GangstaFam said:

DO IT

Sdldawn said:

i'm actually not at all impressed with the snippets. but that's 30 second snippets for you, i suppose, because i really like all 3 of the full songs i've heard (Earth Intruders, Innocence, I See Who You Are).

Dayspring said:

Yeah, they're a waste of time. And no, I haven't listened.

sosgemini said:

??

OMG I DON"T WANT TO LISTEN TO THE SNIPPETS

argh

ok i just listened

indeed, like Gangstafam expected since quite a while, it sounds
a lot like a mix between post and a little bit of Debut but the
production and songwriting skills are all totally bjork 2007.

judging from even the 30 second snippets this is a fan-tas-tic
album. great mix between soothing breezy world & semi eastern
sounds on some and the warm cerebral electronics on other cuts.

really anxious for this to be released now.

why the hell does WB keep on taking down the video?

glad i caught while it was still there though

damn, innocence is just it's like Alarm Call vs Who Is It?

I'm kind of surprised that this one (and a few other big new releases) have not shown up at you-know-which-sites.

Have the labels finally figured out a way to plug leaks?

MendesCity said:

i've heard rumblings that volta is leaking out all over the place...though i want to try to maintain my volta virginity until i can hear it w/ the pleasure of looking at the liner notes/lyrics/packaging at the same time, so i haven't exactly been seeking out the leakage.

interview with Drowned In Sound

http://www.drownedinsound...es/1900868


"I’m just doing my best to escape boredom": DiS questions Björk about Volta and beyond
Artists: Björk
It’s alright – we were a little confused too. Björk’s last long-player, Medúlla, split opinion in a fashion quite unlike any of its preceding album releases. The Icelandic avant-pop queen had taken a drastic sidestep, and not everyone in her audience was willing to follow her lead into the unknown.

The aforementioned last-long-player-proper, released in August 2004, was an experiment of sorts, an intentional distancing of its maker from her past work. Made entirely from vocal samples, some straight from the throat and others distorted through a sequence of electronic tricks and twists, the album was a far cry from the enveloping intimacy of Vespertine, Björk’s album of 2001 which rightly topped DiS’s Our 66 poll last year – click here to see the run-down.

Volta finds Björk taking a few steps backwards in order to leap forward – the new album, out on May 7, possesses its fair share of Vespertine and Homogenic echoes – Homogenic was her third studio LP, remixes aside, released in 1997 – but manages to feel entirely fresh at the same time. Propulsive, attention-grabbing songs sit shoulder-to-shoulder with tracks that are so soft and delicate the slightest surge in volume could shatter them irreparably. Tracks produced by Timbaland – boisterous and full of fun – jostle for space with songs guided by previous collaborator Mark Bell, who worked with Björk on Homogenic; he lends the album the tenderness that balances its tumultuousness. It mixes subtlety with the exact opposite quite brilliantly, and features Antony (and the Johnsons) Hegarty as a guest vocalist on two of its ten tracks.

Ahead of Volta’s release, DiS was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to send some questions the way of Björk. Today, we received some answers. Which was rather more than nice.


Volta begins in impressively immediate style, with ‘Earth Intruders’ (lead single, review here) – was it important to you to lead with a track that’s almost completely different to what was on your preceding album, Medúlla? Do you hear Volta as a ‘pop’ record, at least more so than Medúlla and even Vespertine? (Your label) One Little Indian has implied that it’s your most commercial record to date…

One Little Indian are so cute. They always feel that ‘my latest release is the most commercial to date’. It’s good to know they have hope in me. But you’re right – emotionally I wanted this album to start with urgency, the sort of ‘go to the top of a mountain with a flag and a trumpet’ demand for justice. I really don’t know what is pop and what is not. The meaning of the word comes from folk, or people, and therefore I felt at moments that Medúlla being only done with the human voice, which we all have, [was something] that everybody could join in. I feel materialism has really distorted that word, and it has changed its meaning into ‘sellable’, not ‘music of the people, working-class style’.


Although brash and boisterous at times, Volta also possesses moments of wonderful introspection, passages of delicacy such as ‘I See Who You Are’. Although you stated in an earlier interview that you wanted Volta to be “fun… full-bodied and really up”, was it also important to retain some of the vulnerability, the intimacy, that was so prevalent on Vespertine and Homogenic?

Thank you. Yes, of course. I’ve noticed though, in some online features about the album, where I was describing the first single journalists kinda used that for the whole album.


Volta features a wealth of contributors: did you have a wish list of collaborators, or did songs that you’d penned just seem to suit particular individuals, who you then approached? For example, was ‘Dull Flame Of Desire’ written with Antony already on board, or was he approached after the song was in an almost-finished state? You recorded a number of tracks with Timbaland, three of which are on Volta – will the other tracks ever be released?
The songs just kinda grew. And then I bumped into people and they joined in. Each track has different story, and it is hard to not over generalize. ‘Dull Flame…’ was not written with Antony in mind, but we had been singing together for a while and I felt we both were too shy and singing too sweetly, perhaps worried we would step on each other’s toes. So I woke up one morning with this melody I had written earlier, in the middle of the night, and a poem by a Russian poet from the 19th Century and said: “Okay, no more sweet stuff. Now we are going to belt it out, diva style. We can sing words by a third party, so it is neutral – not my world and not your world”. Then we sang and improvised from that melody for a whole day and I later spent few days editing [the song] together, focusing on the emotional chronology we went through. I don’t think the other Timbaland tracks will come forth.


Antony remarked in an interview, post-collaboration, that you were “really inspiring” and “like a master”. How do you fare at receiving compliments from fellow artists, musicians who are your peers? Are compliments from likeminded artists more special, maybe, than a glowing review written by a stranger in a foreign magazine? Do you draw inspiration from peers, or are your muses too myriad to put succinctly into words?

Hmm, good question. Of course, to hear something that lush from Antony is going to make me weak in my knees, but overall it’s kinda unpredictable. Sometimes a stranger can be more honest because he or she doesn’t know you and they hit the hammer on the head (this is more constructive criticism that I’m describing here, probably), and the other way round. I guess it depends totally who it is – sometimes you kinda mirror out the answer you’re looking for and ignore the rest, if you know what I mean. But to be honest, overall, doing what I’ve done for so long, the main floor you stand on has to be [based on] your own positive and negative remarks. The rest is bonus. Otherwise you’d tumble too often.


At this stage in your career, are you concerned at all by critical reactions to your albums? You’ve reached a status where records will sell regardless of any in-print negativity, that much’s obvious, but on a personal, artist level, have you ever been affected by anything written about one/some of your past albums? Although it’s not a solo album in a strict sense, the Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack album (of 2005) was met with a rather mixed reception, for example…

With Drawing Restraint 9, because it was a soundtrack album, it was such a different project – to enjoy it you kinda had to be into Matthew [Barney]´s stuff, the filmmaker, and see the film as you listened to the music. So I didn’t really take the comments on it that seriously. Also, there are complications where people listen to it in context to my earlier stuff and try to find continuity, which of course doesn’t make sense. But overall I don’t believe in the artist that does what he or she does only for power and people, and to be famous and all that stuff. I also think, though, that it is just as bad to totally isolate yourself from the world and people – then the love starts to go out of it. So I try to be somewhere in the middle; there is no one answer. You have to tightrope walk all the time, to keep yourself open enough to communicate and retreat enough to plant new seeds and grow.


2007 looks like being a busy year for you, touring wise – a number of festival appearances are confirmed, along with some North American shows. Do you expect to play many dates in the UK, perhaps around Glastonbury? What sort of stage set-up are you looking at for shows this year? I have read that you’re using something like 30 musicians…

It is going to be 10 brass musicians (Icelandic girls), Mark Bell on beats, Damian Taylor on electronics, Chris Corsano on drums, and Jónas Sen on keyboards. So 15 in all, including me. We might come back in December and do some shows in England – we have to go to South America and other stuff first.


How difficult is it, now, balancing your career with your family life? With Volta looking likely to rekindle many critic’s love affair with Björk, are you bracing yourself for a full year of interviews? Do you worry, ever, that paparazzi interest in your personal/social life could escalate to how it was in the ‘90s?

I don’t think so. I made very specific choices to get away from that, and i think it works. It is a choice. There are celebrities that want the whole world to know about every move they make, and there are celebrities that don’t. I think in the world of reality TV and the internet, and Paris Hilton et al, people that happen to have a public job are allowed to be varied. Ten or twenty years ago it was more presumed that if you went on stage you were up for being available to strangers 24/7. Not anymore – now you have all kinds of celebrities, on all different levels of interest from the paparazzi. They leave the ones who don’t want it alone. (It takes two to tango?)


You’re sometimes, still, perceived as something of an eccentric, an artist who can be hard to stomach at times. Is this something that, essentially, you strive for though, to be absolutely removed from what is the norm at any particular juncture of your music career to date? Do you think any of your solo records have emerged at a time when that music – the music on said albums – was vogue in any way? You won at the BRIT Awards in 1994, 1996 and 1998, but not since – is that an indication that tastes, certainly within organisations like the BRITS, have become safer, flaccid and, sadly, devoid of imagination? Is there a lot of modern pop music exciting you right now?


Hmm... that’s a big question touching on many subjects. I have been asked questions a little like this [before, and] the only angle I can get on it is that I am aware that there are periods when I am an extrovert and there are periods when I am an introvert. It’s a very natural progression, in and out, kinda like the tide. And when I am at my most introverted it probably goes in hand with developing a deeper contact with my idiosyncrasies; when I am very extroverted I am curious about other people, so I reach out way more. To be honest I don’t have a clue when I’m “in” or not – that’s way too abstract for me, too close to home, and the journalist’s job. The same goes for the integrity of the BRITS – I really am not the right person to measure that.


How did being recognised for your role in Dancer In The Dark affect you? Was it pleasing to be approved by a group of people unrelated to what is, essentially, your day job? I read that you turned down a role in Michel Gondry’s The Science Of Sleep – was this in order to focus solely on music for the time being, on Volta and all the promo activity around it, or are you finished with acting?

That is some sort of misunderstanding. There was, in the beginning, a chance I would play the main role in Human Nature, Michel’s first film (released in 2001). Parts of it were related to me – I had been going on about it for years with my visual collaborators, if i could be all hairy, and the whole Isobel story: being born in nature and not fitting at all into urban situations. But it was important for Michel to claim his independence at that time and I fully understood, so we both thought it would be good that he would do something without me. At that point we had done six videos together, but I was really relieved because it would have been hard to turn a friend down. It really isn’t on the top of my list to act – it is kinda at the bottom.


Wikipedia.org lists your genres as, and I take a deep ‘breath’: pop, trip-hop, rock, jazz, ambient, electronica, dance, alternative, hip-hop and experimental. Does this widespread array of diverse pigeonholes serve as a plus or a minus, ultimately, for a commercial artist such as yourself, or does the nature of your music – music that varies so wonderfully from album to album – naturally avoid simple categorising? Would you ever be content, at all, to be retrogressive with your writing? Just how do you begin each album, anyway: is it a case of ignoring, totally, what came immediately before, or is each step Darwinian in evolution?

I’m totally run by impulse, so it is not so planned. I already feel tied down in so many ways that have nothing to do with me. My voice will always sound the same, I will always be the same person, from Iceland, a woman; I have limits to my energy, and I have to try to press the record button in moments of spontaneity and do concerts on already agreed time and so on and so on. Compared to that, changing from strings to brass in one album or from a whisper to a scream on another seems like nothing. I’m just doing my best to escape boredom.


Finally, and to return to Volta: the album doesn’t sound like the work of an artist nearing the end of their career at all; it’s fresh, innovative, entirely modernist despite the many echoes of indigenous music past. How long do you see your music career lasting for? Can you foresee a time when retirement might be an option worthy of consideration, or are you unable to rid your mind of thoughts of new arrangement ideas?

I feel it is healthy to keep busy at stuff. Nature made man that way, so I’ll probably be noodle-ing until old age.

Warmth, Björk

Anx said:

apparently last night, iTunes UK fucked up when they put up the pre-order information and all of Volta (including the 3 bonus tracks/remixes from the pre-order version) was available for purchase.


so it is out there. but so far, no one's sharing.

IstenSzek said:

Innocence sound a lot like something off Medulla. Earth Intruders is Army of Me'ish. Not hearing Debut at all. Nor am I getting the fantastic vibe everyone else is getting from this.

I have it...

IstenSzek said:

With a big healthy dose of "I Go Humble" mixed in.

superspaceboy said:

i don't get an Army Of Me'ish vibe at all from Earth Intruders. maybe Human Behaviour on steroids and mescaline. and i've not read anything about a Debut sound to Innocence. Post, a little, but not Debut.

interview with filter-mag.com
http://www.filter-mag.com...=14361&c=2

Army of She: Planting Flags with Bjork
by Ken Scrudato | 04.24.2007


There comes a time in every girl’s life when she’s got to reach for the trigger and take aim at the motherfuckers who seem forever intent on poisoning the sugar and spice of life. Not that Björk has ever spent a tenth of a millisecond playing by their dastardly rules, but perhaps she’s finally exhausted the certainly noble but possibly futile “all is full of love” approach and is, rather, intent on rolling a few heads. And after all, this is the girl that once emphatically reminded us in song that she’s, “no fucking Buddhist.” True Björkies, of course, knew that all along.
On her new album, Volta, some heads do, in fact, roll. And like all of history’s great cries for justice (think, in modern terms, of Sinéad gloriously savaging the Pope on network TV), it is not a coy, introverted affair. The groovy, futuristic pop goddess we all fell in love with when Debut was released in 1993 has arisen once again. These are the most immediate tunes she’s done in years. Björk, it seems, would have us dance our way over the barricades, rather than sit around griping that they might be too difficult to scale. Here she speaks with Filter about her place in the battlefields of music, politics and people.

There were some rather violent reactions to your last two albums, the challenging and fascinating Medúlla and Drawing Restraint 9. How was the making of Volta, a much more accessible record, a continuum or a reaction by you to those records?
Medulla and Drawing Restraint 9 were very important albums for me to make. I don't think I could have done Volta without having gone to these other places first. People overrate extrovert music, and introvert music is underrated. Personally I probably listen more to introvert music than extrovert. But I have been lucky, I'm not complaining. A lot of people’s favorite albums of mine are Vespertine and Medúlla. So, I guess I'm just going to continue on my little path. Some people will get it and some won't.

A collision of nature and machines seems to be an ongoing idea, maybe even struggle, in your work. How does that play out on Volta?
The struggle is still there for sure but it is more seamless and complex. Some of the most natural sounding noises on this album are actually done with computers and then you have trumpets imitating Morse codes.

Is there struggle or harmony between your modernist and ancient impulses?
Overall I'm always quite interested to unite—to create a whole. Some cheap psychology might explain it, being a child of divorced parents; but I have always felt that by uniting techno and acoustic, the modern and the roots, man and woman, the symphonic and the rhythmic, sound and vision, words and music… I can go on forever, but I seem to be quite driven by uniting these things and feel that only then a flow will happen.

You use an Icelandic female brass section on Volta. Yet on “Wanderlust,” you sing, “I have lost my origin.” Was employing musicians from your homeland a way of trying to reconnect with the sort of primal essence that Iceland has instilled you with? Or am I overanalyzing it?
Could be. My anchor this time around was pretty global; I’m tired of nationalism. But it is great to have them around. Perhaps they support also the “female power” aspect of the album.

At one point, Antony told me that he wished that people would stop seeing him as odd or eccentric, and realize that he is just writing simple, heartfelt songs. Have you ever felt you were overly classified as being peculiar or idiosyncratic?
Yes. I feel I’m a pretty healthy, normal human being. I haven't been oppressed by religion or sexism and so on. But people are scared of anyone different, so they point at me.

Was there a statement in your working with African musicians, at a time when the West seems to be badly fumbling our responsibility to that continent?
Yes, not so conscious though. I asked both Konono N°1 and Toumani Diabaté [to play] because of their brilliant musicianship and it was a coincidence they where both from Africa.

Yours have always seemed to be the politics of the human spirit—that the world can be changed by not being afraid to be an individual. But “Declare Independence” seems to be railing with a bit more of a punk sense of defiance. Can you describe your emotional zeitgeist?
Maybe I felt that up to here things would be okay and the “good” would win in the end if only it persists. But things are not looking so good right now. It is time to go up on a mountain with a flag and a trumpet and insist on justice.

You told me before that you would probably die without your music. How would you describe this chapter, Volta, in terms of carrying on the Björk life force?
Hmm. It is always funny when you see old comments of yours taken out of their original context—they seem so extreme. But in a way it is still true. Making music is a way of survival for me. Otherwise I would probably implode. But the Volta chapter is very much about justice. Justice for women, the female spirit, nature and people in need in general. Perhaps having a little girl influenced me in a way that I felt I needed to update, to educate myself on the state of things and how I was going to explain it to her.

grrrr. i can't believe this shit isn't on soulseek yet!

Dayspring said:

It's so strange, cuz I'm actually content to wait now.

GangstaFam said:

meeee too. i really want to be able to crack the shrink wrap on this sucker, wondering what the hell ride i'm in for.

Anx said:

ME THREE! I haven't even heard Innocence or watched Wanderlust from SNL yet. I'm the purest voltavirgin here!

eleven said:

And the new Tori is so satisfying right now that, to be honest, I'm a bit "Bjork who?" right now.

GangstaFam said:

Weeeeellll, I don't think I'd go that far! I think only Prince giving me the keys to the vault would make me ever say "Bjork who?"

hmm...even then...

eleven said:

I know. I'm exaggerating a bit. But I kinda hate it a little when 2 albums I really care about come out at the same time. I'm glad to have Tori early and give it some proper time cuz I really don't want the 2 competing for my attention. It'll be emotional overload already, that's for sure.

eleven said:

oh, i heard about what you did up in the hayloft with MySpace and a laptop!

Anx said:

Do I even want to know about this?

I'm not into her at all, but I did watch both performances on SNL last week. Chick is interesting but I can't see myself actively listening for some reason

Anx said:

i've looked for Volta all over the net and came up empty handed until now.

the only thing i've been able to locate was "innocence" and the donky has
what is supposed to be the whole album but once you download it and unzip
the file it's just that "Army Of Me" remix album from last year.

none of the blogs seem to have anything either. but i'm sure they'll all
have it in a while. the new Tori suddenly started popping up all over the
place last week.