Just back home from a City Trip to Helsinki, the capital of Suomi Finland.Tonight I found a brand new interview with Björk in the latest Reykjavik Grapevine issue by Haukur.
Read it yourself @ A Conversation With Björk
About her next record, and past records:
G: Is this something you will employ on your next album?
B: Can you smell it? Yes, I am excited about this. It’s more complicated than pouring water around, of course, but all these programs are very exciting and bring with them the promise of a thousands unexplored possibilities.
G: What are you thinking in terms of the next record? Not so much in how it sounds, but in terms of themes, underlying concepts, emotional spectrum and ideas. I’ve experienced each of your records as examining certain concepts or thoughts, Volta being all screaming physical revolt, then you had Vespertine with its frail undertones of courtship and introspection...
B: Well, Vespertine was... I made it around the time I bought my first laptop. It was very exciting. Everyone was so depressed, talking about ‘THE END OF MUSIC’ and ‘music is doomed, what with all the downloading’ and I was just... ‘No, it’s not. You just need some imagination.’ It was partly inspired by that. There was a collection of instruments on the record that all sound very good when they’re downloaded – like the harp, glockenspiel and celesta – and all the voices were whispered instead of sung at full blast.
The soundscape was kind of virtual, more thought than physical. More mental and frozen. I decided: ‘OK, this world is not warm summer, it is a frozen winter. It’s cold, you turn off your body.’ In Vespertine, I made a record that you experience in a frozen state, from the cover artwork to the soundscape and all lyrics being about being in a pupal stage on a winter’s night. Hibernating. I was playing with that idea. It’s funny to think that in the year 2000, when I was making that record, people were acting very scared about the purported ‘end of music’. It’s always that same cliché. I liked turning it upside down.
And now of course, almost ten years later, there’s a whole lot of music out there being made that’s directly influenced by what downloads well. Music being made by people that have been for the last decade listening to mp3 files at their house, and now they’re making music out of them. There’s no real focus now on listening to Dolby Stereo at your house. The bitrate can be shitty for that matter, there’s no right way to listen to music. Anyway, I thought that work with Vespertine was equally exciting and challenging. And then Volta was a very different affair...
Up on the hill with a flag and a horn
G: So what are you thinking or contemplating right now that might be reflected on Volta’s follow-up?
B: My friend Gabríela [Friðriksdóttir, artist] is big on numerology. In the time leading up to Volta, she’d calculated that I was an eight, which means justice. I thought that was funny, especially since my dad is always working in the union movement and my mom has that gene in her... she went on hunger strike for eighteen days to try and stop the Kárahnjúkar dam from happening. So I thought it would be funny and humorous – although maybe no one but me gets the joke – to do a justice album, an EIGHT; up on the hill with a flag and a horn.
For the next record, if I can promise you anything about that, it’s that it will not be a justice record. It’s fun to run up the hill with a big flag, demanding justice, but it can be a tiring feeling in the long run. Trying to think you can tell others what’s right and what they need to do. It was fun for two years but now I am done with that. I liked it, though, the raw energy with the brass girls and the hooliganism. But now I have something different. I will say that I am excited about all the new programs and instruments we’ve been talking about.
