Originaire du Canada, il s’est entre autres chargé de la programmation à l’aide du logiciel ProTools sur l’album Vespertine.
Collaboration avec Björk
Homogenic
– Ingénieur du son, production : All is Full of Love (Guy Sigsworth Mix)
Selmasongs
– Programmation : Scatterheart
Vespertine
– Programmation, ingénieur du son
Volta
– Programmation, ingénieur du son
Biophilia
– Direction musicale
Autres titres
– Programmation : The Comet Song, The Boho Dance
Concerts
– Présent sur la tournée Volta
Damian Taylor à propos de Vespertine
We were picked up at the airport by Björk’s brother, and driven for two hours through darkness and blizzards to some tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere. There was a huge aurora across the sky ; there was a geyser. It was pretty trippy. For percussion, she wanted feet crunching on the snow, and that wound up
being the footsteps on “Aurora”. There was a big waterfall nearby, Gullfoss, which I recorded, then chopped into a ton of pieces and ran through an audio device. That became the angelic ringing noise playing through the end of the track.Uncut - Avril 2017
Damian Taylor à propos de Volta
Volta has got that raw, questing spirit. When I went out to start work on the record, her daughter was three or four. After the domestic, staying-at-home phase, she wanted something designed for touring and festivals. She kept saying ‘rude’, as in ‘rude boy’, which in the Icelandic accent is, like, rrrrrrrrrrude ! It was deliberately tribal and primal. She didn’t want me to get too in depth about anything. She had a place in New York where we started working. Then she’d go, “I think we’ll go to Jamaica tomorrow,” and so we went off to Jamaica for three weeks.
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She’d been listening to Toumani Diabaté, so next it was, “Let’s go to Mali !”, and the next day you’re in Africa. The first day in the studio there was a blackout. It was early evening and we went to the courtyard, sitting there with candles. Toumani’s crew were there, they all started playing, and Björk started singing. It was very special.
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The Timbaland sessions [in New York] were nuts. Tim would go to the club then turn up at the studio at 3am for 20 minutes. Björk likes to work from 11am to 4pm so she would come in and he wouldn’t be there, and then he would come in and she wouldn’t be there. On the fourth day, his management managed to catch him at 11am and persuade him to come in. They said hi, and he got the beat for “Earth Intruders” going. Björk said, “Give me a microphone,” and they did an hour jam of about five core ideas, which was one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen. Björk took them away and worked on them, but that initial spark was pretty amazing.Uncut - Avril 2017
Damian Taylor à propos de Biophilia
Near the end of the Volta tour, in Lisbon, Björk called a meeting with her management, Mark Bell and me. She said she didn’t want to do a conventional album next, she wanted to do a big project, an ‘experience’, about patterns in nature and music, and how they relate to each other. She said it would take two-and-a-half to three-and-ahalf years. That was her declaration.
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The early stages were about working out what the project might be. She was thinking about it being a house, with all these rooms, and each room would be a song. She was interested in architecture with a musical quality. I spent a lot of time in New York going to Home Depot and buying buckets and ropes, experimenting with ways of doing things in the physical world that could be converted into musical systems. There were a few experiments that didn’t get off the ground. We had rare earth magnets and a pendulum, which moved in a crazy way. She’d say, “Turn that into a bassline,” which would turn into two months of research. Nothing was off limits. She erased any conception I had of being an authority on making music, which is incredibly liberating.
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A year and a half in, we’d completed a seven-month residency at a beach-front house in Puerto Rico. She doesn’t like being in cities too long, and Puerto Rico was humid for her voice. I began to notice her internal barometer would go in waves of 10-14 days. It might start with her working quietly in her notebook. Then it would build momentum, like the tension before a storm. Then one day she’d come in and say, “I’m going to sing today.” Ninety minutes of vocal warmups, then it became launch control ! I had all these stations to set up and computers to synch. I’d get it all up and running, then she’d just fucking go for it, and sing her heart out. We started gravitating to an acoustic event driven by electronic systems. We had a running joke : why don’t we spend three years working on this project then record it all in a single day and film it ? National Geographic were in extended talks about making an Imax film, they were going to give her access to all their archives. After that, the first iPad came out in 2010, and she got amazing people on board. We had another year and a half of the app project running in parallel with the music and political stuff she was doing in Iceland. It was the biggest science/art project you could do. No-one would say Biophilia is more accessible than Debut, but she has an amazing ability to turn her imagination into reality. And if she sings on it, it’s going to reach people.Uncut - Avril 2017
