Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  Björk is probably the most famous Icelander since Leif Eriksson, who voyaged to America a thousand years ago. Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, who served as the country’s president from 1980 to 1996, once compared her to the women of the national sagas, like Brynhild and Aud the Deep-Minded. Björk has spent much time abroad in part to escape this monumentalizing attention, which makes her uneasy. Instead, she has ended up with a global sort of fame: as the creator of eight solo albums, involving British, American, Indian, Iranian, Brazilian, Danish, Turkish, and Inuit musicians; as a sometime actress, who in 2000 won the best-actress prize in Cannes for her performance in the film Dancer in the Dark; and, more recently, as a denizen of the New York art-world circles frequented by her partner, Matthew Barney. Her appearance at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics, singing an ornate new song called “Oceania,” confirmed her status as the ultimate musical cosmopolitan, acquainted with both Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Wu-Tang Clan. Though she now spends much of her time in New York, she keeps coming back to Iceland, where she lives for several months of the year. The relative simplicity of the place is reassuring to her. Once, she translated a local news headline for my benefit: TIRE TRACKS IN FOOTBALL FIELD. A look of pleasure crossed her face as she studied photographic evidence of the catastrophe. “This is so Iceland,” she said.

  In my talks with Björk, which began in Reykjavik and continued in New York, London, and Salvador, Brazil, she mentioned the “Nordic idea” several times, although she was never too specific about it. Some sort of Nordic idea is plainly at the heart of her album Medúlla, which appeared in the summer of 2004. The moment you try to put this idea into words, however, the glacier of cliche begins to advance. Asmundur Jónsson, the visionary manager of the Icelandic record label Bad Taste, once said that her earliest solo recordings made him think of a solitary figure standing in an open space; but there is nothing inherently northern in that. Whatever is Nordic in Björk’s music is filtered through her own creative personality, which is all-devouring by nature, taking in dance music, avant-garde electronic music, twentieth-century composition, contemporary R&B, jazz, hip-hop, and almost everything else under the winter sun.

  When it becomes known that you have met Björk, people tend to ask, with an insinuating grin, “What’s she like?” She is expected to be a cyclone of elfin zaniness; she is, after all, the woman who showed up at the 2001 Academy Awards with what looked to be a swan carcass draped around her body. She does have her zany moments—I won’t soon forget the image of her dancing down a street in Salvador shouting “Bring the noise!”—but it is not the first word that comes to mind. She is warm, watchful, sharp-witted, restless, often serious, seldom solemn, innocent but never naïve, honest and direct in a way that invites confidences, shockingly easy to talk to on almost any subject but herself. Teresa Stratas once said that Lotte Lenya was “an earth sprite, a Lulu, at once vulnerable and strong, soft and hard-edged, child-like and world-weary.” Much the same could be said of Björk, except that she is rather nicer than Lulu—and far from being weary of the world.

  Early work on Medúlla, whose name describes the inner part of an animal or plant structure and, more appositely, the lower part of the human brain, was done at Greenhouse Studios, which belongs to the producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. Valgeir, a mellow, soft-spoken guy in his early thirties, had been working with Björk since 1998, when the two collaborated on the soundtrack for Dancer in the Dark. The studio is at the end of a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Reykjavik. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary home, which it partly is: Valgeir lives with his family on one side. The main recording console is in a long room with cathedral-style windows and gleaming beech floors. Downstairs is a small performance space, with an adjoining kitchenette. The place is cool, spare, and abnormally neat, Valgeir’s T-shirt-and-torn-jeans style notwithstanding. By the time we went upstairs, the midwinter day was already ending. An hour later, a full moon was hanging uncomfortably close. The white-capped mountains glowed in the distance.

  Björk sat down to listen to sketches and partly finished versions of the songs that she wanted to put on the album. She had written many of them at the end of the previous year, during a trip to Gomera, in the Canary Islands. “I am at the point where I can let it out for other people, hear them through other people’s ears,” she said. “There is a point where you are very secretive, but then you become confident enough that you can hear criticism, and not become discouraged.” I nodded sympathetically, as if I, too, were an Icelandic pop star who has erased boundaries between genres. Björk often uses the second person to close the distance between herself and others.

  She’d laid down the initial vocal tracks in a spontaneous rush, standing over the mixing board with a handheld mike—“a big old 1950s thing,” she said—while electronic mockups of the harmonies and beats played on Valgeir’s computer. “The album is about voices,” she said. “I want to get away from instruments and electronics, which was the world of my last album, Vespertine. I want to see what can be done with the entire emotional range of the human voice—a single voice, a chorus, trained voices, pop voices, folk voices, strange voices. Not just melodies but everything else, every noise that a throat makes.” She mentioned as possible collaborators the avant-garde rock vocalist Mike Patton, the Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq, the “human beatboxes” Dokaka and Rahzel, and the R&B superstar Beyonce. “The last album was very introverted,” she said. “It was avoiding eye contact. This one is a little more earthy, but, you know, not exactly simple.” She stopped to answer a phone call about school fees for her older child, Sindri, who is of college age.

  Björk started playing the tracks and commenting on each. Some were full-fledged four- or five-minute songs, with verses and a chorus; others were briefer, more atmospheric, more elusive. Most immediately gripping was a song called “Who Is It,” which Björk had started working on during the Vespertine sessions. This version began with two minutes or so of vaguely medieval-sounding choral writing, a misty mass of overlapping lines. Then big bass notes began to growl, and in a matter of seconds the song transformed itself before one’s ears into the kind of quirkily ebullient anthem that Björk specialized in earlier in her career: “Who is it that never lets you down? / Who is it that gave you back your crown?” I thought of The Master and Margarita, of the midnight carnival erupting in a Nordic place. As it was, “Who Is It” was something between a pop song and a choral meditation by Arvo Part. Remixed with a few more heavy beats, it could rule every dance floor in the world.

  Not yet satisfied with her creation, Björk sat down at a keyboard and worked out new vocal lines to add to the swell of sound at the beginning of the song. At least half the time I was with Björk, she was hunched over a keyboard or a computer, building her synthesis one piece at a time. She seldom sits absolutely still, and is constantly crossing or uncrossing her legs, squatting in a chair in various yoga-like positions, or getting up to twirl her body this way or that. Yet her gaze stays fixed on whatever is engaging her attention; her body seems distracted but her mind is not.

  At around 6:00 p.m. the next day, sixteen singers arrived at the studio to record the choral parts that Björk and Valgeir had been working on for several months. In the past, Valgeir told me, they had printed out string and orchestral arrangements directly from the computer, using the Sibelius music-notation program, but in this case they engaged a copyist to produce clean vocal parts. Most of the singers were members of a group called Schola Cantorum, which has appeared on several recordings of the music of the furiously original Icelandic composer Jón Leifs. Björk heard the Leifs recordings and liked the chorus’s sound. In recent years, she had worked with professional choruses and also with a group of large-voiced Inuit women, who came along on her Vespertine tour. (She found them while on a vacation in Greenland, by putting up ads in a supermarket.) These singers, she hoped, would be classical in technique but flexible in their approach. “I want a little bit of a pagan edge, a bit of Slavic,” s
he said.

  The session was on the late side because most of the singers have day jobs. They congregated in the kitchen, looking nervous but game. Valgeir placed the vocal parts in piles, and the singers picked them up in a shuffling line. If you had walked in off the street, you might have thought that this was a gathering of procrastinating Christmas carolers, not a major-label recording session. Björk offered bowls of chocolate-covered almonds and raisins. Valgeir’s son practiced in-line skating in the hall. After an initial run-through, five Domino’s pizzas arrived, and the singers began devouring them. Valgeir hovered in the background, chatting about Brian Eno and keeping an eye on the pizza situation. Fifteen minutes later, there was no trace that the pizzas had ever existed.

  To convey her ideas to the singers, Björk sang, danced, conducted, gestured, talked, and joked. She is noted for using extravagant metaphors when she talks about music. “I say, ‘Like marzipan,’ and they say, ‘Oh, you mean dolcissimo,’” she told me. Since Valgeir was upstairs at the mixing board, Björk also took care of some technical matters, fiddling for a while with a malfunctioning Wurlitzer piano and unplugging some unused headphones that were lying on the floor. She was unfailingly, elaborately polite. In several months of recording, I never heard her raise her voice or deliver anything like a firm command. Criticisms were prefaced with phrases like “the only thing I would say is …” and “the one thing I’m not so crazy about is …” If one of her collaborators sought specific guidance, she might say, “Whatever hits your fancy. I just like to hear whatever you do with it.”

  Yet Björk does put forward some specific instructions. Most of the parts for the Icelandic singers consisted of wordless vocalise, but she asked them to apply different syllables to the notes—“hoo” instead of “aah,” for instance—and had to rein them in when they started inventing faux-African mumbo-jumbo. In some cases, she changed the parts on the spot, either to clarify a texture or to make it richer. She got very excited when the basses kicked in with Mephistophelian tones; she was depending on them to take the place of the big, low electronic beats that had moored so many of her songs in the past. She assigned them to sing along in the middle section of “Where Is the Line,” an aggressive song in which Björk lays down the law for someone who has been abusing her patience. “More of a rock feel,” she said happily. Valgeir looked on with a quizzical smile, scratching the stubble on his face. “We’ve been talking about the choral arrangement for so long,” he said. “It’s such a relief it’s actually happening.”

  Later, in the upstairs recording room, I noticed something remarkable about Björk’s voice. The singers were in a circle, with a microphone positioned in front of each. Björk was usually in the center of the circle or on the outside, with no microphone within reach. Yet whenever she was singing or talking her voice was at the center of the sound. You could pick it out in a second from the Icelandic chatter: the dusky timbre, deep in the mezzo-soprano range; the tremor in it, which occasionally takes on the rasp of a pubescent boy’s voice; the way it slices through the sonic haze, as if a few extra frequencies in a given range are being twanged to life. It carries without effort, like those Mongolian voices that can be heard across the steppe. Somehow, the mere fact of her voice became a creative magnet, pulling the music in the right direction.

  On the day I was to leave Iceland, Björk decided that I should see something of Reykjavik’s art scene. Jóga, one of her oldest friends, is married to the actor and artist Jón Gnarr, who was having an opening that afternoon. We drove in another taxi—if Iceland has limousines, Björk does not use them—to an old Lutheran church in the center of town. The show was titled INRI, and it consisted of a series of photographs of G.I. Joe and Ken dolls acting out the Stations of the Cross. The resulting evocation of Christ’s last days was unconventional—only four of the attendees of the Last Supper wear clothes, and the best-dressed one, in khakis and a sweater-vest, is Satan—but if any conservative Christians were scandalized they did not make themselves known. The mood of the piece was whimsical rather than provocative. “Judas looks like a rave kid,” Björk said, giggling approvingly.

  In the church, everyone seemed to know Björk, but no one made a fuss over her. I had a hard time telling whether the people who greeted her were relatives, old friends, fans, or simply extroverted strangers. At one point, a blond boy walked up to Björk and said “Hi, Björk!” Björk said “Hi!” in return, whereupon the kid casually sauntered away. Two older teens were dressed in tattered, oddly festooned military-style greatcoats; they looked like stylish deserters from the final Army of the Tsar. Outside the church, a television reporter was interviewing Gnarr. On a nearby lake, swans made a noise that sounded like an anarchist brass band, or so it seemed in this context. The snow and ice melted in the weak glare of the sun. I said goodbye to Björk and took a cab to the airport.

  My incoming flight had landed after dark, and I had seen nothing of the landscape around the city. Now I stared in wonder at the miles of blackish lava, at the volcanic boulders that had dropped from the sky, at the conical peak of Mount Keilir, in the distance. I had gone from a fashionable modern place into a charcoal sketch of an unfinished world.

  For a long time, there was nothing where Iceland now is. The volcanoes of the island began rising from the Atlantic twenty million years ago—a geological pause for breath. The island was undisturbed by what the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness called “the tyranny of mankind” until about A.D. 870, when Norse and Celtic farmers began to settle it. They brought with them the lore of the Germanic tribes, which became the basis of an oral and written tradition that changed little in the following nine centuries. The stories of gods, heroes, Vikings, and ordinary Icelanders were expounded in rímur, or extended chanted tales. When they are read today, they are uncannily familiar, for they have burrowed their way into modern mythologies of Western culture; Wagner used them as the principal source of the Ring cycle, and J.R.R. Tolkien put them at the core of The Lord of the Rings. Wagner’s Ring of Fire and Tolkien’s Mount Doom come straight out of the Icelandic landscape. No wonder I felt a chill when I saw Mount Keilir looming over the plain.

  Until the early twentieth century, the Icelanders lived out of sight and mind, more a rumor than a fact. Laxness changed this by winning the Nobel Prize, in 1955, for his novel Independent People, which tells of a sheepherder named Bjartur, who holds on to his parcel of land in the face of mounting natural and supernatural obstacles. The book is notable for, among other things, its ambivalent relationship with the Nordic idea; it paints an epic portrait of a hardy, solitary soul, yet it undercuts that mythology with slow-burning deadpan humor and blindsiding blasts of emotion. If Bjartur suffers in isolation, the novel suggests, it is because he chose to. Laxness’s mixture of dignity and irony seems central to the national character.

  Modern Icelandic music begins with Jón Leifs, who lived from 1899 to 1968, and whose 1961 work Hekla helped bring Björk and her chorus together. While in Reykjavik, I had lunch with Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, a young Harvard-educated musicologist who is writing a biography of Leifs. “He was a tremendously complex personality,” Árni told me. “To some, he was witty, charming, and sophisticated; to others a paranoid megalomaniac.” Despite his drastic individuality, Leifs based his music on a close study of Icelandic folk music: his lurching rhythms follow the patterns of the rímur chant, and his craggy, medieval-sounding melodies imitate a song style called tvisöngur. The composer spent much of his early career studying in Germany, and remained there throughout the Third Reich. Unfortunately, his messianic belief in Icelandic tradition blended all too well with Nazi philosophy, which prized Iceland as the locus of an uncontaminated Aryan culture. Yet his roiling dissonances and percussive effects caused some to label him a “degenerate.” The fact that he had married a Jewish German pianist did not help his position. He and his wife escaped to Sweden in 1944.

  Hekla, which is named after Iceland’s largest active volcano, has been described as the loud
est piece of music ever written. It requires nineteen percussionists, who play a fantastic battery of instruments, including anvils, stones, sirens, bells, ships’ chains, a sort of tree-hammer, shotguns, and cannons. During a break in Björk’s choral recording sessions, I asked one of the Schola Cantorum singers about their recording of Hekla, on the BIS label. “That was totally crazy,” he told me. “Leifs knew that a lot of what he wrote couldn’t really be sung, but he wrote it down anyway. Björk is very easy to work with by comparison, although the music is surprisingly similar sometimes.” Björk herself loves Leifs’s music. “I think he almost animated eruptions and lava in sound,” she said. Yet this composer lived out the tragedy of Laxness’s “independent man,” who fails to see that his pride is the source of his suffering. It seemed to me that Björk has been working her entire career to correct this mythology—still to maintain independence, to seek the new and the strange, but also to make compromises when necessary, to live in reality, to accept imperfection.