty and miniature. This is the total opposite. There is a necessity for brutal things a lot of the time.

It’s been hard work but I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Visiting places like Peru, Lima, Bogota and Guadalajara for the first time was really exciting and I enjoyed going back to Australia and Asia because it’s been 12 years since I performed there. Back then, I only had a handful of musicians on stage with me. Now I have 15 musicians, including a ten-piece, female brass band from Reykjavik. When they’re not playing their instruments they wave flags and help make each show really huge and bombastic like a grand finale.

I don’t know if the audience would agree. But his definitely feels like my most theatrical tour. Aside from the costumes and the whole visual spectacle, the music is very celebratory and full on. I’d say 50 per cent of each set is from Volta and Medúlla and the other 50 per cent is older songs. I didn’t want to play the same songs night after night so we rehearsed 40-50 songs from Debut to Vespertine before the tour.

The travelling on this tour has been really tough. The only thing we have the time to do between shows is eat, sleep and travel. I’m an iPod shuffle girl so wherever I am I just press play and see what comes on.

Volta is about me trying to be larger than life, so I wanted it to be like that on tour as well as on record. You know, I hadn’t played outside UK for 12 years. And playing for the first time since the Homogenic tour with Mark Bell of LFO – we go way back. He produced 50% of Volta, and arranged the vocal-songs from Medulla for instruments too, so it was like a celebration of us really, which made the whole mood really, rah ! And that’s without these big, noisy songs that really call for a huge, huge band.

I like seeing the different reactions from the audience in different places. In South America, in Peru, they sing along really loudly and sometimes do counter-melodies I’ve never heard and they don’t even speak English that well. And they were louder than us ! Intricate things, really beautiful. In Brazil, they’re more into rhythms, picking up on polyrhythms. This song, Desired Constellations, there’s this 4/4 beat against this triplet thing, and they’re there in total sync. You wouldn’t get that in England ! In Italy they’re always singing along – [does Pavarotti impression] ’Weergh !’ They really do ! And in Germany they clap their hands perfect to the beat. I’m not a nationalist, not at all, but seeing those differences between cultures... it’s important to remember they’re there, I think, so you can play more for them.

You know what’s happening with the internet and how the music industry is being in general... to me, this feels like the last big tour I’ll do for a long time. I mean, for me, as well as everything else. My daughter’s going to school in the Autumn, and when I’m touring, I feel that. But also it might be the last time I can tour with a 15-piece band, given the money in the music industry. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just means what I have to do from now on has to be more lo-fi. So this feels like a grand finale of something.

With what kind of band do you perform this year and is there a certain concept for the shows ? Can one expect spectaculair costumes or unusual clothing from your part ?

There are 10 Icelandic girls who take on the brass instruments. Mark Bell and Damien Taylor control diverse electronic instruments. Chris Corsano plays drums/percussions and at keyboards Jónas Sen can be heard. If there is a concept it would be agressive and warriorlike, drenched in neon and barbarousness. But maybe i will surprise you and will wear something artless and boring.

The military thing was Michel’s idea. I was quite intrigued by using the costumes that we had been using live ; they’re very colorful, very happy. But for him, because of the whole thing with the string being the only part that’s in color, the costumes couldn’t scream for attention. So the military thing was something that we thought might help [the performers] blend into the background.

Like camouflage.

Yeah, that was kind of the idea. When I spoke to Michel, it was important to me that it was a live performance. And it was important to me that there wasn’t a hierarchy. That everyone be kind of equal. I never see myself in a position of controller, or as someone with authority, even though I happen to be on stage. So that was something I was quite sensitive about. That [the other performers] would be giving me as much energy as I was giving them, that it was an equal thing.

Well, quite literally, with the string, there’s an amazing exchange of energy.

That was one of the reasons we were all wearing the same thing. We’re supposed to be on the same level. If I was wearing some crazy colored dress it wouldn’t be balanced. But maybe— I haven’t really thought about this— but maybe you’re right, maybe it comes across as too military. It wasn’t military, it was more just about trying to make everybody equal. Having the clothes be neutral. I think we were more excited about the flags on everybody’s arms.

What is the significance of the flags ?

It’s Greenland’s flag and the Faroe Islands’ flag. Iceland became independent from Denmark 60 years ago. We were a colony for 600 years, and we were treated really badly, as all colonies are. And Greenland and the Faroe Islands are still part of Denmark. The song was partly written to those countries. In Iceland’s newspapers, there’s always some talk about the Faroe Islands and Greenland wanting independence, and Greenland seemed close, but then they found a lot of oil, and Denmark doesn’t want to let that go. If you were to go into a local bar and ask about Greenland and the Faroe Islands, people get very feisty. People are very supportive of Greenland and the Faroe Islands getting independence. I think that Greenland and the Faroe Islands have looked a lot to Iceland as an inspiration, the way we set up our bank systems, the way we became more and more independent.

And I thought it was hysterical to say to your friend who is having a lot of problems with his girlfriend, to just say ’Declare independence and raise your own flag.’ Maybe it’s just my silly sense of humor. But it’s definitely written to Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

I was so excited to be working with Michel again. We wanted to do something that was opposite from what we’d done before. The ["Declare Independence"] video is based on a live performance. It didn’t have a complicated narrative like our earlier videos have. It’s very immediate, because the song is quite punk. So we basically shot it and a week later they had edited it, and it was ready.

You’ve worked with Gondry quite a bit in the past, but it’s been over a decade since you’ve done a video together. Could you sense the ways in which you’ve both grown ? Was it a different experience working with him now ? Or did it feel familiar ?

I think it was both. The first videos he did— outside the low-budget stuff that he did for his own band— were all for me. So when I was working for him, I probably had a bit more experience than he did. But now, he’s gone and done movies and amazing videos with other people and I think he’s grown a lot. We’ve always kept in touch and we’ve become such great friends, so in a way, it was like nothing had changed. It’s great working with him, I think we’re quite excited about doing more stuff now. Not videos, but something else. I think we’re a very natural fit. It’s a very happy experience for both of us and very stimulating

When we did the competition for "Innocence", where all the fans sent in videos, they sent in like 400 videos. There were some that I thought were amazing, made by really talented visual people who had maybe never done this before, but they didn’t totally fit with the mood of "Innocence". So I contacted them and asked them if they would work together and do ["Dull Flame of Desire"]. In that song, we repeat the same verse over and over again. So I thought it would be interesting to have one verse presented by one director, and then the second by another director, and then the third by another. I had never done that before, and it was quite exciting.

We recorded our part in front of a green screen, and sent it by email to the directors, one in Japan, one in Spain, and one in France. They’re collaborating via email. I don’t know how long it will take. I was being pressured by my record company [to make videos] for the more up-tempo songs, but I have great love for "Dull Flame of Desire", and it was very emotionally special for me to make that with Antony. I thought this would be a good way of doing it.

I guess for this one I felt a bit sensitive about "Earth Intruders." Part of the imagery coming from the tsunami and Indonesia, part of it the dream and people with aids in Africa, and part of it ending up working with Timbaland. And me being an Icelandic person whose totally looking at things form the outside a lot of the time. Like how Timbaland flew to the recording session in a private jet. But just 200 years ago probably his ancestors were slaves, and good for him, he should be flying in private jets. You know, I’m not criticizing that for one second. Seeing black people in the US finally getting a little bit of respect for what they do. Like they’ve won three oscars or something, I can’t remember what it is. So that song is a little bit about that, and wanting to balance that power structure on the planet a little bit. [laughs]

It’s sort of a justice song. Like, "We want justice NOW !" So I ended up feeling "How on earth am I gonna do that visually ?" And I ended up finding an animator who’s French, but he was brought up in Africa, and did gorgeous cartoons. For example, one called Kirikou. I just think he portrays people with dark skin in a very on-level sort of way that is very equal. It’s not like the colony style that I think Africans are exhausted with, kind of like "Oh, I’ll kill the tiger and put its head on my wall", like it’s an exotic creature or something. I mean, me being from Iceland, I’ve never seen an elf in my life, but still 20 years later, everybody calls me "elfin" or whatever. So basically, (sorry it’s another long answer) Michel Ocelot is doing the video to this one. And it’s animated. And it’s about the Earth Intruders.

Hilferty : Why the contest ?

Bjork : I wanted to involve the fans, but in a way where they are making things just like me, not in a Bjork-worship kind of way.

Hilferty : What grabbed you about the winning video ?

Bjork : There were others that perhaps were more original ideas, but this one had emotional content. They had listened to the lyrics and there is an emotional transformation during the video. Also, it is very much in link with the music. So the winner was the one that ``married’’ the song best. Made sure the song and the video aren’t just two separate things but there is the chemistry to make sure that they are communicating.

I guess with innocence,it being quite a rythmic track, I could quite easily imagine like animation and quite sort of physical comedy coming into it . I was quite excited about the costume that I wore on the cover which I thought was quite "slapstick", so a mixture of all these things I thought of this idea, why not ask fans to do a video competition so they could use the costume I wore and do quite animated sort of rythm orientated stuff to it. And and to my surprise 400 or 500 videos turned up, and it was actually very tricky to pick and go through everything . So we ended up with like 11 videos that I thought were like great contenders to win and asked the fans again to help me to vote for these 11 ones. I think for me almost the all 11 won, almost won, but we had to pick one so, there you go, It was a very positive experience and a lot of enthusiasm and I’m very amazed about all the work that people put into it, and I go away more positive now when I drive on motorways or fly in airplanes. I look at houses in urban environements and think of all the exciting things that are happening inside them.

I always want to push things with videos, the visuals are just as important to the feel of what I’m trying to do. Like with my song Innocence – getting fans to listen to the song, make their own videos, send something to us. I liked the way we opened that out. And we got 400 videos ! It was a long process going through them, because it’s tricky to get right, you know – it’s not just about finding an original idea, it’s what works with the music, the beat, the feel. There’s got to be a mutual heart in sound and vision.

With Wanderlust too...that song’s the heart of the album. It’s a very restless heart that doesn’t want an origin, so the video had to fit that too. The song’s taking the piss a bit, it’s so intense – that’s my sense of humour, which people don’t get a lot. You know, that need for mad restlessness in the doubling up of words, like the song goes : "restless, restlessly".

Through my experience, I have found that if I don’t bring the visual counterpart of my songs, someone else will. So through the years, out of necessity, I have more and more gotten involved. This time around I was into some tribal neon stuff. To try to unite modern and tribal, put importance in freedom.

I guess it was really different from how I usually work. Because at least with Homogenic, Vespertine, and Medulla, if there was a starting point, it was rhythms. I don’t know why, maybe because it’s the thing that I don’t do. With Homogenic, I would start with a programmer, just to do distorted rock beats. And we did, I think, 100 just one bar things. And by the time I had written enough songs, I would just sit down, and then I could just sort of call it, ’okay, for the chorus of this song, like beat 73, and for the verse, number two’ or whatever. And for Vespertine, I had just gotten my first laptop, and it was very much about the static universe of the internet, and all the beats clicking and everything whispered. So that would be the starting point. And obviously, Medulla was a vocal album.

But with this one, it was different because I knew more emotionally what I wanted. And because I’d done two or three projects in a row that were quite serious, maybe I just needed to get that out of my system or something. So all I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up.

For some reason, for me it was maybe a little bit nostalgic going back to 1992, where you had really simple 808 and 909 really lo-fi drum machines, not doing anything fancy but really basic, almost like rave stuff or trance stuff, and then really, really acoustic drums. So there are a couple of tracks on this album which are actually programs, with many programming hours spent, and you listen to it, and it sounds like kettle drums or something.

Les cuivres tombent en grappes, et frappent à grands coups pour faire pénétrer leur dissonance anxiogène. « The beast is back » chante, puis crie, puis hurle, la diva. On prend peur, le sourire aux lèvres. L’intensité monte, toute carton-pâte qu’elle soit, réminiscente des talents de conteuse de Björk, et les boucles à suspens (tirées de la B.O. de Drawing Restraint 9) donnent la chaire de poule jusqu’à Bernard Herrmann.

"The Beast Is Back," where did that come from ?

It’s a long story. I hope I can squash it into a radio show, it’s a really long story. But part of it for me was having a daughter, because I had had a son before, and I heard from a lot of my friends that when you have a child the same sex as you suddenly a gate opens. Like I had a daughter, and suddenly I understood my mom better, and her mom, and her mom, and her mom. You get this kind of line. I’ve heard fathers say that about the first son they have, and they suddenly realize the relationship between them and their fathers, and back back back back. And suddenly you get this gate opening way to the beginning of mankind. And I started reading a lot of books sort of about that stuff, and again being slightly influenced the Iraq war, how organized religion is not a very good idea, for me at least. Like with what was happening before this organized religion thing happened, when we were more in touch with the right side of our brain, more intuitive and impulsive. Things like natural medicine, and wasn’t like you were a witch, and you weren’t burned. And this came into the fact of how I’m going to explain to my daughter stuff about women and their position in the world, and things that are pretty female. I mean, at the end of the day I still think we’re all both male and female, but...

But it sort of became this joke-song, kind of like a b-movie soundtrack to, "the Earth Mother, RISES back from the mud !" Like the earth goddess as a zombie. [laughs] And she’s going to go vertebrae by vertebrae, back on her hind legs, the beast is back ! Also taking a little piss on how scared organized religion is of nature, they’re just terrified. And I just find it so hilarious, I mean what’s so scary about it ? For example : the fact that in the year you have thirteen full moons, and women thirteen times a year become red. And they made the months into twelve months, and every year everybody’s still like, "Oh, is there 28 days in February, or 29, or...?" Everyday you have to calculate instead of just having it 28 days and thirteen months, I mean come on. It’s kind of stubborn with organized religion how it’s like, "No, we control, and we’re not part of nature, and we’re Christians !" Or whatever, Muslims, Jews, all that stuff. "We’re gonna act outside of all that, and we’re not gonna take part of all that." And I live in a flat in New York that happens to be on the twelfth floor, and there’s no thirteenth floor. There’s no thirteenth floor in all of the skyscrapers in Manhattan, and I’m like, "You’re not THAT scared of nature ?!" You know, ’Friday the 13th’ and nature is just like some horror movie. So basically this song is sort of the earth goddess rising up on her hind legs, grabbing a crayon, and crossing out all the fourteens in Manhattan and writing thirteen. The beast is back ! [laughs]

The drums on “Vertebrae by Vertebrae“ are equally compelling, a real rollercoaster of rhythm. Like most leaders, Björk knows when to farm out the work.

I have to give Damian Taylor credit for that. He is an amazing drum programmer. First, I tapped on a table sort of where the main accents should be. It is a tricky song because it is in 9/8. He then programmed a beat and used a white noise, static micropallet for the beats. I felt the pattern was right but the noises were wrong and suggested he should change it into a marching beat. He then used the same pattern but changed the noises and sprinkled some magic dust on top.

in hindsight, vertebrae by vertebrae, is probably about kundalini yoga,
which i started around this time and i still do
about the miracle of raising your spine and overbreathing
the sensations that come from this are miraculous !
soin my arrangement, i was aiming for maximum energy
kundalini means the snake in the spine
and the access to this recharges our hips
immensely

I’m guessing you’re part of your own marketing and shrewd at it as well. How much did you play into the viral promotion of Volta or create its PR ? Since your last records, YouTube and MySpace have grown up around you.

That’s another question I am not sure I totally understand. What do you mean with YouTube grown up around me ? Actually Volta’s the first project ever when I hired two publicists. Not because I wanted a mass thing happen but I was very aware of that, emotionally, this was a way more extrovert album than the couple before and I didn’t want things to feel stifled. Fluidity in communication, you know ?

I think we forget that we are animals, and I’ve been reading quite a lot about Christianity and how it tried to make us forget that we’re part of nature. There’s quite a lot about that in the lyrics on Volta. I wanted to celebrate nature and our bodies ; that’s why a lot of the rhythms on there are quite tribal.

Volta is definitely for me very related to post. Similarly scatterbrainy. Searching for new things.

Volta begins in impressively immediate style, with ‘Earth Intruders’ (lead single, review here) – was it important to you to lead with a track that’s almost completely different to what was on your preceding album, Medúlla ? Do you hear Volta as a ‘pop’ record, at least more so than Medúlla and even Vespertine ? (Your label) One Little Indian has implied that it’s your most commercial record to date…

One Little Indian are so cute. They always feel that ‘my latest release is the most commercial to date’. It’s good to know they have hope in me. But you’re right – emotionally I wanted this album to start with urgency, the sort of ‘go to the top of a mountain with a flag and a trumpet’ demand for justice. I really don’t know what is pop and what is not. The meaning of the word comes from folk, or people, and therefore I felt at moments that Medúlla being only done with the human voice, which we all have, [was something] that everybody could join in. I feel materialism has really distorted that word, and it has changed its meaning into ‘sellable’, not ‘music of the people, working-class style’.

It’s such a diverse album, is that the way things came together ?

It did. Especially with ’Medúlla’ I was working a lot in my house, and doing things that could be described musically as not looking in someone’s eye, sort of introverted. And on this album I was very into having every song looking in your eye, always craving for communication. I knew whether I wanted it to be a down track, an up track, everything, but as long as it was looking at you in the eye. I mean, from my point of view I don’t look at it as "aggressive." It is very confrontational in the sense it is always looking at you in the eye. But albums I did like ’Homogenic,’ which I did in ’97, was for me pretty aggressive. I had been under a lot of pressure, and it was kind of my answer to that, and a reaction that I had felt attacked in a certain way, and to attack back. But in this one I think is very vivid, and it’s definitely me at the top of my toes being as vibrant as I can be. But I don’t look at it as being "aggressive," I mean, it’s in your face, but I think it’s pretty healthy and pretty happy. At least compared to me. [laugh] Which is probably "sick" for other people... Nah, just kidding. [laugh]

I read somewhere that Timbaland said what he did for you was hip-hop. Do you agree with that ?

I’m not going to argue with him, but I don’t think so. Come on, I’m from Iceland ; I don’t do hip hop. But these guys see it differently. There was a documentary done on me many, many years ago ( ’Inside Bjork’ ) ,where there was an interview with Missy Elliot where she said Homogenic is hip-hop. And I’m like, ’Mmmmmm...?’ Do you know what I mean ?

There were some rather violent reactions to your last two albums, the challenging and fascinating Medúlla and Drawing Restraint 9. How was the making of Volta, a much more accessible record, a continuum or a reaction by you to those records ?

Medulla and Drawing Restraint 9 were very important albums for me to make. I don’t think I could have done Volta without having gone to these other places first. People overrate extrovert music, and introvert music is underrated. Personally I probably listen more to introvert music than extrovert. But I have been lucky, I’m not complaining. A lot of people’s favorite albums of mine are Vespertine and Medúlla. So, I guess I’m just going to continue on my little path. Some people will get it and some won’t.

I feel in a lot of ways Volta is Post 2. Very restless and sort of schizophrenic. Promiscuous in collaborations, but sincere. It’s consistent in its restlessness

Much of your work finds its way to the dancefloor. I know many who originally discovered your work through remixes. Do you have anything special planned for Volta remixes ?

I have asked a couple . And funnily enough , quite a lot of people have been asking me if they can remix . We’ll see what comes out of it .

Are you planning on releasing anything else related to Volta ? Are there more singles in the works ?

I think my record company in London, One Little Indian, wants to make a package where all the videos are included together with the live concerts. We filmed Paris, and we also filmed a concert here with a choir and a brass quartet, so it was a mixture of songs from Medúlla and Volta. Because I never really toured Medúlla so we never really filmed that. So I think there will be some wrapping up of everything from Volta in one box. Also remixes.

One of the reasons I have headspace on this album to take on issues like the Earth, suicide bombers and so on is possibly because all things are pretty good at home right now — as good as it gets.

I have periods when I’m hungry for something new. I’m quite hungry right now. And then I have periods when I’m more domestic. I kind of make fun of my hunger on the new album in a track called "Wanderlust." It’s about the state of looking for something and almost knowing you’re never going to find it

wanderlust
was written when i had bought a boat
and lived on it for a while
sailing between islands and cities
we were living in harbours for a while
where it was easy to fall in love
with the symphony of shiphorns
i put samples of them on a small midi drum kit
and was playing around
then got obsessed with morse code patterns
i got the wonderful girls in wonderbrass to play
(i recommend playing staccato morsecodes
on brass instruments if you are eager for lushious lips)

Is music getting too visual ? We could open a bottle of wine and talk about that for five hours. It’s like doing embroidery, like when I used to knit a lot as a teenager. You just sit and noodle all day and have a cup of tea and make pretty patterns.

Was there a statement in your working with African musicians, at a time when the West seems to be badly fumbling our responsibility to that continent ?

Yes, not so conscious though. I asked both Konono N°1 and Toumani Diabaté [to play] because of their brilliant musicianship and it was a coincidence they where both from Africa.

I guess we have mutual friends in New York, and we sort of got to know each other. He came to Iceland and did a gig there, and we ended up in a cabin in the mountains singing, and it slowly developed from there.

There are two songs on the album : one that I wrote to my son, where Antony’s voice is singing the part of the conscious, so it’s a little bit of his Jeremy Cricket to my Pinocchio, if you want. And on another song we’re singing a poem by Russian poet, and it’s very, very romantic. It’s the duet. We would spend a week in Jamaica and we would sing all the stuff over and over again. I guess we ended up singing quite quiet songs because maybe we were a little bit worried about stepping on each other’s toes, but then one morning I turned up with this song on the dictaphone, that I’ve written in the middle of the night, and thought “why don’t we just start it out like divas ?“ We can be proper Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand. We both sung into the same microphone, which was quite funny, because he’s a lot taller than me, so I had to stand on the chair.

We’ve got mutual friends in New York and it slowly developed. He came here to Iceland two or three years ago and did a gig. We ended up in my cabin in the moutains, singing. I never usually do that with people, really. It was just a one-off, a mutual admiration thing. But life is pretty magic like that. You just bump into people and have a lot to give to each other without any effort whatsoever, it’s just very natural.

We would hook up in New York also. I googled a studio in Jamaica and we decided with three days notice to go to a studio in Jamaica, probably because it was only a three hour flight from Manhattan. And we ended up swimming in the ocean, plucking fruits from the trees, singing all day. Which is sort of hilarious, because we’re both pretty much northern hemisphere creatures, with white skin and black clothes. It was a new experience for the both of us. We’d just sing over and over and over again. We sang a lot of sort of quiet stuff, whispering and humming, probably because we were too afraid of stepping on each other’s toes or something.

And then one morning I woke up and said, "Okay, enough of this wimpy stuff. We’re gonna blast it out like proper divas, and we’re gonna be Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand." And I had a melody that I had woken up with in the middle of night and written down. "Here’s the melody, and here’s the lyric." Just to liberate us, so we didn’t have to sing about ourselves. A hundred year poem by a Russian poet, a passionate love poem. "Let’s just sing this." We just sang all day, singing into the same microphone. Which is kind of hilarious because he’s so big, and I just sort of stand on this chair. And at the end of the day we both expressed that we had forgotten who was who. He was doing noises like I do sometimes, and I was doing noises like he does sometimes. That sort of sensation when you merge into one, for sure.

I started working with brass on Drawing Restraint 9. It was quite ambient or abstract, so when that project was done, I was excited about looping the brass into a more poplike manner. That developed into me doing a couple of brass arrangements for the songs I was working on, and [it] ended up on six songs on the album. It was so fun and possibly the area where I was most innocent on this album, the steepest learning curve. I had learned a lot from arranging the strings on earlier albums, but obviously it is a different animal. I was quite excited about doing techno brass in the rudest possible way. I used Sibelius to do this and had a guy called Matt Robertsson help me distribute the parts to the instruments. Then, similarly to the string stuff, I recorded them both as a group and separately and edited quite a lot afterwards.

This album, it’s funny, I went back to brass. I always do, on Debut, Homogenic...maybe because I still think I have a long way to go with brass. People think they are bold instruments, about power, that it’s this controlling army music, quite hard-edged. I think I prefer it more matt and warm and sort of human. You know, folky. Because I love trumpets, trombones, tubas, and the noise they make can be like a sad voice, a cry, a human uttering something. Brass has real power in that way when you use it right. Like on Wanderlust – making brass sound like ship flutes, something coming in, yearning for you.

( For Volta, she worked with Chris Corsano and Brian Chippendale )

"They are kind of the opposite sides of the same coin. Chris Corsano plays very butterfly, very light, and Brian Chippendale’s very ..." she scrunches up her face and mimes some furious drumming. . "I’ve never done this before, it was so fun - they didn’t hear any music beforehand, they just went in a room and heard a song and they just reacted to it. But they come from this scene where it’s all about improvisation and just jumping off a cliff every time."

When she first heard Konono No 1, she realised they were doing something entirely different. "There they were doing electronic music, but it wasn’t to that grid, so all the electronic nerds like me went berserk when that record came out. I knew I wanted to work with them."

Very early, I was into the idea of doing something with Konono No 1 from the Congo [the collective whose amplified thumb pianos provide the backing beat for Earth Intruders]. The sound they make is amazing – it’s like an electronic rhythm not stuck to a computer grid, which is very rare. I couldn’t go to the Congo unfortunately as it was impossible to get visas – you know, it’s not a peaceful place. So when the group had their trip to Belgium, their first trip out of Africa, I had to meet them. We didn’t spend very much time together to be honest, but I would like to think that it was just the beginning of something.

Antony was perhaps the most organic (collaboration). I met him through friends and we gradually became friends. Timbaland and me had been aware of each other for a long time. I had met him 10 years ago and he complimented me on the bass line in Venus as a Boy ; then he sampled Joga, and through the years there have been talks about doing stuff.

Konono No. 1, I fell for after hearing their album that came out a couple of years ago. I just thought it was so amazing that they took thumb pianos and hooked them up with electricity, and then played many of them together - polyrhythms.

For an electro fanatic like me it is so rare to hear electronic rhythms that are in real time, not locked to a computer grid. It is just more organic and natural, like I feel electricity is anyway - a part of nature (thunder, lightning, northern lights and so on).

It was a mutual admiration thing going on, and over the years we had discussed working together one day. And [for Volta] we just sort of decided to go for it. It was a bit of a coincidence that last year was such a huge year for him, because we wrote songs together more than a year ago, and I didn’t really know what was coming. It wasn’t like I was desperate for the hottest producer. I just thought for a long time that we might be really, really different, but we have this tiny little section that we have in common. I guess I was just up for a bit of action in my music, and maybe that’s why this became sort of the moment where we decided to go for it

How did you connect with Timbaland ?

He sampled my song ’Jóga’ like 11 years ago, and said many times in the press that he really liked my song from 14 years ago called ’Venus as a Boy’. Actually, we recorded the string section in Bollywood for that, and he was really fascinated by that. We’ve met at parties and there has been this mutual admiration thing going on for years, and talk of doing stuff, but it never happened.

After doing two or three serious projects in a row, I was just like, ’Okay, where’s the fun ?’ I called him a year ago, and said, ’Let’s do something.’

What was it like working with him ?

That was very...very different. I work so much on my own, which I enjoy very much. 90% of every album is me editing on a computer or writing, walking outside writing melodies, or writing lyrics, or, as in the case of this album, doing brass arrangements, so it’s a lot of solitude there, which I love. But when it comes to collaborating, I’m really excited about leaving all that behind and just merging with somebody who is hopefully quite different from me.

We always felt, even though we’re really, really different, we sort of have this very small section, this sort of mutual ground, in a strange way. It was interesting to go into a studio with a person that you haven’t met that often.

The first time I met him, he was like, ’So what do you wanna do ? You wanna do something weird ? Or something like a hit ?’ And I’m like, ’How can you say that ?’ I could never work like that— sort of decide what it is before you even start. And I was like, ’I’m just curious where you and I meet, where is our natural...’ You know, if you put together this circle and this circle, where’s the natural overlap ?

He wanted to do a sort of ’"Cry Me a River’ kind of track, and I have a different luggage, I listen to 80s indie bands. That to me sounds like [sings] ’Take my Breath Away’. I love when he does rave shit, like really roots synthy stuff, and just humor. I think his stuff, especially with Missy Elliot, there’s a lot of humor there, and also taking the piss out of themselves, which is something that maybe people just don’t do much. It’s pretty rare.

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.

How did you end up picking Timbaland ? What did he bring to the table ?

I have said this before but he was a big fan of "Venus as a boy" , the bollywood strings and I remember him coming up to me at a party and saying he loved the bassline in that song and I felt pretty chuffed because I wrote that ! He also sampled “Jóga“ for a Missy Elliott track so we have had an eye on each other for a while . We were always going to work together one of those days . So I wasn’t really after a hip hop thing , I am just into him as a musician . It was kinda weird after we did that stuff together some hot hip hop producers contacted me thinking I was going to do a hip hop album . I was really flattered but that was not what i had in mind . I first sent Timbaland some of the brass stuff I was working on but he felt it was too weird ( one of it was in 9/8 ). I walked into the studio with timbaland and he immediately played a rhythm and I sang on top even though I had a throat problem that day and 5 minutes later “earth intruders“ was ready . Two hours later we had 3 tracks . I then walked away with the mutlitrack and edited it for a year and added other musicians on top . “Earth intruders“ and “Innocence“ kinda happened in the studio with him and Nate but “Hope“ I added on bassline later and then took it to mali , africa and Toumani Diabate played on top .

I walked into the studio with Timbaland with no preparations. Usually I would have already written the song and there would just be a small little space for the visitor. But now I just wanted some challenge. We improvised for one day, and I just sang on top of whatever he did. You just walk in the room and it’s just“ — she made an explosive sound — “pfff !, and I just went pfff !, and we did seven tracks, just p-p-p-p-p-p. You get really smitten by his energy. It’s like, why doubt ? Who needs the luxury of doubt ?

He’s very impulsive, confident and very male . . . in the positive sense of the word. If you think of the elements, Timbaland is very much one element . . . 500%. There’s not one drop of doubt, so you walk into a room and he does a beat and you sing on top of it, and then five minutes later, you’ve got a song. We always said we’d do something together one of these days . . . and maybe I was ready to do something with him now because I was kinda ready to be put on the spot where you walk into a room and you just do it. First we spent three hours together and did four or five songs, and then we met again for two hours and did three more.

Well, rumor spread out that I was doing a commercial hip-hop album, which of course was never my intention. I don’t feel I manipulated anything. I worked with Tim as I have worked with any person. That’s a collaboration.

We could have exchanged musical ideas electronically. But I wanted to sing it with him at the same moment, because it’s always different when you do that.