Eumir Deodato

Eumir Deodato
I was looking for someone that could orchestrate my songs in order to create a texture. Eumir is very melodic, which is wonderful, but in Vespertine I wished to give the strings a more distant role, a panoramic texture.

O Globo, 24 oct 2001

Eumir Deodato
The work on Homogenic is actually simple. A lot of her rhythm loops are very contemporary, so before I attempted to write things on top of them I decided to write underneath, on her vocals, rather than to fight or add to the rhythm. Writing over the beat means writing a new line that’s not in the song, something that will stick out-a high violin part, for instance. But when you write a melody that’s already there, or chords in the low or mid range as pads, that’s writing under. In some of the songs I followed her secondary vocal lines ; there was very little harmony and very few chords. I was doing that on ’Isobel’ too, where I wrote a natural C in a line that was in B minor. Much later on I learned that Björk is the type of singer who will sing the A sharp in A minor, but I wasn’t...

Musician, december 1997

Eumir Deodato
I attempted to make string arrangements, with a lot of help from Eumir. He’s been like a big daddy, letting me experiment with notes but still being there for me when I need him, and sometimes just completely doing it for me.

MIM UDOVITCH 5/98

Eumir Deodato
"I was in Japan and she called me from a studio in Bahamas", recalls Eumir. They met couple of days later in London and the results can be heard in tracks Hyperballad, You’ve Been Flirting Again and Isobel. "She has developed a style and a music that I’ve never heard anything like in my life. When I heard her material, I freaked out, and I said, ’What are you doing ? This is crazy, this is so difficult, to propose this kind of style to the people.’ But she does, and she’s successful at it. There’s the liberty she takes with melodies and with harmony that sometimes apparently leaves clashes that are not really clashes, they’re concepts. It’s an acoustic principle, but she instinctively goes into that vein, and she blends all these things with a beautiful voice."

MIM UDOVITCH 5/98