Bjork interview & review on Volta
A yearning for adventure has always defined Icelandic singer Björk, whose 14-year solo career has journeyed from chart-topping pop gems like “Army of Me” to risky experiments such as 2004’s “Medulla,” an album consisting entirely of vocal tracks.
In the past few years, Bjork's adventures included raising a daughter and traveling extensively through Africa and Indonesia, both of which have left a strong imprint on her sixth studio record, ‘Volta.’ The eclectic album contains danceable work by Timbaland, as well as more daring compositions featuring instruments seldom encountered in pop songs, like kora, pipa and even a foghorn.
But in our interview with her, Bjork insisted nothing about her work is avant-garde. Read on...
“I don’t think ‘Medulla’ was that experimental,” she says. “It was all vocal, but so are Manhattan Transfer and Bobby McFerrin. With ‘Volta,’ I was up for an adventure. I had a bit of cabin fever after having a child, so I was up for some fun. I traveled to Mali and some of the songs were recorded on a boat (off the coast of) Tunisia.”
Bjork unveiled songs from ‘Volta’ at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April in the desert town of Indio, about 200 km east of Los Angeles, bringing along a 10-piece all-female brass band from her native Iceland. Wearing a headdress that flowed over her shoulders into a robe befitting the Egyptian sun-god Ra, she started the set with Timbaland’s beat-heavy “Earth Intruders,” the first single off ‘Volta,’ and danced and sang her way across the stage like a possessed shaman.
Her quirky sense of style and outlandish costumes are of course nothing new for the petite 41-year old, who wore a fake swan dress at the Oscars in 2001.
“I don’t set out to push boundaries,” she says. “That would be a bit silly. But I have a pretty low boredom tolerance so I try to keep things exciting for myself. It probably would make life easier for me to do two albums the same way, but I would be bored stiff and that is no good.”
She produced the album herself, leaving the beats to be recorded last. “We had done a lot of experiments with rhythms but I just threw them all away because every time we did something clever with drum programming it was just too pretentious for this album,” she says. Realizing she needed an acoustic drummer, she enlisted the trance-inducing percussion of underground jazzmen Chris Corsano (Sonic Youth, Cold Bleak Heat) and Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt). Then of course there was Timbaland.
“Timbaland is someone that has before expressed interest in my music,” says Bjork. “He sampled a song of mine, ‘Joga,’ like 10 years ago and for a long time there had been talks of perhaps working together. So when I stuck my nose out of my cabin fever I was up for some action and he was too.”
While hit-maker Timbaland was an obvious choice, other collaborators were not. ‘Volta’ counts among its contributors Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, Congo group Konono No1, Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, a 10-piece Icelandic brass band and Antony from Antony and the Johnsons.
“I decided to have a collection of bendy, dirty-sounding string instruments on this album,” says Bjork. “It was the opposite to ‘Vespertine,’ where I had clean plucked instruments like celeste, harp, music box and glockenspiels, the sort of music played in heaven. But now it was time to get a bit grittier. So kora (African harp), pipa (Chinese lute) and clavichord (the ancestor of the harpsichord) ended up on the album. It was amazing to work with both Timbaland and Toumani. Even though they are very different they have similarities -- an air of confidence and positivity, and they sort of have similar faces too. And similar height as well!”
Lyrically, Bjork remains razor-sharp and totally world conscious, although her words are at times harshly enunciated in heavily-accented English. On ‘Earth Intruders’ she imagines a tsunami of people marching for justice, while on ‘Pneumonia’ and ‘I See Who You Are’ she muses on feminism and motherhood. She is a rebellious punk on the electro-tinged ‘Declare Independence,’ a song she dedicates to Greenland and the Faeroe Islands in her live shows, and in which she urges people to “start your own currency/ make your own stamp/ protect your language… declare independence… raise your flag.” Of course, one might argue she doesn't really know what she's talking about, since Greenland and the Faroes could not survive without the big yearly payment they receive from Denmark...
She loses focus further on ‘Hope,’ a song in which she bizarrely contemplates the circumstances under which it would be acceptable for a pregnant Palestinian woman to become a suicide bomber. Of course, even this fits with Bjork’s image. Her sense of fashion, her attitude and her music are different than anyone else’s, even though sometimes it can be seen as weirdness for weirdness’ sake.
“I feel it is an extrovert dynamic album, a global, tribal kind of thing,” says Bjork. “I think quiet music that you listen to by yourself (or) with a few friends is just as important as Friday-night music. We all go through both emotions in the space of a week and both emotional locations need a song to go with it.” Now embarked on a world tour with her young daughter in tow, Bjork is reluctant to look too far into the future. “I have to keep things a bit spontaneous, so we’ll see where I’m at (when the tour ends) and who I’ll bump into until then,” she says.
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