5 years string arrangement was done when i was well into homogenic
and wanted to take the arrangement further into geometric dimension
making triangle shapes and squares and making them
sound like a synth with different oscillators
the song is about someone who didnt have courage for love
so i guess the narrator is kinda telling him off
so i wanted the song to be standoffish and cold
so the arrangement was supposed to be the opposite of jóga
and bachelorette, that were very passionate and open
therefore 5 years is more of a robotic and
a non vibrato affair

i had been writing brass arrangments for couple of years
in iceland. anchor song, aeroplane
and rehearsed first with my simple arrangements
with icelandic musicians in 1989 or so
i then ended up asking oliver lake from the saxophone quartet
to take my arrangments and elaborate on them
and he is playing them on the album
so you could say that these brass arrangments
were my first babysteps into
the world of arrangements... ?

i wrote áróra on sibelius software i got in 1999
and fell in love with and have used ever since.
i am excited to have the original harp arrangement
played by both harp and 32 string players in pizzicato
exaggerates the magical frostscapes i was excited about .
i wrote the middle section in a cabin in borgarfjördur i stayed in , in winter
i remember the shadow of the mountain came over the whole valley
and i tried to worship the shape it made.
ever since , when i sing that section , i always remember borgarfjördur
and the humility i craved so at that moment

bachelorette for me is part three , of 3 songs
1 : "human behaviour" is the childhood
2 : "isobel" a story of a girl that leaves nature for the big city
she is run by impulse so she gets misunderstood amongst urban logic
it is instinct versus logic. she gets burned so
she retreats to rural to heal and isolates herself
but trains moths to go back to the city and fly
infront of the faces of people who are stuck in
making too much sense and say "na na na na"
until they snap out of it
3 : "bachelorette" is then about following the moths,
returning again to the city but with strength
wounded and wiser confronting coldness with love
therefore i wanted the arrangements to be romantic
as epic as possible, the grandiousestest drama ever
but still with love

i remember writing black lake in
a hot spring rural spa in japan
this was the bottom of my heartbreak
and that combined with jetlag
i han"’t been able to sleep for a week or so
so at night i would walk down this geo thermal creak
and add a verse after verse to this song
it was the absolute surrender
i wanted the strings in the beginning
and at the end to be almost like an old painting
where the canvas was coming a part
so you could see through it
and still today when i ask players to play it
i ask them to do it kinda left handed
or if their hand is broken. .....
...then there are the freezes :
long chords where you are so paralysed
with sorrow you cant move
but in the middle of the song you
have gathered the courage
to express yourself passionately
but still : hopefully the music
a little like an old painting
seen through a
21st century screen

come to me was written to 2 friends of mine that
i felt like protecting .….. so i wanted the song to feel
like a velvet blanket wrapped around them.
talvin singh took this song and venus as a boy
to bombay and was a musical director at a recording
of a string arrangment by sureh sathe
we were doing all this very low budget
so we couldnt afford to go ourselves
talvin returned with a dat cassette
and our minds were absolutely blown !

when i had finished writing biophilia, i realised it need a
universal theme, a theme song for the apps. .… as if it were a
film. and this is the song for that. i came up with this
homemade theory that for the egyptians, jews, first nation
people, all tribes, their creation myths were their science
and that the big bang was simply our
civilisation’s creation myth and after few centuries, people
would find ours naive. so i mentioned this to sión which then
wrote the lyric. i wanted the choir intro and outro to be like
planets going on orbit, so curved glides and with the brass
imagined a national anthem for the galaxy
if there is such a thing...

when i wove up all the flute arrangements
i got super obsessed with patterns and textures
then recorded them and
when i heard them all back to back,
i discovered the beats had
to be the opposite of fluffy,
they needed to be double speed and
italian techno style sharp and nasty
i explained this to arca and
it was extremely satistying
when she obviously nailed it
... in one day... !
that day,
we were dancing manically
allover

is about how you worship your beloved
how it contains falling down on your knees before him
and also in a humorous way
point out that it becomes a religion
so i wanted the song to be like
a folk-psalm or medieval troubadour song
someone would play on a lute or something
soi wrote and arrangement like that,
with simple chords. and then zeena took it to the next
level
... as she does...

after writing "harm of will’ through improvisation
i spent months writing the string arrangement ..….it was an
important moment for me personally as a string arranger
where i wasn’t going for maximum grandness,
like the string melodies of the choruses "jóga" or
"isobel" and
went for a less melodic abstract approach
i wanted it to be clouds of exaltation, erotic energy
coming and going but then not committing
or settling into anything solid

hidden place was written falling secretly in love with
someone and not being able to express is. so i wanted to
make the arrangement a thick current, that is suppressed
underground
like taboo taboo taboo. .….. unexpressed love .
a hidden muscular fossorial snake...

history of touches is a poem
about when the first time
in a relationship
(that you had gathered
essence to last 5 lifetimes)
is about to end
so instead of looking at it
forwards into the future
you stand at the end point and look back
the brain does a funny self survival thing
that it goes through all you memories
like a filofax
and restores them
so i could see all the times
we made love flash infront of me
and i kept hearing the sound
like fingers stroking through filofaxes
and we tried to base the arrangements
on that sound :
that brain hick-up
of trauma

the melody of this song i wrote while i was in the sugarcubes
it was called ’"marsinn minn" and never kinda got completed
i saved that melody though, and when i wrote the lyrics few
years later, i felt the melody had found a match
the words are about humans from a child’ s point of view
grownups mostly
this is why i asked michel gondry to make a video from the
point of view of the animals
all wet and furry

hunter was written when i escaped the paparazzi of london
and moved to a studio in southern spain
i was marching up and down the empty winter beeches
and claiming territory i guess...
it is about the energy most musicians that tour recognize
after performing for a long time
you return to writing...
and you have to go hunting for melodies
so you can provide for your team
i came back to the studio with the melody to this marching song. ... played
mark bell bolero after ravel
and he took out his 909 and wrote the rhythm in one take
909 fanatics still rave about it to me

hyperballad was a lyric idea that i had in my diary for a while
and i remember standing in nellee’s studio and it
fitting like a glove to this new melody.
i recently read jungian books about the shadow and it
seems to fit this idea pretty well. i definitely was not aware
of these theories when i wrote it.
i guess it is about how in a relationship you isolate the shadow
and deal with it on your own, without your partner. or do you let it in ?
or do you harness it in an innocent routine like proposed in the lyric. ... ?
i guess it is an attempt to create a boundary and therefore you can
truly come back and be generous ...

i remember the melody of "l’ve seen it all’swirling in my head
for a year or two, with parts of the string arrangement tailed
behind. i remember perhaps a ecstatic and not so sober
evening in london singing it full force underneath one of the
bridges in a marvellous reverb
and i would like to make a confession, at the time i was
listening nonstop to " pavane pour infante defunte" by ravel
i got deeply inspired by the mood of it, the majestic grande
humility is enormous ! after expressing muscular "homogenic" it
was a delight to settle for the search for enormous gestures
inside immense gentleness. ... or at least try....

i remember, while writing the melody of "isobel in reykjavik
( by the window in my house on tryggvagata ) that i was not only
trying to make something passionate but it also had to contain
some strange graceful joke ?! i tried to explain for hours and hours
to sjón who this creature "isobel’ was . and that humour was essential
in hindsight, i feel it was my way of dealing with
the mythical creature i had become in the media,
kinda writing a tongue in cheek song about a magical reality persona
and perhaps by allowing me to be the author of it,
i could own it. bypass victimhood.
timewise, isobel was 8% of the album ,
so somehow i was revealing that was how much of me
would step into this persona in the future, but for the other 92 %
i wanted to be a lot of other characters. most of them hidden.
but perhaps all things tongue in cheek have a grain of truth
in them and for sure the story of a girl that leaves instinctive
impulsive iceland for a calculated cold city was not totally far off...?

joga is written to my best friend jóga
i went to a cabin in midwinter alone for a week
my father dropped me there and
i was hiking in the snow and
i remember especially an epic night
with northern lights above ingölfsfjall
low clouds below them and
the towns mirroring in them
at the bottom of the horizon.
this was probably the bravest yet
i had gone with an arrangement at that point
playing the melodies of the first violin and violas
with clumsy fingers on the piano.
it probably took me a year until i found
the right words for the chorus : state of emergency ...
i was walking down a hill in southern spain
around midnight, singing the chorus again and again
trying to figure out what would match those vowels
and match the emotional intention jóga deserved

in lionsong i had rented a cabin just outside reykjavik
in heidmörk. and i was walking in
the protection of the trees
opening up my throat and
tilting my head back thinking
i wanted maximum air to flow
through my body and without
hindrance out of my mouth.
i spent aeons on the string arrangement
based on vocal improvisations..
i guess i wanted to move up a step
with my arrangements and base
them more on the narrative form
of my voice rather than background chords.
the arrangement is probably also
influenced by the crooked birch forest
i was walking through.
first song in human scale trees
after the galactical scale of biophilia

losss is a sort of a blues
in a way a closure to pagan poetry
like the binary dark twin
the mourning of a love and i probably spent
equal amount of time as in the harps in pagan poetry
only now i was weaving flutes
into ribbons of sorrow

the orchestra for vulnicura was unusual in the way that it had 5 cellos
5 violas and 5 violins. ...
(most orchestras have around 30 violins, 12 violas and 6 cellos )
this was because i wanted a dark muddy sound, to match the
heavyness of sorrow on a heartbreak album .
mouth mantra is not about heartbreak though, it is a song i wrote
earlier
about having to go to a vocal nodule surgery
the lyric is about all the moments i have sung and all the high notes
my throat has allowed me to sing and the gratitude for that
appreciate all the air that has gone through it
so in this song, i decided to add to the timbre of the album as a
whole
and this be where i would make these muddy deep strings as dense
as possible
and spent months making it more rhythmic, added friction
and thick thick chords
like nodules

mouth’s cradle is about breastfeeding
a foetus ghost arriving with the prangsta energy infants have
the humour is super strong but enormously gentle
i wanted the arrangement to sound playful and was trying with
the irregularity of the frases to represent a newborn
it’s spirit to be still liquid in form and not having coagulated yet
soi was trying to catch that brand new feeling
but most importantly it is an anthem for nourishment
celebrating that mouth and the teeth that are a ladder up to it
and last but not least
the nourishment you are receiving
the breastfeeder that is

mutual core is about the tectonic plates
of a lake in iceland called binqvallavatn
they actually move a part
the same speed fingernail grows
and one plate represents europe
and the other north america
i tried to represent it in the beat
like magnetic energy dissolving
and the glides in the brass in the chorus
are about this separation too

is a melody that had been swirling in my head for a long time
i was trying to make some clarity
so just simple fifths and see through chords
like when you stroke glass and there is that clear sound
and no luggage
a new beginning

notget is the last and sixth song of
the heartbreak saga on vulnicura
i wanted it to be the manifesto
of someone who believes in love
that if you merge into love
then you experience "the forever"
but if you don’t love, you fear death
(kinda an albino goth song, i guess.
this song was the first song
in mine and arca"s collaboration,
where we met 50/50
i edited an already made song of hers
together with mine and
then arranged strings
inspired by moments in both
on the co-ordinate
where venezuela and iceland meet

oceania was written for the olympics .. so my odd
sense of humour went directly to tom and jerry
competing on 2 pianos , as if it was sport. so those
extreme runs in between my phrases , were first
piano runs and then later, when the focus turned to
greece, i decided to make them into nymphs and
syrens flying in the sky, wailing
i asked sjón to write the lyric, and since i am not the
sporty type, i asked him to do it from the point of
view of the ocean that surrounds all countries and
unites them
still feels lush to sing his sentence : " your sweat is
salty, i am why*
...!! (from the point of view of the
ocean talking to all humans )
those long belted fermata notes were me going
mediterranean (i am phoenician, 2000 years back
though so it is a bit of a stretch...)

pagan poetry is about meeting someone for the first time
and falling in love and picking up his subconcious energy
the rhythm, the pace, the grace, the gentle and the dark
and finding that one’s subconscious can easily match it
and i wanted the harp arrangement to be
about this embroidery of love
when 2 people start weaving their core together
i spent aeons on it
might be my first sibelius soft ware
wet dream

when i wrote pluto i had finished homogenic
and felt it needed a cathartic explosive song at the end
i had just bought my first nordlead,
it was a sunny day in mountaine ous spain
and put the synth on the balcony enjoying the view
all the way to atrica
i then recorded the different arpeggio synth riffs
and wrote the melody and the lyric
i then brought it into the studio and mark bell
tidied up my synth riffs and put a beat underneath it
eumir deodato then wrote the the string arrangement
based on the notes in my backing vocals
i would also like to thank matt robertson"s score preparation
he did a marvellous job in notating my synth rifts
and orchestrating them for this concert
Soi guess this arrangement is a merge of
my backing vocals and my nordlead synth riffs ?
if that makes any sense ?

when the mother is the pessimist
and the daughter the optimist
i wanted the arrangement to be a lazerbeam of light
almost blindness from too much brightness
then go so over-the-top encouraging
in the centre of the song
that it would turn up a third !
but also wanted to be honest
about the faults of optimists. ...
"When we*re broken we are whole
and when we’re whole we’re broken
( the shadow of the optimist ?
or the sun of the nihilist ? )
now, who’s the whole one ?
we all play such odd roles sometimes...

i guess this song is kinda self explanatory.
... hmm ... the lyric
kinda says it all
and i feel i knew pretty much from the start that it shouldnt
have any arrangements or instruments so no score stories
here
a part from in the inner structure, where inferior matches
with interior ?
and that i wanted the melody to be a ball that falls up and
down so there is like a stretch in the first note
then gravity pulls it down and then it rolls up again
perhaps similar to the melody of "utopia" and several other
songs of mine ...

i wrote all of the melody of sonnets in a hotel room on my dictaphone in one take. just following ee cummings poem
(i feel out of all my melodies, it is probably the most jazz ? i guess i have had a fantasy of hearing it one day in this style ? ) it is such an odd thing to sing about worst case scenario in a lyric. .….. when the total opposite is true. you are completely safe in a relationship and then you imagine the horror of it ending. the carrying-a-precious -vase-across-a-street-syndrom ... 10 years before it actually happened .….. on "vulnicura"

stonemilker was written on a beech next to grótta in 2012.
which is really close to harpa music hall, where we will perform it.
the song for me is cyclical, a big of a mini-fugue,
therefore i asked andy huang who did the video with me
if i could walk around the camera in circles
and include the panorama surrounding it.
there is an emotional attempt in it to be inclusive and with
the circular movement unite all, everything , between 2 people

in sue me i was excited about trying rave flutes,
kinda how quicksand of vulnicura was for the strings
to prove somehow that flutes can be techno
and that they are very dynamic and diverse
in all the different arrangements i tried to cover
romantic, humourous, ballad, aggressive
vibrato :
both modern sounding and more extreme passionate
and in sue me, i was going for more
like lazer beams
confrontational

"sun in my mouth" was written on a day of improvisations with
guy sigsworth. i had lined up poetry books and poems from
friends. "harm of will’ and "mother heroic" came from the same
day. when i hear this song i hear the connection between me
and guy at this moment,
the sublimity of e.e.cummings words
but also me storming out of a certain film studio regaining the
rights to my music. it was the moment i got empowered to
stand by myself,
the metoo clock in me got wound up, to be rung eighteen
years later

tabula rasa happens in utopia.
It is a song i wrote to my
daughter and it is about taking on
generational traumas and clearing them
up, in hope to give girls the least
amount of luggage for their future
i tried to make the oxygen in the
tutes weave a healing chord
...almost like hyperventilating yourself towards a cure...

i wrote anchor song when i moved into my house by the harbour. i was ecstatic ! i had dreamt a dream about diving into the ocean at night and dropping the anchor there soit is about the satisfaction in putting down roots finding a home and belonging i once told my grandmother ( who was an amateur oil painter ) that that song was based on her colours and the compositions in her paintings she simply looked at me and said : "i know"

the gate is about the flow of love
in the chest between 2 lovers...
...the album before , vulnicura
was about the healing of a heartbreak-
wound in the chest and the gate is
about the energy of the wound
reversing and it becoming a gate
where love can be given from
and received...
i wanted the arrangement to project prisms
when you are in the void and the arrival of
the first beam bursts through the darkness
and it prisms around with generosity
the flutes arrangement is prisming
in the same way

14 months after the last time i gave birth, i gave
myself a gift, a trip to a studio in la gomera, a rain
forest island in the atlantic. i wrote pleasure is all
mine", about generosity of women, if you would
tune selflessness and generosity up to a million
what would that be ? like the guitar solo of the
hostess !!
so this song is about the ego of the selflessness of
womanhood (myself included ) if that makes any
sense. and i wanted the choir arrangement to feel
almost haunted with femininity, possessed as in
wuthering heights. and i remember being on that
island drinking my first coffea for forever , after many
oceanswims and breastfeeds, standing infront of the
microphone, opening my mouth, tilting my head
back slightly and trying to make sounds that connect
most to my core. letting the air run through me
who gives most ?

with unison i was very keen to try to capture this magical walking
as if you are walking through a forest exalted
and it is one of the few times when forces of harmony
and equilibrium are actually going your way
the bassline was an attempt for this kinda slow trance walk
at the time, it was a counter emotion to
a massive struggle i had just been through
the melting after a long term conflict
or attemot for one .....
for sometimes when you want something really bad
you just have to make a musical mockup
and then move into it

this is a lyric i had in my diary for a while .…. it is obviously
about long distance relationships
me and guy sigsworth wanted the arrangement to sound
like something was unravelling, an electronic spindle
tomorrow we will play this on an accordion , which would
with it’s great access to oxygen, be able to represent this
well

utopia is a scifi offer for a new world
it is about women and children
arriving to an island starting a new
without agression, violence
an optimistic-post-apocalyptic manifesto
the birds might have merged with the flowers
and humans become flute mutants
but it is harmonious and hopeful
i wanted the flute arrangement
to represent this kinda weaving

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

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)

there is a pattern in my melody that reveals an icelandic dna
the snake like pattern and irregularity me and the bass singers will sing tonight
reminds me of some of the wood carvings on bedposts in the national museum here
it is quite common in icelandic folk songs to have irregular time signatures (5/4, 4/4, 3/4 and more, back and forth ) but also this song is some strange kinda music-joke to mix together death metal and techno and the choir tradition from my home
the lyric for me is about the absurdity of telling someone else off (when you are no angel yourself) and i guess the strange humour in merging wrong music genres
together is supposed to represent that absurdity ? plus the person im telling off is a metal kinda person...

is about the celebration when you have found love and it
completes you,
make you back into what you were intended to be
therefore "gave me back my crown"
... i was going for grandness in the arrangement
trying to make it big and simple
to match that mood

the arrangement in ’you’ve been flirting again" happened after
working with eumir deodato on "isobel’and "hyperballad"
in those songs i would play and sing the lines
in the string arrangements to him. and then he orchestrated it.…
but even though the string arrangement in ’you’ve been flirting again"
is simple, it was a big step for me finding my own "’string voice’
and in that sense is the beginning of arrangements for
"jóga, "five years" and ’sod off" on "homogenic"
.... which i felt
were more "icelandic"
.... or more "me" ?