Interview: Björk

Björk is out of sight in the kitchen of her black-painted house that stands on a quiet Reykjavík street, overlooking the North Atlantic. There are clatters and bangs, the sound of frozen plastic rustling, the thud of a closing freezer door. Dressed in a stunning red-and-white-striped smock, she comes back into the dining room and slams a tray down onto the roughly carved wooden table. On the tray are ice lollies, nuts, chocolate and sweets. “Oh dear, here it is, a total ADD dessert,” she says, and laughs.

We’re taking a break from discussing Björk’s equally colourful, though far more coherent, new album / app / music education project / marvel, Biophilia. At a time when half-cocked, badly thought-through new formats of music distribution are being thrown out by panicking major labels as if they were trying to lighten a sinking ship, Björk’s Biophilia does feel like a genuinely innovative development. Her entire approach to the project seems to have been one of open-mindedness and a willingness to, given she was out of record contract, attempt something truly visionary in scope and ambition. This included talks with National Geographic, who had considered setting up a record label with Björk as the first signing. “I thought, ‘Wahey, I’m labelmates with lemurs and sharks!’” she says. Although the lemurs and sharks will have to wait for a label showcase alongside Björk, National Geographic remained involved with Biophilia, contributing photographs to be embedded into the app. This is a pointer to the breadth of Biophilia, which at one moment features a voice introduction by Sir David Attenborough and at next seeks to explain musical structure — scales, rhythm, score — via the workings of nature.

Over the course of our conversation, Björk reveals how her desire to create a project that would educate not only about music and science but also the power of technology to open minds was “very influenced” by a period of intense involvement in the politics of her homeland. She is clearly still angered by the financial crash that saw Iceland’s banks collapse: “The bankers decided: ‘We are superheroes, we can run the world.’ But it went, ‘Pffsst.’ The guys who made the mistakes… we’re trying to get them to pay. The working class should not be cleaning up the shit after them. We are slowly getting them into jail, these guys, and selling their companies to pay the bills.”

When I remark that Iceland has recently become a bogeyman in the UK press, affecting our pension funds and sending ash clouds marauding south into British airspace, Björk responds that the media has got the wrong end of the stick: “It wasn’t that they refused [to pay the debt], they wanted [the bankers] to pay. There were 20 bankers who spent the money of 350,000 people. They just ruined it all.”

She also hopes that Brits might lift their doughy forms from their sofas and follow the radical example set by her countrymen and women: “What Icelandic people felt was that the same people in England — we call them banksters — were furious that the working people here won, and the banksters had to pay it. They don’t want the Icelanders to get away with it because then the working class in England will do the same thing — they will refuse to take on their venture capitalist rollercoaster behaviour.”

Following the crash, she felt that Iceland was “at a crossroads”, which is why she felt compelled to get “entangled in a battle”, perhaps against her natural instincts: “If you’d asked me five years ago I’d have said I’d never get involved in politics — never ever.”

But Björk felt she had to act in the face of a very grave threat to Iceland’s vast, unspoiled landscape. “They wanted to make five aluminium factories,” she explains. “But the island is not that big. If you do that it will become like Frankfurt in the space of five years. Building an aluminium factory seemed like going back to an industrial age — a dinosaur idea.”

‘Crystalline’

The solution for which Björk campaigned was to say, “You’ve got to connect the dots and make the whole thing work. Green solutions are easier — if you’re using tidal energy, it’s cheaper, and you’re going to be better off in the long run. What I want to do is not go, ‘Okay, let’s have it how it used to be — all nostalgic and nationalistic.’ I want to use this energy… I want to use it to go high-tech, and so do a lot of people, not just me. I don’t want to do what England or what Europe had to do — 200 years of building factories. We don’t have to do that. We can go straight into high-tech, solar power, wind farms… and then we can come into the 21st century. We actually put up a petition online where we asked the government to keep our energy resources in public property, not privatise it. And 25 per cent of the population signed.”

One of the instruments used on Biophilia, the gameleste, was even employed in protest: “We took the organ and did a karaoke and it was really touching because old ladies, farmers from the north… they came and sang the national anthem, and people were crying.”

Others took more persuading, though: “The rednecks in Iceland took a lot of time to take that in. You have to convince them that it’ll actually save them money. So I ended up debating with rednecks. Coming out of that into this project… it was thinking that the 21st century isn’t just an opportunity, we have to work with nature, whether we like it or not.”

Björk pauses and smiles. She has a strange habit of making physical punctuation, sticking out her tongue and running it over her lips and the right hand side of her face. “We could talk about this all day. That’s why I had to go to Puerto Rico.”

It was there, far from the turmoil in Iceland, that Biophilia really started to take shape. “I found a town that was really easy for my boyfriend to fly to New York from,” she says. “It happened to be a surf town, believe it or not. It’s in a Beach Boys song from the sixties. It had good restaurants, because surfers know about food. I loved it. I still miss it. It was a paradise world — you’d wake up, swim in the ocean… Wow.”

There, Björk and her small entourage experimented with the midi technology that allows her to operate the giant pendulums, Tesla coil synth and gameleste organ that are an intrinsic part of the Biophilia touring set up. This was done on boozy nights that dealt with the “cabin fever” of being in a small house on a beach, far away from home. “There are always pirate versions of songs on midi, things like ‘Smoke On The Water’, which sounds pretty good on the organ, and then we’d get ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ by Snoop, which sounded amazing, and ‘Bills Bills Bills’ by Destiny’s Child. We’d take it in turns to do the lyrics and singing, and one person would run the midi on the organ.”

Although she had previously used touch-screen technology on the Volta tour, it was only when the iPad was released that Björk felt she had the technological tools available to make the concept of Biophilia come to life. Plans for it to be a National Geographic-funded film directed by Michel Gondry, or a “music house” in a repossessed building in Iceland, were simply not up to the task that Björk had in mind. Now, the Apple tablet allowed complicated ideas to be created and developed simply. After all, the songs were all finished, completed in Puerto Rico and Björk’s simple home studio. All that was needed was the means to make them come to life. So her manager contacted her favourite app developers, who all agreed to take part in the project, coming to Iceland to work on ideas. “We were in a small restaurant in Iceland, brainstorming, I guess, and I’ve never really done something like that. Musicians don’t really brainstorm! They eat good food, tell bad jokes and get drunk for a few days, and on day four they have a song.”

Her utopian ideals for the future of Iceland as a centre for high-tech industry and small companies based around local cooperation ended up being manifested in the way the technological side of Biophilia was funded. It was a return to Björk’s punk roots: “We’d run out of money by that point because we hadn’t signed with anyone and we were trying to get people to finance us, but everyone thought it was the most utopian thing: ‘And then the moon is going to play a song?’ I don’t blame them. But then the app builders, they just said, ‘Okay.’ They just offered and said everyone works for free, and then we split the profit 50/50. So this is how we did it back in the punk days, with the indie-label system. That was amazing on so many levels, because it made them feel as if it was their baby as well, and for me, without a record company, it felt like I was 18 again, because that’s something I know — the DIY, group work ethic. It’s not about egos. People just get it done. So, 5,000 Skype meetings later…”

Yes, 5,000 Skype meetings later and Biophilia is ready to be introduced to the world. It would be tempting to say that its release is a game-changing moment in music and technology, except it’s hard to imagine another artist who would be able to realise such an audacious, heartfelt and thoughtful project so perfectly. Biophilia is not just a new means of distribution for music, or a way to show off the capabilities of sound combined with the very finest geeks in Appland. Instead, shaped by the tumultuous Iceland of recent times, and Björk’s unhappy experience of the narrow teaching methods in music school, it is a reaction to narrowness of thought. All these ideas become natural byte-fellows within the app: combining musicology made simple with a sense of wonder at the power and beauty of the natural world, Biophilia is a truly remarkable achievement.

With such a positive project now gradually finding its way into our iPhones and iPads, and thousands wowed by the live debut of Biophilia at the Manchester International Festival, is Björk now also positive about the future of her country? Just before her daughter runs into the room and shoots her with a homemade bow and arrow, she says: “I am, actually. I think people are standing up and trying to mould the future of Iceland.  It’s not just me, it’s all of Iceland. It’s exciting times.”

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