Exclusive: Bjork Talks Volta for the Very First Time

"All I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up."


[photo by Erez Sabag]

On Friday, Björk opened her music box and revealed its latest treasure: Volta, the Icelandic powerhouse's forthcoming album, due out May 7 on One Little Indian/Atlantic.

The record was produced by Björk herself, and features a globe-trotting all-star cast of contributors, including Timbaland, Antony, Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale, percussionist Chris Corsano, African collective Konono N°1, kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté, Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, and a ten-piece Icelandic brass section.

Last week in New York City, Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy sat down with Björk for her first interview about the new album. (Full disclosure: Stosuy is a friend of Matthew Barney, Björk's partner.) During their lengthy chat, Björk opened up about the politics and sonics of Volta, her relationships with her collaborators, and her plans for the future.

In the first part of a series that will continue over the course of the coming weeks, Björk talks about the rhythms of Volta: how they're different from the rhythms of her previous work, and how a trip to tsunami-stricken Indonesia inspired the life-force behind the beats.

Pitchfork: On your last album, Medulla, you focused on the human voice. This album has more of a percussive feel. Were you consciously trying to focus on percussion on this album?

Björk: I guess it was really different from how I usually work. Because at least with Homogenic, Vespertine, and Medulla, if there was a starting point, it was rhythms. I don't know why, maybe because it's the thing that I don't do. With Homogenic, I would start with a programmer, just to do distorted rock beats. And we did, I think, 100 just one bar things. And by the time I had written enough songs, I would just sit down, and then I could just sort of call it, 'okay, for the chorus of this song, like beat 73, and for the verse, number two' or whatever. And for Vespertine, I had just gotten my first laptop, and it was very much about the static universe of the internet, and all the beats clicking and everything whispered. So that would be the starting point. And obviously, Medulla was a vocal album.

But with this one, it was different because I knew more emotionally what I wanted. And because I'd done two or three projects in a row that were quite serious, maybe I just needed to get that out of my system or something. So all I wanted to do for this album was just to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up.

I actually did the whole album, and it wasn't until the last two or three months where the only jigsaw that hadn't been solved was the rhythms. We had done a lot of experiments with rhythms but I just threw them all away because it was like every time we did something really clever with drum programming beats, it was just too pretentious for this album, it just didn't stick.

For some reason, for me it was maybe a little bit nostalgic going back to 1992, where you had really simple 808 and 909 really lo-fi drum machines, not doing anything fancy but really basic, almost like rave stuff or trance stuff, and then really, really acoustic drums. So there are a couple of tracks on this album which are actually programs, with many programming hours spent, and you listen to it, and it sounds like kettle drums or something.

Pitchfork: Marching--both the rhythm of feet and the concept of marching itself--seems to play a big part in this record. What's the significance of marching?

Björk: I just wanted to get rhythmic again. Medulla was my way of pulling out of that, refusing to be categorized as 'Oh what rhythm is she going to do next?' Just feeling the pressure of all these young drum programmers or producers or whatever you call them contacting me, like, who was going to be the flavor of the month. It had become this kind of fashion statement, it just wasn't right.

I mean, I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It's common, it's in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who've got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it's fun when it's impulsive and it's about fun. When it becomes clever, when it becomes more of a left-brain, who can mathematically out-do the other, it's not so fun anymore. And maybe I just sort of pulled out and did a whole vocal album.

But I definitely missed my rhythms. I mean, I love rhythms. I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14 and I was the drummer, not the singer. I'm very, very, very picky when it comes to rhythms. So it was fun to approach it from another angle on this one.

And I'd be lying if I didn't say it was some sort of reaction to the state of the world today. I mean, I went in January over a year ago to Indonesia, to the area where the tsunami hit the worst. Just seeing a village of 300,000 people and 180,000 died, and people were still there digging people out and the smell of corpses and bone. The tsunami kind of scraped houses away, you could still see the floor, and the people I was with found their mom's favorite dress kind of in the mud and it was just like, outrageous.

I mean, the human race, we are a tribe, let's face it, and let's stop all this religious bullshit. I think everybody, or at least a lot of my friends, are just so exhausted with this whole self-importance of religious people. Just drop it. We're all fucking animals, so let's just make some universal tribal beat. We're pagan. Let's just march.
Bjork Announces Tour Dates, Talks Timbaland Collab




"The first time I met him, he was like, 'So what do you wanna do? You wanna do something weird? Or something like a hit?' And I'm like, 'How can you say that?' I could never work like that-- sort of decide what it is before you even start."

A Björk tour is always cause for celebration. Less a rock show than a circus or an opera, her live show is truly a spectacle unto itself. And the tour in support of her forthcoming album Volta, due out May 7 in Europe and May 8 in America on One Little Indian/Atlantic will be no different.

In a recent interview with Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy, Björk revealed that the Volta live show will feature accompaniment from percussionist and album contributor Chris Corsano, longtime collaborator Mark Bell, a ten-piece, all-female brass band, and "an old friend of mine who is an Icelandic Chinese concert pianist, and I got him a huge pipe organ, so he's going to wear tails and do some very virtuoso dramatic performances in between sets."

"I think it's going to be a lot of fun."

Just a smattering of North American dates and international festival appearances have been announced so far, but more are in the works. The dates can be found at the end of this story.

Unfortunately, one person who will not be joining Björk on tour will be Volta contributor Timbaland. In part two of Pitchfork's Björk interview, Stosuy chats with Björk about her collaboration with the superproducer.



Pitchfork: How did you connect with Timbaland?

Björk: He sampled my song 'Jóga' like 11 years ago, and said many times in the press that he really liked my song from 14 years ago called 'Venus as a Boy'. Actually, we recorded the string section in Bollywood for that, and he was really fascinated by that. We've met at parties and there has been this mutual admiration thing going on for years, and talk of doing stuff, but it never happened.

After doing two or three serious projects in a row, I was just like, 'Okay, where's the fun?' I called him a year ago, and said, 'Let's do something.'

Pitchfork: What was it like working with him?

Björk: That was very...very different. I work so much on my own, which I enjoy very much. 90% of every album is me editing on a computer or writing, walking outside writing melodies, or writing lyrics, or, as in the case of this album, doing brass arrangements, so it's a lot of solitude there, which I love. But when it comes to collaborating, I'm really excited about leaving all that behind and just merging with somebody who is hopefully quite different from me.

We always felt, even though we're really, really different, we sort of have this very small section, this sort of mutual ground, in a strange way. It was interesting to go into a studio with a person that you haven't met that often.

The first time I met him, he was like, 'So what do you wanna do? You wanna do something weird? Or something like a hit?' And I'm like, 'How can you say that?' I could never work like that-- sort of decide what it is before you even start. And I was like, 'I'm just curious where you and I meet, where is our natural...' You know, if you put together this circle and this circle, where's the natural overlap?

He wanted to do a sort of '"Cry Me a River' kind of track, and I have a different luggage, I listen to 80s indie bands. That to me sounds like [sings] 'Take my Breath Away'. I love when he does rave shit, like really roots synthy stuff, and just humor. I think his stuff, especially with Missy Elliot, there's a lot of humor there, and also taking the piss out of themselves, which is something that maybe people just don't do much. It's pretty rare.

Pitchfork: How many tracks did you create together?

Björk: We did in three hours like seven songs, just totally improvised, nothing prepared. And then what happened afterwards, he went off and did the Justin [Timberlake] album and I think Nelly Furtado. So he sort of didn't have time to attend the aftermath, really, which turned out to be a blessing, because it meant I could noodle with the results for a year, and edit the fuck out of them, and add musicians like Konono and Chris Corsano and Brian [Chippendale] and the other instruments.

I think it's actually the first time that he's done that, that he's relaxed with giving his tracks or his material away and letting somebody else complete it. So I would send him stuff and he would say, 'Yeah I love it,' you know, he was just really into it.

Pitchfork: How many of the songs that you made together ended up on the album?

Björk: "Earth Intruders", "Innocence", and "Hope". 'Earth Intruders' also features Konono. On 'Hope' he did a beat, and I sang on top, and then I took his beat and layered it and chopped it so it's way more chaotic than how he did it, where the bass drum is doing an irregular stereo thing. And then afterwards I wrote a bassline and took it to Toumani Diabaté who played kora over it. So it became not so much a Björk /Timbaland thing, it sort of took on its own life a little bit.

Pitchfork: I read somewhere that Timbaland said what he did for you was hip-hop. Do you agree with that?

Björk: I'm not going to argue with him, but I don't think so. Come on, I'm from Iceland; I don't do hip hop. But these guys see it differently. There was a documentary done on me many, many years ago, where there was an interview with Missy Elliot where she said Homogenic is hip-hop. And I'm like, 'Mmmmmm...?' Do you know what I mean?

But I don't care, they can call it whatever they want. What can I say? I just know what fuels me, and I think, especially the tracks where it was more of a 50-50 thing, for me I feel very happy with them, they feel very Björk and Timbaland. It's not like me being alien in his universe, or him being alien in my universe, it's mutual ground. So I don't know what that country's called, but it feels pretty healthy.


Bjork Talks "Earth Intruders", Volta's First Single




"[It's a] fantasy that maybe a tsunami of people would just come and hit the White House and scrape it off the ground and do some justice…"

When Björk was creating her new album Volta (due out May 7 in Europe and May 8 in America on One Little Indian/Atlantic), the state of the world was on her mind. As she told Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy, a trip to tsunami-ravaged Indonesia in January 2005 inspired her to think about the human race as "a tribe," and to make "some universal tribal beat" for this album.

Nowhere is Björk's concern for the planet more apparent than on Volta's first single, "Earth Intruders". Based on a loopy, frenetic Timbaland marching beat, with added percussion by African collective Konono N°1, it's the album's catchiest song, with Björk chanting "We are the Earth's intruders / We are the sharp shooters."

In the third part of Stosuy's interview with Björk, she talks about the genesis of this song. Click HERE for part one of the interview, and HERE for part two.

"I flew straight from [Indonesia] to New York and met with Timbaland, who got a private jet or something and met me in the studio," Björk said. "So it was like two extreme kinds of worlds. And I'm not criticizing him, I mean, good for him, I can understand it's a totally different context...it's really hard to put into words.

"'Earth Intruders' was the first beat he [Timbaland] put on, and it just all came up, that sort of fantasy that maybe a tsunami of people would just come and hit the White House and scrape it off the ground and do some justice and spread these people all around the planet...

"I could see all these people in Indonesia that lost everything just kind of coming up, and everybody in Africa-- because they were asking me to go there and fight, to be one of the people to address AIDS-- just seeing those people, one sees pictures, but then meeting them is something else. Just a wave of people."

http://www.pitchforkmedia...first-time

First!

Wait a sec I read this interview a long time ago.

Björk is LOVE

i want one of them big feeted bjorks for my christmas tree this year.

Anx said:

ooh yeah! they better be selling some christopher radko volta ornaments at the concerts next month.

I want a red lastic lunch box with a 3-d big feet bjork on the front.

eleven said:

the bjork collection. oh yes.