Introduction || Klaus Biesenbach

Bad Taste Records is formed; Bjrk, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, or Eldon, Einar rn Benediktsson, and Bragi lafsson start The Sugarcubes
Joins Kukl (meaning sorcery) with friends Einar rn Benediktsson, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, Birgir Mogensen, and Gulaugur ttarsson
Tappi Tkarrass release their first 5-song EP
Aged twelve, releases a self-titled album, Bjrk
Joins punk band Tappi Tkarrass, whose name translates as Cork the Bitchs Ass
Enrols in a local childrens music school, where she studies musicology, flute, and recorder
Receives the Order of the Falcon, awarded by the President of Iceland
Sugarcubes sign to ex-Flux of Pink Indians Derek Birketts independent label, One Little Indian
Kukl join Chumbawamba and Flux of Pink Indians on a miners strike benefit tour in the UK
Sugarcubes release their first album, Lifes Too Good,, to critical acclaim in UK and US
Kukl release The Eye on British anarchist record label, Crass
Sugarcubes tour the US for the first time and appear on Saturday Night Live
Bjrk writes, illustrates, and publishes a short fairytale titled Um rnat
Receives the Q Inspiration Award from Robert Wyatt
Named Best International Female at the BRITs for a third time Receives Qwartz honor at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards
Wins Best Female at the MTV Music Awards Awarded the Polar Music Prize
Wins BRITs Best International Female for the second time Receives two Golden Globe nominations: Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, and Best Original Song for Ive Seen It All MTV O Music Awards presents Bjrk with the Digital Genius Award
Receives six MTV Music Award nominations; Its Oh So Quiet wins Best Choreography in a Video Surrounded: all albums re-mastered for Dolby Digital and surround sound
Releases Surrounded: Wins Webby Artist of the Year
Wanderlust video, directed by Encyclopedia Pictura, receives three awards at the UK Music Video Awards:
Bachelorette receives award for Best Art Direction at the MTV Video Music Awards Best Art Direction in a Video, Best Indie/Alternative Video, and Video of the Year
Wins Best International Female and Best International Newcomer at the BRIT Awards and performs at the ceremony with PJ Harvey
All is Full of Love video, directed by Chris Cunningham, wins Breakthrough Video and Best Special Effects in a Video at the VMAs The Academy of AIM (Association of Independent Music) honors Bjrk with Outstanding Contribution to Music Award
Receives Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival; the film also wins the Palme dOr Releases Voltaic,, a double CD and DVD encompassing the best of the tours live performances
Releases Receives the National Order of Merit awarded by the President of the French Republic and a recorded live session at Olympic Studios, London
Bjrk moves to London Contributes exclusive instrumental soundtrack to Nick Knight and Alexander McQueens installation Angel for La Beaut en Avignon exhibition
Ive Seen It All is nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars
First single, Human Behaviour, is accompanied by a Michel Gondry video
Releases
Releases Includes a studio album, apps, new website, educational workshops for children to learn
First single is Hidden Place, with a video directed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and M/M (Paris) about music, nature, and science, and live shows (three-year world tour of month-long residencies in eight cities)
Releases Releases Selmasongs
Selmasongs, soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark with Bjrk using apps to play custom-built musical instruments
Vespertine tour launches at the Grand Rex in Paris with the Novecento Orchestra conducted by Simon Lee, the group Matmos, Zeena Parkins, and an Inuit womens choir
Releases remix album, Telegram Bjrk and John Taveners collaboration A Prayer of the Heart premieres as an accompaniment to Nan Goldins Heartbeat photo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris
First single, Army of Me, is accompanied by a Michel Gondry video
Bjrk attends Oscars in Swan dress by Marjan Pejoski, and later performs
Biophilia receives a Grammy for Best Recording Package sleeve, designed by Bjrk and M/M (Paris)
Releases Releases
preceded by a mini-tour of European clubs produced by Bjrk, Mark Bell, Timbaland, and Danja Bjrk, Peter Strickland, and Nick Fenton
First single is Jga, and Michel Gondry directs the video Earth Intruders is the first single, with a video directed by Michel Ocelot present Biophilia Live concert film at Tribeca Film Festival
Releases Drawing Restraint soundtrack to the Drawing Restraint 9 film directed by Matthew Barney
Interviews composer Arvo Prt for the BBC program Modern Minimalists 9,, directed by Matthew Barney
Release of Drawing Restraint 9 Releases Comet Song, recorded for the soundtrack of the animated film Moomins and the Comet Chase
Sings Gloomy Sunday at Alexander McQueens memorial in London;
later releases Trance as the backing track to a short film made by Nick Knight, titled To Lee, with Love, as a tribute to McQueen
Releases Performs a duet, Fltta, with Antony and the Johnsons on the release Swanlights
an a cappella album featuring only voices Bjrk vocals appear on Death Grips release The Powers That B
Releases Greatest Hits and Family Tree
Tree,, with sleeve artwork by artist Gabrela Fririksdttir Releases the Biophilia Remix Series 17
Sugarcubes release second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! Launches Greatest Hits tour at London Hammersmith Apollo Announces new commission and accompanying retrospective
Releases Live Box set, featuring four CDs, one from each album, and a DVD of live performances of the past ten years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach
Releases Bastards,, a compilation of remixes from Biophilia
Charity compilation of twenty remixes of Army of Me released in aid of UNICEF Biophilia Live presented as the Sonic Gala at the 58th BFI London Film Festival
Bjrk records jazz album Gling-Gl with Trio Gumundar Inglfssonar in one day; it goes platinum in Iceland Tetralogia soundtrack composed in collaboration with Gabrela Fririksdttir for the latters work at the Venice Biennale Nordic Council funds Biophilia Educational Program initiative
Performs at Live8 Tokyo to bring the curriculum to Nordic countries schools.
Records two tracks with 808 State, which are released on the groups Ex:El album First single is Crystalline and has a Michel Gondry video
Performs live at the Royal Opera House in London, the first ever contemporary pop artist to do so Biophilia app acquired by Museum of Modern Art, New York,
the first app in the museums collection
Accompanied by the Brodsky Quartet in a filmed a cappella performance at the Union Chapel, London
Performs with Dirty Projectors at the Housing Work Bookstore, New York, to raise money for homeless New Yorkers with HIV/AIDS
Cast alongside Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark Dark,, directed by Lars von Trier Sugarcubes re-form for a one-off concert in their hometown of Reykjavk Joins Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith
for Stopp Lets Protect the Park charity concert in Iceland
Performs Schenbergs Pierrot Lunaire with conductor Kent Nagano, the Opera Orchestra of Lyon, and musical director Murray Hipkin Nttra featuring vocals from Thom Yorke is released as a stand-alone single with all proceeds going towards the Nttra Foundation
Meets and interviews Karlheinz Stockhausen for Dazed & Confused magazine
Performs alongside Sigur Rs at Nttra concert to raise awareness of the destruction of Icelands landscape through increased aluminum smelting
Records Live at Shepherds Bush Empire
Empire;; tickets are distributed for free to fan club Performs at the inaugural Fashion Rocks, pairing with Alexander McQueen
Sugarcubes Stick Around for Joy is released; the band play their final show before splitting on November 17 at the Limelight, New York Mount Wittenberg Orca is releaseda collaboration between the Dirty Projectors and Bjrk
Performs Oceania at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Greece with all digital sales proceeds donated to the National Geographic Society Oceans Initiatives
Release of When Bjrk Met Attenborough documentary
Speaks with Jefferson Hack at WIRED conference, London
Performs songs from Debut on MTV Unplugged Bjrk lends her voice to Anna in the animated film Anna and the Moods
Bjrk lends her vocals to Surrender, a track on lf Arnalds album Innundir Skinni

Bjrk gives birth to her first child, son Sindri Eldon Bjrk gives birth to her second child, daughter Isadora Bjarkardttir Barney

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Bjrk Gumundsdttir is born on November 21, in Reykjavk, Iceland, to parents Hildur Hauksdttir and Gumundur Gunnarsson I

1 moma klaus cover_UK.indd 1-6 14/11/2014 17:18

 Klaus Biesenbach Introduction

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 in 2015, The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated
a large-scale retrospective to Bjrk, and commissioned a new
work by her, considering her to be one of the defining artistic
practitioners of our times. At the heart of Bjrks work as
a seminal composer, singer, and writer is the ongoing creation
of relevant new content, expressed not solely as music,
but also as innovative forms that cross all channels of our
media-driven society.
Artists work with the images, sounds, and forms that
surround them in daily life. Younger generations, in particular,
are not only inspired and shaped by work that fits into a frame
or onto a pedestal. Music, images, film, video, words, and sounds
are experienced in real-life social settings such as museums,
galleries, concert halls, and theatres, but also online and
in the media. Bjrk is a groundbreaking pioneer in connecting
many different creative practices in and around her work.
An uncompromisingly original and highly accomplished auteur
and solo artist in her composing, singing, and music, she is
notably open to collaboration and interpretation of her output,
extending even into education and audience participation.
Bjrk, aged one month.
Over the decades she has developed a highly collaborative
practice in order to visualize her music and lyrics. Working with
photographers, film- and video-makers, designers, architects,
craftsmen, and inventors, she crosses over into all categories of
high and low culture, digital and analog, in most creative fields.
With her music itself she bridges the classical and the
experimental, the folkloric and the popular, the rural and
the metropolitan, the visceral and the technological, the pagan
and ancient with the futuristic and new; she even bridges the
gaps between man and machine, living beings and dead material.
Bjrk herself seems to be composed of binaries: aggressively
vulnerable, bold and fragile, wild and sensitive, little girl and
femme fatale, innocent creature of nature andromantic mountain
hiker on the one hand and urban highflyer and metropolitan
nightlife animal on the other. Driven by instinct and intuition,
but at the same time methodical and almost scientific in her
ways of exploring new form and content, she creates work
that is highly personal as well as poetic, and often political and
activist. She is the melancholic, suffering dancer in the dark,
and at the same time the violently happy character singing
all is full of love.
As an era-defining artist, she has also been a catalyst
and inspiration for a wider culture. As a woman from
a geographically peripheral countryIceland, with its mere
320,000 inhabitantsshe can simultaneously be eccentric
and take center-stage, be experimental and open the Olympic
games, be alternative and nominated for an Academy Award
(and shock at the Oscar ceremonies with her radical sense
of sartorial expression).
Over the last 22 years Bjrk has created an exemplary
body of work that is grounded in seven seminal albums. For
each album she has created a complex, multifaceted character,
creating striking visual images that express and embody her
music. These characters form the heart of this exploration.
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2 Klaus Biesenbach Introduction
Roots
in 1944, after six hundred years of Danish rule, Iceland
declared independence, establishing a new and sovereign
republic. Bjrks parents were born shortly after the founding
of the republic, and both grew into strong activists and civil
leaders. Bjrks generation, born twenty years later, were
the children of the first free-born Icelanders. This generation
were naturally connected to native Icelandic tradition, but also
had an openness to international exchange and opportunities
to travel. Culturally, for native Icelanders, pagan tradition,
folkloristic storytelling, and the universal mass-media society
collided at an accelerated pace.
After her parents separated when she was a year old,
Bjrk was raised in a bohemian environment of creative people
on her mothers side and responsible craftsmen and later union
activists on her fathers. Her mother was, as Bjrk describes
her, a dreamer, who took her out of traditional patriarchy
to live in a commune of musicians and artists on the outskirts
of Reykjavk, a setting which Bjrk now describes as a fairy
tale. Her paternal grandmother was an abstract painter, who
took the young Bjrk to museums. Bjrk was inspired very early
on to be both the wild, liberal spirit in the more traditional/
conservative/bourgeois paternal family, while at the same time
acting as the responsible wake-up call for her mothers more
liberal way of life. For the first five years of her life she lived
in the commune as an only child, but then acquired one half-
brother on her mothers side and three half-brothers and three
half-sisters on her fathers.
Bjrks musical talent and open nature were evident from
a young age. When she was still at school, she would ride
the bus and sing in front of anybody who happened to be
on it. She would also sing and improvise while walking to and
from school. She liked to help the teachers distribute food
and snacks to the other schoolchildren, rather than being part
of the group being cared for. From the ages of five to fifteen,
in addition to regular school, she attended a specialized music
school. Several days a week she studied the theory and practice
of music, and received a classical music education on the flute
and recorder. While in music school, it was clear to Bjrk that
she was fascinated by the study of musicologythe structure
and composition of songswhich in many ways was one of
the important educational principles of her album Biophilia,
released in 2011.
In early 1977, when Bjrk was eleven, she recorded
her first album, and it made her a national celebrity. Bearing
in mind Icelands small populationwith most living in
her home town of Reykjavkshe was not yet comfortable
becoming a recognized public figure. Having lost her anonymity,
she refrained from composing and releasing a second solo album.
Instead, she dived into the group dynamics of an art collective
and several different bands. In so doing, she was working
collaboratively on her creative process, but much less visibly
than if acting as a solo artist. It took her until she turned
twenty-seven to appear on the cover of a solo album again.
During her teens, from 1980 to 1984, Bjrk was involved
with a surrealist poetry, painting, and photography collective
in Reykjavk which went by the name of Medsa. The group
members have remained important friends and collaborators,
including Sjn, Matthas Magnsson, lafur Engilbertsson,
Einar Melax, and r Eldon, to whom Bjrk was married for
five years and who is the father of her son Sindri. The collective
opened Bjrk up to new ideas, and she began reading Story
of the Eye by Georges Bataille and The Demon Flower by Jo Imog,
which, she says, basically became part of my DNA. 1
Bjrk was also in the bands Spit and Snot, Exodus, Tappi
Tkarrass, and most notably the punk and orchestral group Kukl
(19821984) and The Sugarcubes (19861992), meeting several
important musicians and collaborators, among them Eldon,
Einar rn Benediktsson, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax,
Birgir Mogensen, Gulaugur ttarsson, and Bragi lafsson.
smundur Jnsson and Einar rn Benediktsson were in addition
members of a group called Gramm, who owned an Icelandic
indie shop from 1979 to 1985, dealing with music, poetry, and
literature, and functioning as a meeting place. Gramm, Kukl
and Medsa came together to create an indie label called Bad
Taste in 1986, which went on to represent The Sugarcubes. While
Bjrk was with the band she met Derek Birkett, who at the time
was the bass guitar player in a British punk band, Flux of Pink
Indians, and who has been a collaborator, co-conspirator, and
close friend ever since.
Musically, Bjrk broke with the traditions of Beethoven and
Mozart and with the history of guitar rock while still in music
school. She wanted to do something more organic and embraced
Messiaen and Mahler, as well as the chord structures of Kate
Bush and Joni Mitchell as female role models. When Bjrk was
sixteen, she traveled to London for the first time and purchased
with saved-up money several albums at a Virgin record store.
Of the ten to twelve albums she recalls buying, she notes Brian
Eno and Robert Fripps Evening Star, Eno and David Byrnes
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a Kate Bush album, and an album
by a band named Hybrid Kids.
Bjrks time with Kukl, The Sugarcubes, and other bands
provided her with the opportunity to work on covers, videos,
and other visualizations within the protection of the group
environment. She often took on the task of communicating and
working with art directors, video directors, and photographers.
At the age of twenty, while pregnant with her first child,
she posed with three bananas hanging around her neck for
the cover of an Icelandic womens magazine, and considers this
to be the first mature visualization she worked on.
In 1992, Bjrk moved to London, and she released her
solo album, Debut, the following year. By the mid-1990s, she had
become a world-famous pop icon. She had lost her anonymity
again and experienced the commitment of a large fan base that
were in the overwhelming majority dedicated and knowledgeable
music lovers, though there were exceptions.
1
Author interview with the artist, May 2014.
 There were two incidents at airports in Thailand and New
Zealand, in which photographers harassed her and her young
son until she was forced to intervene. Then in 1996, a disturbed
fan sent her a letter bomb and tragically committed suicide,
which he documented and videotaped. Public visibility had
become a double-edged sword.
Early on Bjrk developed strong visual identities;
recognizable personas that she adopted without hiding herself
behind them. She developed various creative strategies, among
them outfitting her characters with sets of signs, traits, and
exterior skeletons, and she worked with numerous designers to
create masks that would give her characters a distinctive look.
Masks
the symbol of the mask has been thematized throughout
the ages. In the plays of antiquity, actors went on stage with
a mask, thus simultaneously embodying a person and a persona,
a living and a dead body. By the sixteenth century, the mask
had disappeared, as actors felt the need to express the individual
emotions behind their roles. The face as mask became the actors
instrument. The voice, the accent, the diction were also part
of the role. In engaging with readable signsin adopting
different masksthe actor could convey different characters.
As an artist, Bjrk has adopted many visually compelling
personas. She has worn some of the most experimental head-
coverings, including wigs, veils, diamond-studded surfaces,
feather ear-pieces, and extreme sculptural dandelion-like
head-dresses designed by Maiko Takeda. But the mask is only
one palpable, tangible embodiment of the idea of a character.
Bjrk also created distinct, semi-fictitious characters to evoke
and perform the author/actor/singer/protagonist/heroine/role
of each album, channeling the creative energies of a musical
period and galvanizing a mask to reflect the art and artist
simultaneously. She made each character a highly detailed,
stylized, accomplished, almost sculpted visual construct,
being one with the music and acting as its imago.
Visual artists have long been preoccupied with masks,
characters, and signifiers. In portrait painting, artifacts
of personal existence became symbolic objects, often reflecting
the subjects place in life. In recent times, Hiroshi Sugimoto
made photographs of historical figures by photographing their
Madame Tussaud wax figures, thereby creating the uncanny
illusion that people who had been dead for centuries were
undead. The American artist Cindy Sherman has used her
own face, make-up, wigs, and costumes to echo the presence
of historical figures for her work.
The creation and display of an outward identity is
a pronounced characteristic of contemporary life. As 3D
scanning and printing become more commonplace, people
will have the ability to access their own 3D portraits with ease.
In the meantime, the idea of the selfie has produced millions
of self-portraits that have found an audience on the internet.
With social media such as Facebook and Instagram, the online
person and persona are easily blended: document with fiction.
Or users can adopt avatars and completely falsify their identity.
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4 Klaus Biesenbach
When the internet became popular in the 1990s, people
created fictitious email addresses, such as spiderman@hotmail.
It didnt occur to users in the 90s that it was a direct address, like
a phone number; a name recorded in a passport, like a traceable
identityone to one. In the pre-Google internet era one would
create a character that would not be immediately identifiable.
Parallel Worlds
bjrkglobally popular and recognizable, yet at the same time
artistically uncompromised and incredibly precise in her practice
of finding formhas continued to experiment with identity,
simultaneously and often in parallel with the visual arts of her
time. In the following thoughts, parallel practices and strategies
are exemplified that contextualize her in a productive dialogue
with popular culture and the visual arts of her generation.
The title of the Buggles 1979 hit song Video Killed
the Radio Star implied that in the future all music would have
to be visual, as it would be perceived through television. It took
a while for video to become the common golden frame of both
visual arts and popular music, but it is now one of the most
prominent contemporary artistic practices, merging film-making,
music, popular culture, fashion, and lifestyle. Music television
was one of the identifying mediums for new generations, and
there were huge production budgets that made this one of the
most fertile art sites and laboratories of the 1990s. Long before
iTunes, downloading, and Napster changed the music industry,
music television was a dominant force in the cultural landscape.
It was also a catalyst in crossing the boundaries of
the museum and the pop world. Visual artists were quick
to seize upon the territory of the music video, both anticipating
it and appropriating it, while musicians and film directors readily
embraced the aesthetics of experimental video art and film-
making. In 1996, Pipilotti Rist, who performed as a member
of the feminist punk band Les Reines Prochaines, created her
seminal work Sip My Ocean, an immersive video and sound
installation, which involved the viewer walking into a room filled
with colored light and music, and diving into an ocean being
projected while listening to a karaoke version of Chris Isaaks
love hymn Wicked Games, sung by Rist herself. Claiming the
male pop stars voice and appropriating one of the most romantic
tunes of the decade, Rist created a polymorphous whole-body
experience in her installation. In her work Mutaflor, also
from 1996, Rist hungrily looks at the camera then swallows
an endoscopic camera, which, after a passage through her body,
pops out of her anus, only to be swallowed again. The action
is endlessly looped, like playing a single track on auto-repeat.
In the 1990s, music audiences were able to hear and see
Bjrks work on the hardware that was current at the time
of each albums release, whether that meant watching her on
a box TV set or listening to a CD playing on a Discman while
jogging or in the bath. The tension between the wet and the dry,
the living body and the increasingly mobile prosthetic electronic
devices created danger. The panic of electronics potentially
falling in the bathtub, harming the body or the electronics,
was reflected in Marilouise and Arthur Krokers discussion
of the phenomenon of male hysteria and angst of bodily liquids
in the era when everything seemed to become electric.
Introduction
In Bjrks work, this motif is perhaps most prominently
featured in the video for All is Full of Love, in which robots,
despite being electrical machines, are having sensual wet
intercourse, with bodily liquids flowing voluptuously without
causing any visible shortcircuits. The video, a collaboration
with director Chris Cunningham, was presented in many art
exhibitions of the 1990s, projected and on an auto-repeat loop.
The repetitive playing of video art in galleries and listening
to a song on a CD in a Discman became like theme songs for
certain moments. All is Full of Love was widely exhibited
in the contemporary art context in the same time period as
Doug Aitkens multi-channel installation Electric Earth.
While Cunningham and Bjrk found a sculptural creation in
the electronic robot as the point of departure for their video,
Aitken searched for sounds and rhythms of nocturnal urban life
as music to visualize our world as electric.
If the music video is the link between the visual arts
gallery, music television, and YouTube, there has also been
an ongoing use and placement of sound as a sculptural element
in contemporary artistic practice. Both space and time can
be defined by a sound and by the audiences perception. For
Photo shoot for Volta, 2007,
example, in Janet Cardiffs looped Forty Piece Motet, there by Bernhard Kristinn.
is a three-minute break between performances of an eleven-
minute piece of music, sung by a forty-person choir, played on
forty speakers installed in the exact spatial configuration of
the singers of the choir when the piece was recorded. The singers
seem not to know that they are being recorded before and
after their singing. They can be heard coughing, clearing their
throats, whispering, and so on before they focus on their artistry.
They mutate from being individual, private members of the
choir carrying out worldly profane actions to embodying perfect
artificial singing voices when they each become a persona
of the forty-voiced choir singing the motet. Bjrks personal,
visceral, and non-artificial singing style also relates to intimacy
and a break between the natural voice and the highly trained
voice. Her singing goes from intimate whisper into the listeners
ear, as if she were almost touching the recording microphone
with her lips, to loud screaming that competes with wind and
other forces of nature.
Bjrk wearing a wig by Eugene Souleiman
Interference of organic human and inorganic technology and a dress by Iris van Herpen,
has been a marker of the times. Standing in a club or at performing on the Biophilia live tour, 2011.
a concert next to the speakers, the body can feel a vibration
that resonates, either through sound waves or through direct
contact if one is leaning against the box. Even if one steps away,
the resonance remains in the body. As a physical phenomenon,
this induced the body to dance. The 1990s saw an emerging
electro and techno scene in clubs all over the world, as well
as nightlife-like levels of sound and dance at daytime raves.
The Love Parade was the Woodstock of the 90s generation.
Clubs proved to be an experimental site for music, popular
culture, performance, fashion, photography, and moving
images to intersect and inspire club kids, the artists themselves,
and a wider audience. Sometimes they were simply the location
for people to meet and talk and expand horizons and states
of mind; at other times they were the occasion for presentation
and performance, collaboration, provocation and pioneering
creations that couldnt be ignored, even in the mainstream.
 Many of Bjrks contemporaries either met her on music
television or experienced her work as the sound of music that
you would dance to, that would be sampled and played over and
over again in the 90s club scene. In parallel to music television,
the club scene was a porous membrane and interfaced with
popular culture into the visual arts and other practices. Leigh
Bowery was a strong presence and fixture on the London
scene when Bjrk moved to the city in the early 1990s. He was
one of the most prominent artists of the 1980s and early 90s
whose practice was truly collaborative. Blurring the boundaries
between author and muse, fashion designer and model, club
kid and performance artist, provocateur and seminal innovator,
he became famous for creating costumes that covered his
monumental body, including his feet, hands, and most
importantly face. He disguised and disfigured himself with
Scotch tape, safety pins, experimental make-up, and masks,
and he made himself even taller by wearing platform shoes.
He turned himself from a recognizable person, a human being,
into a sign, an object like a state of being, which would be
alienating and disturbing in an everyday environment. During
this time he posed for the painter Lucian Freud. He also
collaborated with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark on videos
and choreography. In a city whichever since the Freeze
exhibition of 1988, organized by Damien Hirsthad been
at the forefront of the new Young British Artist scene, Leigh
Bowery had a potent effect on popular culture and left
a highly influential oeuvre.
In the 1990s Paris scene, relational aesthetics and
post-conceptual approaches gave Bjrk a different context.
In 1999, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the rights
to a Japanese anime character, which they named Annlee
(a.k.a. Ann Lee). They invited other artists, including Dominique
Gonzalez-Foerster and Bjrks longtime collaborators M/M,
to devise artworks based around the figure. Videos, works
on paper, and even performance pieces were created within
this framework. Ann Lee was a fictitious character born out
of collaborative imagination; artist Jordan Wolfsons female
figure, on the other hand, was modeled after a real person,
Lady Gaga. Wolfson created a cyborg robot wearing a mask,
simultaneously portraying and disguising a famous pop star.
The robot appears to interact with one person at a time,
claiming itself to be not an object but a subject, seducing,
and blurring the lines between human being and machine,
technology and emotion. Wolfsons female figure is also
an important continuation of Bjrks robots in her All is Full
of Love video. But here it is not a question of two robots
interacting with each other in front of a large TV audience;
it is more the embodiment of a live character interacting
with an audience. The jump from the 1990s perception
of performance as recorded video has materialized into
a one-on-one encounter, reflecting the paradigm shift that,
today, participation is the proof of performativity.
Stills from Black Lake, commissioned
by The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
and directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2015.
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6 Klaus Biesenbach Introduction
While the face mask in Wolfsons kinetic sculpture gives
away the view of artificial glass eyes with cameras, in Pierre
Huyghes recent film work Human Mask (2014), based on a real-
life situation, a monkey was trained as a waitress and wore
a human mask over its face. The viewer can see the animals eyes
through the slits in the dead object of the human mask. A wig
covers the monkeys head, but the small dress it is wearing does
not cover its hairy body. The lines between the living and the
dead body, animal and human, object and subject are blurred
in a highly disorienting, disturbing way. The works by Wolfson
and Huyghe further the dialogue with Bjrks recognizable robot
face mask in All is Full of Love. Watching the video allows
viewers to see Bjrks own eyes, behind or through the opening
of the robots mask portraita portrait of Bjrk of herself.
Marina Abramovi and Ulay pioneered new ideas of
autobiography as part of an artists work. They called their living
together in a truck, driving around Europe from performance
to performance, art vital, claiming that life was art and art
was life. The pair merged their personal and love lives with their
artistic practice. Until the 1980s and early 90s many pop stars
had a personal life that was completely at odds with their public
persona (George Michael, for example, singing heterosexual
love songs with a playboy image). Bjrk, meanwhile, was always
very authentic both on and off the stage. While her work
contains elements of fiction and poetry, it seems nonetheless
like Abramovis workto be essentially true to her real life.
For the 2015 exhibition at MoMA, Bjrk created the work
Black Lake, which was filmed on location in Iceland during
the summer of 2014. She conceived the songs visualization
with director Andrew Thomas Huang, with whom she had
previously worked on the video for Mutual Core. Black
Lake is an eleven-minute-long looped composition that deals
with the expression of the pain that Bjrk went through
during her separation from artist Matthew Barney; a cathartic
acknowledgment of this pain, as if only dying to be reborn.
For the video she worked with choreographer Erna marsdttir
on expressive, dance-like movements, through which she palpably
exorcised her pain, resonating with viewers and listeners, but also
making the growth, reincarnation, and rebirth of her character
a necessary and natural outcome of the process.
I sat in the prep trailer during the filming of Black
Lake in the Icelandic landscape. All of a sudden I found
myself listening to some music that sounded otherworldly;
visceral and at the same time ephemeral; very real and rooted,
but nonetheless ethereal. Whats that? I asked. Do you all They breathe, pulse, tick, oscillate, hum; she might even include
hear that? James Merry, Bjrks personal assistant and close
collaborator, who was instrumental in the visual identity
of the video, answered, Thats the artist Fatima al Qadiri.
She included a Chinese singer interpreting Sinead OConnors
Nothing Compares 2 U on her new album.
Was hearing the famous song translated into Chinese
such a displacement that it caught my full attention? No, that
was not all I was hearing. In the background, behind a curtain,
Bjrk was tuning her voice, exercising the width and capacity
of her vocal spectrum, before leaving the trailer clad in a dress
made out of a woven copper wire fabric to sing in a freezing,
water-dripping cave. The camera crew and director were covered
in layers of coats, but Bjrk was doing take after take, standing
in her bare feet on cold wet sand. For each take there was no
lip-synching; she sang live, loud, and real.
Outside the cave, the prep trailer, the set, walking
through the lava fields of Iceland, you are as a human being
by far the tallest living object. There are no trees, no large
animals, just moss and very low-growing vegetation. Coming
across rocks feels like the only encounter of an equal volume,
another object standing across from you, the human being.
All of a sudden it becomes clear that for all of her career Bjrk
has created a body of work that could be described within
the theory of Object-Oriented Ontology, in which the landscape
around her, she herself, and the landscape inside of herher
blood, her organs, the sounds made by her and perceived
by herare all one universe of objects and subjects, subjects
and objects, robots and humans, plants and animals, stone
and volcanoes and oceans at the same time.
According to Nicola Dibbens 2009 book Bjrk, the singers
music naturalizes technology rather than technologizes nature. 2
Dibben further notes that Bjrks music imitates physical sounds
of natureas a unification of the human and the natural. 3 Yet
it is not only about the humanization of technology; it is also
its feminization.
Bjrks voice sounds at the same time like that of a child
and that of a seductive woman: visceral and guttural, a highly
personal, easily recognizable voice, with rolling rs and a heavy
accentpractically the opposite of the cleaned-up artifice of
a classically trained singer. Often her singing includes inhalations
and exhalations and other sounds made by the respiratory tract.
She often shouts and screams out into nature or the city, as if
she were speaking with and fighting and loving it.
In Bjrks world, entities such as rocks and mountains,
technology such as factory machinery and running trains,
and living beings such as plants, animals, and humans are all
objects in the same realm. They are equal to each other, having
a duration of existence and a rhythm, and often making sounds.
the sound of a compact disk skipping at its final loop. Dibben
notes that the rhythmic regularities of machines and everyday
sounds are a means of transition into musical numbers and
thereby into a fantasy world. For the album Medlla, Bjrk
created the sounds of different instruments purely by using
the human voice, thus highlighting the instrumental quality
of the voice and its ability to mimic sounds.
2
Nicola Dibben, Bjrk (Indiana University Press), 2009, p. 98.
3
Ibid. p. 99.
 Her singing juxtaposes the pagan and folkloric storytelling
and traditional music of her native Iceland with her classical
music training. Her music seems to come from an authentic
and intimate inner place. It might erupt as a spontaneous urge
to sing and express emotions out loud while riding in a friends
pick-up truck, or while hiking in Iceland near her cottage. It
speaks of a primal, unquestioned directness of creating while
doing; composing by singing.
In Bjrks music, and in her lyrics and videos, there is
curiosity and surprise; a sense of wonderment and mystery,
both in everyday life and in extreme situations. This sense
of immediacya touching, a looking, a listeningseems
to be present in whatever she encounters, be it the ocean
or a landscape, a machine or another human being. All
the encounters seem to be equal, whether with a stranger or
lover, an animal or mountain, a cloud or the flashing lights
of the big city. And everything leads to music: motors run,
clocks tick, lungs breathe, a train provides a rhythm, the tide
or a waterfall sets the pace.
Bjrks attitude to life could perhaps be described
as an oceanic feeling: the need to get out of the house, to go
towards the sea, hike up a mountain, and feel the romantic,
unthreatening, pre-religious ecstasy of being at one with
the world, in love with the world, part of the world. Jga,
All is Full of Love, and Wanderlust are all odes to the joy
of loving the world. Jga is a declaration of love for the wild
natural landscape of Bjrks home country. The video opens
with her lying on black sand on the seashore and ends with
her standing on a peak overlooking everything beneath her.
She opens her body and her interior is full of rocks like a cave.
The Chilean film-maker and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky notes
that all humans are equal on the inside: you cut the human body
open and we are all liquid and red, all full of blood. In a way
the planet earth is like this, and it is most tangible in a country
like Iceland, where the earths surface is often heated by the
volcanic activity underground. Wherever you cut into the surface,
you will end up with a red, liquid bath of lava. Tectonic rifts
are like wounds in the body of the planet, where the hot liquid
inside can get to the surface.
However, the metropolitan city also offers a polymorphous
environment that can stimulate. There are city lights, moving
traffic, and urban heartbeats. In many videos, Bjrk is either
moving vertically or horizontally through the canyons of
the city or the canyons of the countryside. For her, both the city
and nature are backgrounds and foregrounds, protagonists and
extras, objects and subjects, as part of an artistic practice that
tries to touch it all, breathing it in, breathing it out, shouting and
screaming and laughing at it, until it screams and laughs back.
Certain motifs reappear throughout the work. The embrace
of urban life shown by dancing on a moving truck in Big Time
Sensuality is juxtaposed with the dancing on a train moving
through the countryside in Ive Seen it All from Dancer
in the Dark. Both Big Time Sensuality and Hyperballad
are welcome songs of the artist greeting the big city.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
8 Klaus Biesenbach
In Bjrks work, being at one with an expanded, endless
world means identifying with the smallest and the biggest
objects in existence; with being inverted and catapulted into
a weightless universe. In her visualization of her music,
the camera, the gaze, becomes an optical instrumenta tool
with which to examine the world. It can either be macroscopic
or microscopic. It could be a telescope from a satellite from
somewhere in the universe that is zooming in and zooming out
from the smallest atomic, molecular, cellular structure, to human-
sized entities, to planetary-sized entities, to the biggest universal
order. Sometimes her characters are seen under water or above
water, and this draws attention to the scale of objects: sometimes
Planet Earth is tiny, sometimes there might be a gigantic worm
behind her. In her video Its in Our Hands, she wanders
in dark environments as a night-view camera captures images
of gigantic flowers, grasshoppers, stingrays, and ferns, and with
wide eyes Bjrk sees what otherwise is hidden at night. Videos
are often set in an environment like a dolls house or a stage
seta little too small or a little too big; somehow displaced, like
caricatures or exaggerations of houses. In the video to Triumph
of a Heart, Bjrks partner is a cat, and their home is a little
house in the vast, remote, rural landscape.
The matryoshka-like structure of Bachelorette, filmed
in 1997, could be regarded as a metaphor for, or premonition of,
Bjrks further artistic life to come; in a way, as an anticipation
of her show at MoMAa retrospective that unfolded in her work
through a script that was a self-fulfilling vision in its artifice and
in its character of a vision of a memory in a vision of a memory
in a vision of a memory.
In her videos and when photographed, Bjrk is often
depicted as non-human. She can appear like a drawing,
or a cartoon, or a manga character, or a wax figure, turning
into a sign or symbol. She appears geisha-like on the cover
of Homogenic. Her constant morphing between her own shaved
head and a digital animation of a polar bear in Hunter
is a predecessor of her embodying an object, like the robot
in All is Full of Love. In The Dull Flame of Desire, Antony
Hegarty and Bjrk morph into one face: both strong, vulnerable
feminists who are superimposed into a single person. In All is
Full of Love and Wanderlust, Bjrk is doubled: she is her own
counterpart robot in All is Full of Love, and in Wanderlust
she carries a clay body double in her backpack. In the video
for Hidden Place, a small Bjrk can be seen in her mouth when
she opens it. Often there is a fluid transition between two- and
three-dimensional images, drawings, photographs, and objects.
With differing degrees of obsession, Bjrk plays with her
own being. In Hidden Place, there is an extremely magnified
shot of her hair, in which every strand can be seen moving, and
then every pore in the skin of her face: this is as close as it gets
to staying on the surface. In Pagan Poetry, there is a shift from
an abstract graphic and abstract image to a close-up view of
her face, then to parts of her skin and nipples being pierced and
bleeding. In the video for Cocoon, she wears an asexual white
body suit, and red strings squirt from her breasts.
Introduction
The video Alarm Call, directed by Alexander McQueen,
is also about surfaces, the underwater surface, the forest, the
meadow. It is like having sex with the world as a polymorphous
perverted character that is stimulated by being in touch
with all the surfaces of her body and everything she encounters
(interestingly, independent from his collaborations with Bjrk,
McQueens work was so much about surfaces that his celebrated
exhibition, Savage Beauty, had a different surface in each
of the exhibition rooms; and it was an almost fetishistic look
at the detail that allowed the visitor to get close to his practice).
In another motif, drawings on Bjrks face become a veil,
and this mask adds a layer of content to her face, making
it a work of art. Similarly, her clothing often functions like body
armature, like architecture fitted exactly around the body, like
a perfectly molded shell; a sometimes porous, sometimes solid
membrane between her and the world. In the video Who Is It?
she wears Alexander McQueens bell dress, the bells looking
like barnacles; she becomes the bell, while Iceland appears
like a moonscape. On the cover of Volta Bjrk wore a piece by
Bernhard Willhelm, which resembled a carved-out empty shell
of a cartoon figure, and the dresses designed by Iris van Herpen
for Biophilia created a body armor-like shield around the artist.
The white coat in Jga almost becomes an astronauts moon
suit before the vast, tectonic, volcanic, black landscapes of
Iceland, and in her first music video, Human Behaviour,
Bjrk literally wears a space suit with a clear helmet on
her interplanetary journey.
From the album cover shoot for Volta, 2007,
Collaborations photographed by Nick Knight, with a costume inspired
by Luigi Ontani and designed by Bernhard Willhelm.
when i was first in regular contact with Bjrk, from the
year 2000 on, popular culture and the art world were more
disconnected than they are now. In the early 2000s, it would
have been almost impossible to create an exhibition that was
authentic to her work in the context of an art museum. However,
projects such as 1999s All is Full of Love and 2011s Biophilia
have paved the way for a synthetic presentation of Bjrks work.
As the idea of a collaboration progressed, it became
clear that Bjrk likes to work organically, with ideas being
discussed, revisited, and researched on a daily basis, in a very
exploratory way, incorporating life and work, reading, writing,
talking, and listening. When we began seriously to discuss
an exhibition proposal, one of the first things she did was send
me short descriptions of the defining character traits of the seven
characters of the seven albums that she had produced.
Ideas were further concretized at a workshop meeting
between myself, Bjrk, James Merry, and Michael Amzalag and
Mathias Augustyniak of M/M. Ongoing work was inspired by
Bjrks interest in Timothy Mortons ideas about Object-Oriented
Ontology, which broadly speaking proposes the abandonment of
differentiation between objects and subjects, taking humans out
of an anthropocentric world and equalizing them with animals,
plants, dead material, poems, songs, magnetic forces, telepathy,
energies, and images. In an email conversation between Morton
and Bjrk included later in this publication, they playfully come
up with expressions to describe the fact that, in Bjrks work
and Mortons philosophy, sometimes the relationships between
Artwork painted by Isaiah Saxon for the
objects are more important than the objects themselves. production of the video to Wanderlust, 2008.

Still from the video for Isobel,
directed by Michel Gondry, 1995.
Still from Army of Me, 1995,
a song co-written by Graham Massey.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
Bjrk performing with music producer Mark Bell
on the Volta tour, 2007.
10 Klaus Biesenbach
The finished exhibition sought to highlight the
groundbreaking importance and innovation of Bjrks music.
At the same time the focus was on the unique collaborative
nature of her body of work. The exhibition also aimed
to broaden the canon of what contemporary museums exhibit
and collect, while also raising questions about the longevity
of pop music, a genre that is evolving and has not proven its
classic timelessness. Can a work of popular culture achieve
eternal truth and beauty when it is independent and removed
from its broader cultural context? How relevant will the concept
of multiple and collaborative authorship be, especially after
relational aesthetics in the 1990s?
When it comes to her music, Bjrk is very much a solo
artist. She even considers herself to be like a tyrant at times,
and only involves collaborators to add to, vary and on occasion
work with her to write lyrics for her own existing compositions.
She works by herself until she has something refined enough
to share and to be given context, colors, images and shapes.
On the other hand, she is extremely collaborative when it comes
to visualizing the characters that inhabit her albums and singles.
Through her thoughtful, coherent, tightly woven concepts
and experimental forms, she motivates those around her.
Her openness with collaborators, in terms of personality and
dialogue, helps push co-creators to go further and further into
a direction that she has envisioned but which they might not
have come up with by themselves.She is a muse, but also
a midwife; a co-artist/catalyst who is clear in her vision and
yet invitingly vague as to the exact visual form it will take.
While the music carries her signature alone, collaborations
with designers, photographers, and film-makers are signed by
multiple co-authors, a notion that Bjrk embraced early on.
Her music videos have become some of the most creative ways
for her to visualize each albums characters, and have also been
the site for some of her most notable collaborations. For each
video she works closely with the director on the concept and
execution, and over the course of her career she has often worked
with the same collaborators on multiple projects.
Though Bjrks music is much more a solo act than
her visual manifestations of each album, she also works with
musicians, composers, writers, and artists to explore and expand
the scope of her music. Many of these musical collaborations
have resulted in long-term partnerships over several albums.
When Bjrk moved to London in 1992, during the early
stages of Debut, she teamed up with composer and producer
Nellee Hooper whose lifestyle, social and work spheres were
a definitive force in the Bristol and London scenes of that time,
centered around Tricky and Massive Attack and bands like
Rip Rig + Panic. He nurtured and brought confidence to
the artists he worked with. Hooper went on to produce nine
songs on the album and worked with Bjrk on Post. Bjrk notes
that he mirrored back to me what I was at the time and what
you could become. 4
4 5
Author interview with the artist, May, 2014.
Introduction
Graham Massey was another early musical partner,
remixing Violently Happy from Debut, and co-writing Army
of Me and Modern Things on Post. The musician Talvin
Singh contributed to Debut, playing the tabla and directing
the string compositions on the album.
The Iranian-born recording artist, producer, and DJ
Leila Arab and Bjrk started their close collaboration in 1993,
when Arab worked on the Debut tour as keyboard player. Arab
recounts that she wanted to learn live mixing and Bjrk hired
her for the Post tour in 1995 to do just that on stage. Arab, Aphex
Twin, Bjrk, and Chris Cunningham were at the heart of a circle
of friends in London in the mid- to late 90s that created some
of their generations most inspiring music and video work.
In order to visualize her characters, Bjrk has worked with
many different photographers throughout her career, creating
portraits that appear on album covers and liners, as well as
other images that appear in magazines, books, and promotional
materials. Juergen Teller, who was starting out in London
at the same time as Bjrk, was an important early collaborator.
Together they worked on the image for the cover of the single
Big Time Sensuality. The video for the single was directed by
Stphane Sdnaoui, who at the time worked very closely with
Bjrk, and also on later videos and photo shoots, including
the image that appears on the cover of her second album, Post.
During her years in London, Bjrk also worked with Japanese
photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, who photographed her for
the cover and inner sleeve of her 1997 remix album, Telegram.
Since the early 1990s Bjrk has had an ongoing dialogue
with Jefferson Hack. He asked Bjrk to interview Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and she was featured in Hacks publication Dazed
& Confused. He introduced her to many contacts from his sphere,
including Alexander McQueen, Katy England, and Marjan
Pejoski. In Hacks own words, Bjrk is like a live wire and
an open source who absorbs, connects and provides leaps
of thoughts to bring forward new ideas. 5
Since her time in London, Bjrk has embraced fashion
as a manifestation of her expressions. She has worked closely
with designers and stylists on each of her albums and for
magazine shoots and public appearances. On the cover of Post,
she wore a jacket made by Hussein Chalayan, one of her first
close fashion friends, who, like her, had come to London
as an immigrant. Together the pair would brainstorm. Posts
Airmail jacket, made of washable, malleable synthetic paper,
reflected her characters embrace of a cosmopolitan urbanity.
Jeremy Scott would later create outfits for Bjrks Homogenic
tour in 199798, and has created other garments she has worn
at events and in public.
Author interview with Jefferson Hack, October, 2014.
One of Bjrks first video collaborators was film director
Michel Gondry. He has directed more videos with Bjrk
than any other director, and their important and prolific
collaborations have been both popular and critically successful.
His video for Human Behaviour (1993), the first single and
video from Debut, along with Isobel (1995) and Bachelorette
(1997), comprise a trilogy of related videos that Bjrk and
Gondry created, telling the story of the character Isobel and
her journey from the forest to the city and back. The figure
of Isobel is Bjrks way of introducing herself as the singer/
songwriter character telling her tale. As Timothy Morton points
out in his conversation with Bjrk, making herself into this
character is her way of making herself a third person, an object
among other equally important objects.
Bjrk had long wanted to do a video or project that took
on the idea of a classic musical, a genre she had loved as a child.
In her first collaboration with director Spike Jonze, they took
inspiration from musicals of the 1960s for the hugely successful
video for Its Oh So Quiet (1995). Jonze went on to direct
two other music videos, Its in our Hands (2002) and Triumph
of a Heart (2005). While their original idea of working on
a feature-length musical was later realized by another director,
Lars von Trier, Jonze and Bjrk continue a very vivid, productive
discussion and exchange ideas on an ongoing basis.
Bjrk has collaborated with producer and mixing engineer
Mike Spike Stent since his work on Posts Army of Me
in 1995. They worked together on several albums, and Stent did
the mix for both the 2000 album Selmasongs and 2007s Medlla.
Electronic musician Matthew Herbert has been an important
collaborator with Bjrk since he began working on songs
for Vespertine in 2001. Matmos, the electronic duo of M. C.
(Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel have done official remixes
of several singles; they also worked closely on Vespertine.
Guy Sigsworth, a keyboard player, has worked with Bjrk
since Post. He played the clavichord and organ on several songs
and has also done remixes of Venus as a Boy and All is
Full of Love. The Icelandic String Octet that Bjrk began
working with on Homogenic continued to work with the artist
in live performances and on tours. In 2001, Bjrk began
working with Zeena Parkins, a harp and accordion player.
Parkins contributed to both the Vespertine album and tour, and
to Biophilia. Bjrk and pianist Jnas Sen have worked together
since 2007, when he joined her world tour to play keyboard;
for Biophilia he also played the pipe organ and gameleste.
Founder of the pioneering electronic group LFO, Mark
Bell was another longtime music producer, writer, and close
friend working with Bjrk from Homogenic on. He contributed
to Selmasongs, Medlla, Volta, and Biophilia, and was part
of the tours for both Homogenic and Volta.
 Alexander McQueen was one of Bjrks most important
collaborators. Starting with his art direction for the cover
of Homogenic, he went on to work with Bjrk on numerous
pieces. He directed the video for Alarm Call, in which Bjrk
wore a dress custom-designed by him. They were more than
just collaborators: like many others who work with Bjrk
repeatedly, they were also close friends, and Bjrk performed
at his memorial service in London in 2011, wearing an angel-
winged dress by the late designer.
The music video for All is Full of Love was directed by
Bjrks dear friend Chris Cunningham in 1999 and is their only
music video collaboration to date, although it was a landmark
in her practice and marked an important shift in her work.
The video shows the naturalization of technology: the robots
in the video are both machine-like and highly emotional
beings. The videos sci-fi setting reflects Cunninghams past
work in the genre, as well as his ongoing interest in robotics
and computer graphics. New technology, software, and special
effects are also featured in the video, seen in the seamless
projection of Bjrks facial features onto the robotsanother
example of her identification with objects, machines, and
all manner of non-humans.
One of the most important, innovative and influential
collaborations in Bjrks artistic practice has been her
longstanding relationship with M/M, the Paris-based art
and design partnership founded by Mathias Augustyniak
and Michael Amzalag, renowned for their use of signs and
images. M/M started working with Bjrk in 1999 and have
continued their collaboration to the present day.Their first
collaboration, for Bjrks compilation of videos, Volumen, was
composed of a cover for pictures, black and white characters,
good and evil, creating characters that were in between album
characters. According to M/M, the conversation was like
reading tarot cards together, while creating a set of their
signature multifaceted signifiers. Their next collaborative project
was working with Bjrk on her first comprehensive artist book.
This was released in 2001, at the same time as her album
Vespertine. M/M have gone on to create, visualize, and help
form the characters in Bjrks subsequent albums.
M/M have also worked on videos with Bjrk, notably
Hidden Place, for which they collaborated with the Dutch
fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh
Matadin. Their work on Hidden Place was influenced
by a conversation the designers had with artist Franois Curlet,
who described a kind of sexual trick from nineteenth-century
French brothels called Poisson Nageur, in which a woman
enjoys oral sex and remits the mans bodily fluids through
her nose. This was the inspiration for the substance flowing
into and out of Bjrks body, creating an incredible sense
of intimacy; the untouchable icon getting wet and dirty, while
remaining beautiful.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
12 Klaus Biesenbach
Working with Bjrk, M/M would spend a lot of time
getting to know her moodboards and compositions, and would
then externalize her visions on a more conceptual and poetry-
based level. For the cover of Vespertine, for example, Bjrk
brought Marjan Pejoskis infamous Swan dress to the shoot,
and as a result the cover of the album was inspired by a drawing
of Sigmund Freuds, in which a swan was portrayed on top
of a Madonna.One of M/Ms images for Vespertine was plastered
all over the streets of Paris.Whenever she toured, Bjrks poster
campaigns made her face a sign in the urban fabric.
Since the release of Vespertine, Bjrk has continued
to work closely with Van Lamsweerde and Matadin. They have
helped to create some of the most recognizable visualizations
of her characters, collaborating on album artwork for Vespertine,
Medlla, Volta, and Biophilia, as well as editorials and books.
Pagan Poetry (2001), from Vespertine, was the first music
video collaboration between Bjrk and photographer Nick
Knight, although the two had previously worked together
on photo shoots, notably for the cover image of Homogenic, and
also for the cover of the Vespertine Live album and for the Volta
image of Bjrk wearing the large Bernhard Willhelm costume.
The video, which was controversial at the time of its release,
embraces themes of the physical body, union, and sexuality.
It incorporates three different sections: a video of piercings,
a private video shot on a handheld camera by Bjrk, and a film
shoot of Bjrk performing the song.
Bjrk collaborated with Japanese artist, art director,
and costume and graphic designer Eiko Ishioka on the music
video for Cocoon (2002), a work which, like Pagan Poetry Biennale pavilion work; Fririksdttir also directed Bjrks
before it, was met with some controversy for its evocative
imagery. Wearing a nude body suit, Bjrk performs the song
as red threads emit from her breasts, slowly enveloping her entire
body, from foot to face, until she is completely cocooned.
For Dancer in the Dark (released in 2000), director Lars
von Trier approached Bjrk about acting in and composing
music for the filma story he had written with her in mind.
She initially resisted composing and in addition taking on
the lead role.However, she eventually agreed to compose, and
afterwards to play the main character, Selma.She fought for
artistic control, so that her part and her music could not be cut
or changed without her agreement. Through her compositions
Bjrk made the story of Selma a true portrayal and the film more
of a true collaboration.
Bjrks song from the film, Ive Seen it All, was shot in stereoscopic 3D, and used a mix of live action, computer-
nominated for the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Song.
That year she famously wore the Swan dress to the Oscar
award ceremony, walking down the runway dropping eggs
as she went. The swan motif was an important element
of Vespertine, and Bjrk wore the dress again on the cover of
the album. During the Vespertine tour, she wore at least two
other versions of the dress, both made with crystals. Although
her appearance at the Oscars was widely publicized, the swan
motif is something that permeated other parts of her work
during this time.
Introduction
Matthew Barney and Bjrk are two artists who have,
in a highly detailed and sophisticated way, created characters
in their respective bodies of work. With Barney, those characters
seem to be more fictitious and literature-based, whereas the
characters Bjrk expresses are at the same time fictitious
and autobiographical. Bjrk and Barney lived together for
thirteen years. In 2002, their daughter Isadora was born, and
until 2013 they commuted between Iceland and New York,
besides other shorter-term residencies. At times their two artistic
practices merged, most notably in the major work Drawing
Restraint 9 (2005), a cinematic piece by Barney, for which Bjrk
composed the soundtrack and acted. The film ended with
a symbolic mutilation of the two lovers, morphing into
sea mammals.
For Bjrk, an important inspiration and friend has been
Antony Hegarty. In addition to collaborating vocally, the
singer and composer and Bjrk share concerns about ecological
challenges, and they have an ongoing interest in feminism.
They first worked together on the 2007 duet The Dull Flame
Bernhard Willhelm and Bjrk
of Desire, and Hegarty is prominently featured in the songs in Iceland, 2006.
music video. The friends have performed together in London,
Iceland, and New York.
During Bjrks New York years, ASFOUR, who later
became ThreeASFOUR, also had an inspiring artistic friendship
with her that led to numerous mutual inspirations, as did
the ongoing dialogue with her Icelandic friend Hrafnhildur
Arnardttir, also known as Shoplifter, who created the hairpiece
featured on the cover of Medlla. In 2005, Bjrk collaborated
with Icelandic artist Gabrela Fririksdttir on her Venice
video for Where is the Line and designed the album cover
art for her Greatest Hits release in 2002.
The multitalented German-born designer Bernhard
Willhelm worked closely with Bjrk on designs for Volta.
He created the large sculptural costume for the cover of
the albuma small-scale piece of architecture like an exterior
skeleton that Bjrk inhabitsbased on a work by the Italian
The cover to Selmasongs,
artist Luigi Ontani. Willhelm also created other costumes worn
released in 2000 as the soundtrack to the film
by Bjrk during the Volta tour, many of which were made Dancer in the Dark, in which Bjrk starred.
of brightly colored fabrics. These were complimented by DIY
crocheted and knitted activist masks by the Icelandic Love
Corporation.
One of Bjrks more prominent collaborations from Volta
was with Encyclopedia Pictura. Their video for Wanderlust was
generated graphics, miniatures, and large-scale puppets such
as the 3D yak and river god, all crafted by the video directors.
Bjrk with her friend and collaborator
Antony Hegarty on Marina Abramovis
60th birthday, 2006.

Bjrk photographed for Biophilia
by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, 2011.
Details of the groundbreaking Biophilia app,
released in 2011 and subsequently acquired
by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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14 Klaus Biesenbach
The multidisciplinary nature of 2011s Biophilia led Bjrk Black Lake, which premiered at MoMA, focused above all
to fresh collaborators, embracing science and technology on the sound and projection of visuals, positioning the work as
in innovative ways. Bjrk worked with the television presenter the basis of the whole exhibition. Definitive traits are the freezes
David Attenborough on the Biophilia education programs, and between the verses, which resonate in the body of the listener.
with James Merry and Scott Snibbe on the development of The finished work includes motifs from the Icelandic landscape,
the Biophilia app. This was worked on by several programmers its flora, and the changes of states of matter from liquid to solid,
and designers, including Max Weisel, who was then in his as well as the ideas of pain, perishing, rebirth, and regenerating
teens. The app was released just after the iPad came out. Bjrks new energies. For this groundbreaking piece, filmed in a cave
integration of music, design, and digital technology was a and a ravine during an especially cold period of summer,
landmark, and the app was subsequently acquired by MoMAs Icelandic rain is captured in the videos imagery, illustrating
Department of Architecture and Design, the first in the museums the narrative of going through pain and arriving at a clearing.
permanent collection. Importantly, the app channels the albums
music and the custom instruments that helped to create the
songs. Bjrk worked with DIY scientists and creatives on the
instruments, including gravity harps made by Andy Cavatorta;
the gameleste made by Bjrgvin Tmasson and Matt Nolan;
the pipe organ, also made by Tmasson; and the Sharpsichord,
made by Henry Dagg. This was not the first time that Bjrk had
utilized new instrument technology. The reactable, an electronic
musical instrument, was featured on Volta. Its flat table top
is activated with different objects or tangibles which create
sounds and music that can be manipulated by the instruments
player. An Icelandic female choir and their conductor Jon
Stefansson joined Bjrk on her Biophilia tour at this time.
For Biophilia, Bjrk collaborated with Iris van Herpen,
who designed the dress she wore on the cover of the album
and several pieces that she wore during the tour. These dresses,
for which Van Herpen uses plastic, metal, and 3D printing,
seem almost impenetrable, a kind of colorful body armor.
The collaboration has continued into Bjrks next character,
with Van Herpen designing dresses worn in the Black Lake
installation (a version of the song appears on Bjrks eighth
solo studio album).
The MoMA exhibition design embraced the ambition
to make Bjrks music the Museum visitors central experience,
while also presenting the broad spectrum of her collaborative
and educational work. The final detailed conceptual and
practical realization in the physical spaces of the Museum was
another collaborative endeavor between Bjrk, her consultant Bjrk was born during the four-year volcanic eruption that A still from Black Lake, 2015, featuring
the producer Sam Gainsbury, myself and an incredible team caused the formation of the Icelandic island Surtsey. Red-hot a dress designed by Iris van Herpen.
at MoMA. flowing lava formed a rocky island that was soon colonized by
seeds that were washed ashore. These seeds brought the dead
island into the cycles of life. At the end of filming Black Lake,
the Icelandic volcano Brarbunga erupted under a glacier,
again bringing together scorching liquid with centuries-old
glacier ice and generating new rocks out of the cooling magma.
This publication and exhibition cement Bjrks singular
place in contemporary practice and celebrate her highly
original and significant music, compositions, performances
and visual presentations. As an artist whose work has been
felt across many disciplines, Bjrk will undoubtedly continue
to expand the boundaries of music, art, and our understanding
of the worldconnecting, influencing, and inspiring. ||
Introduction
 Klaus Biesenbach is Chief Curator at Large at The Museum
of Modern Art and Director of MoMA PS1, New York.
He co-founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary
Art in Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996.
In 2006, he was named founding Chief Curator of MoMAs
Page 10, above and center Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.
newly formed Department of Media, and in 2009 founding Chief
of the Department of Media and Performance Art. In 2010,
he became Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large
at MoMA, where he organized the Bjrk exhibition.
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16
Page 2 Photo courtesy of Hildur Hauksdttir.
Page 5, above Photo courtesy of Bernhard Kristinn.
Page 5, below Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes.
Page 6 Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.
Page 9, above Photo courtesy of Nick Knight.
Page 9, below Painting courtesy of Isaiah Saxon of Encyclopedia Pictura.
Page 10, below Photo courtesy of Mathias Augustyniak and M/M (Paris).
Page 13, above Photo courtesy of Carmen Freudenthal & Elle Verhagen.
Page 13, center Image courtesy of Paul White / Me Company.
Page 13, below Photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan.
Page 14, above Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 14, below App images courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian;
app creative directors Bjrk and James Merry;
software engineer, creative director, and technical director Max Weisel.
Page 15 Video still courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.
 Page 19, above Photo courtesy of Stephan Flad. PAGAN POETRY || Words & music by Bjrk || for harpsichord Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk || Alex Ross Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and the
Page 19, below Photo courtesy author of the books The Rest Is Noise and Listen to This.
of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 21, left Photo courtesy of Benni Valsson.
Page 21, above right Photo courtesy
of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 21, below right Photo courtesy of Juergen Teller.
Page 23, above and below Photos courtesy of Hildur Hauksdttir.
Page 25, left Photo courtesy of Stephanie Pfriender Stylander.
Page 25, right Photo courtesy of
Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Page 27, above Photo courtesy of Petter Oftedal.
Page 27, below Photo courtesy of Mick Hutson.
Page 29, above left Photo courtesy
of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Page 29, top right and centre right Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst.
Page 29, below Photo courtesy of Ji Kjartans.
Page 31, above Photo courtesy of Ji Kjartans.
Page 31, centre and below Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst.

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II

2 moma_ross_cover.indd 1-5 14/11/2014 13:49

 Alex Ross Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk

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 Prelude: on Genre and Fusion
a few years ago, for a feature on a music blog, I asked Bjrk
to make a selection of her favorite records. Her list included
Mahlers Tenth Symphony; Alban Bergs Lulu; Steve Reichs
Tehillim; a collection of Thai pop, entitled Siamese Soul, Volume 2;
Alim Qasimovs Azerbaijan: The Art of the Mugham; Joni Mitchells
Don Juans Reckless Daughter; Kate Bushs The Dreaming; Nicos
Desertshore; Public Enemys It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold
Us Back; Aphex Twins Drukqs; the Panasonic EP; Black Dog
Productions Bytes; and James Blakes debut album, James Blake. 1
Whats striking about the list is not just the breadth
of Bjrks tastethis is no surprise, given her chronic curiosity
about every corner of the musical worldbut also the animated
map of genres that materializes in the background. It is as
though, in a reversal of tectonic drift, isolated land-masses
of taste were reforming as a supercontinent. A grandiose howl
of late Romantic agony; a juggernaut of twelve-tone modernism;
a cool minimalist dance through Hebrew psalms; off-kilter pop
from South Asia; a virtuoso survey of Azerbaijani mugham;
three defiantly idiosyncratic albums by female singer-songwriters;
three pathbreaking electronic records; a raging tour-de-force
of political hip-hop; a collection of dubstep ballads: Bjrks list
circumnavigates the globe, and, at the same time, it overruns
the boundaries separating art from pop, mainstream from
underground, primeval past from high-tech present.
The partition of music into distinct genres, each with
its own history, philosophy, and body of technique, is a relatively
recent development. Before a global marketplace emerged,
with the advent of recording technology in the late nineteenth
century, there was little talk of the classical, the popular, and
subdivisions thereof, although the language of music was seen
to vary widely from nation to nation and from city to city.
Shakespeare employed the word music with blissful vagueness:
If music be the food of love, play on. He apparently felt no
need to specify what kind of music might feed a lusty ear. When
Mozart, in The Magic Flute, enacted what we might now describe
as a radical fusion of genres, combining high operatic tradition
with the popular art of the Singspiel, few seemed to find anything
untoward in the gesture; Antonio Salieri simply commented that
it was an entertainment worthy of being presented to the greatest
monarch. Rousseau, in his Dictionary of Music, noted that tastes
varied widelyOne is most touched by pathetic pieces, another
other prefers gay Tunesbut nonetheless spoke of a general
Taste upon which all well-constituted people are agreed. 2
1
My Favorite Records: Bjrk,
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/11/
my-favorite-records-bj%C3%B6rk.html.
2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionary of Music,
in Essay on the Origin of Languages and
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Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott
(University Press of New England), 1998, p. 407.
18 Alex Ross
The possibility of such a consensus now seems remote.
The musical landscape teems with genres: classical, jazz,
folk, blues, gospel, country, Latin, R&B, funk, soul, hip-hop,
rock, metal, punk, pop, and dozens of national and regional
varieties. Recording technology has surely fueled this explosion
of typologies: once a piece of music becomes a circulating
commodity, it requires classification, so that one can know what
section of the record store to put it in, or, in latter-day terms,
what tag to place in its metadata. Furthermore, each genre
has its own subgenres and ideological schisms. Popular music
is regularly riven by debates between acolytes of classic
guitar rock and devotees of latter-day pop genres that make
sophisticated use of digital manipulation. Contemporary
classical music exhibits a long-running conflict between tonally
oriented composers and those who still pursue Schoenbergs
high-modernist emancipation of the dissonance. Music is very
far from being a universal language, as Arthur Schopenhauer
once defined it; to the contrary, no art stirs more heated debate.
Over the past century, we have seen valiant attempts
to restore a holistic understanding of genre. In 1923, at Aeolian
Hall in New York, the singer Eva Gauthier organized a concert
entitled Ancient and Modern Music for the Voice, with a
repertory ranging from Purcells Hark! Hark! The Echoing
Air to the latest songs of George Gershwin. A decade later,
the High-Low Concerts, at the St. Regis Hotel, put Duke
Ellington and Count Basie together with Aaron Copland and
Charles Ives. After the Second World War, Gunther Schuller,
under the banner of the Third Stream, sought common ground
between bebop jazz and atonal composition. In the 1960s,
Miles Davis, in the name of fusion, blended jazz and rock,
while psychedelic rock bands studied recordings by Cage and
Stockhausen: the latters face was famously featured on the cover
of Sgt. Pepper. More recently, there have been intense exchanges
between younger post-minimalist composers and figures from
indie rock and indie pop.
One of the many faces of Bjrk.
Photographed in Berlin on
theBiophilialive tour, 2013, Photographed by Inez van
wearing a sea-urchin mask Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk created byMaiko Takeda. for Interview magazine, 2009.
 Shortly before his death, in 1992, John Cage said,
We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many
streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that
we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean
which is going back to the skies. 3 Stream, delta, border,
boundary: we keep reaching for geographical metaphors
as we speak of genres, and we sense that the real landscape
of musical activity ultimately has little to do with our tidy
delineations, or indeed with the dismantling of them. Fluid
and shifting, music is spread out like populations around urban
centers, and certain communities could plausibly be assigned
to one citys suburbs or to anothers. Genre may be a kind
of gerrymandering practiced by musical politicians. Indeed,
composers routinely complain when they are described as busters
of genre or crossers of boundaries; they tend to view themselves
simply as artists working with various kinds of material. The jazz
composer Michael Gibbs may have summed it up best when he
said, There is a fusion going on every time somebody writes
music. 4 The idea of fusion keeps materializing and disappearing
before our ears, a mirage generated by the limited ability of
language to account for what we hear.

3
David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds.,
Writings Through John Cages Music, Poetry, and Art
(University of Chicago Press), 2001, p. 1.

4
Julie Coryell and Laura Friedman, eds.,

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Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, The Music
(Hal Leonard), 2000, p. 84.
The bearded lady.
Photographed by Inez van A previously unpublished
Bjrk photographed Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin photograph by Juergen Teller
20 Alex Ross Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk by Benni Valsson, 1998. for Time magazine, 2009. for The Face magazine, 1993.
 The Education of Bjrk
in the intersecting tributaries of Bjrks work, there is
a glimpse of the delta that Cage described at the end of his life
whether or not Cage himself would have been able to wrap
his mind around her music. He died in September, 1993; three
months before, Bjrk released her first solo album, Debut, in
which she began in earnest her fierce dance across the continents
of genre. You hear first a bouncing riff sampled from an Antnio
Carlos JobimQuincy Jones soundtrack, its syncopated beat
consigned to a venerable orchestral instrument, the timpani.
Over this pattern, Bjrk sings a gloriously odd opening line:
If you ever get close to a human and human behavior, be ready
to get confused. The voice exists somewhere on the continuum
from the folkish to the operatic; less by calculation by default,
it lands in the middle ground of pop.
Bjrks Icelandic origins almost certainly contributed
to her quizzical, questing approach to musical identity.
She belonged to a geographically isolated society in which
centuries-old folk traditions remained strong, and in which
young people passed the time singing in choral groups,
as generations before them had done. Somehow, we missed
out on the industrial revolution and modernism and post-
modernism, Bjrk recently told me. We are jumping straight among many others, Messiaens monumental ensemble piece
from colonialismwe got our independence only in 1944into
the twenty-first century. We could enjoy a still almost untouched
natural landscape, and draw upon it as we head-butted our way
into a green, techno, Internet age. All the latest products
of Western culture were readily available to Bjrks generation,
and to those who came after. Yet these shiny commodities
could be assembled in eccentric formations. The up-to-date
mingled with the obsolescent and the ancient. Despite Bjrks
enthusiasm for the latest developments in the digital arena
and her painstaking attention to the minutiae of studio
production, there is much in her music that feels rough-hewn,
homemade, pre-technological.
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22 Alex Ross
Classical music loomed large in her early years. From
the age of five, she attended the Barnamsikskli in Reykjavk
(a childrens music school now called the Tnmenntaskli),
where she studied theory and history, sang in school choirs,
and played the flute. (The box set collection Family Tree contains
a fragment of Bjrks flute playing: a sinuous little piece
from 1980, called Glora.) The focus on a canonical repertory
of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven frustrated her. I remember
being almost the fighter in the school, the odd kid out,
she once said. 5 But a teacher named Snorri Sigfs Birgisson
excited her imagination by introducing her to major twentieth-
century composers: Schoenberg, Messiaen, Stockhausen,
Cage. Early on, she made her own attempts at avant-garde
composition, creating pieces from sonic found objects such as
a tape of her grandfather snoring.
Bjrk remains strongly invested in the modern end of
the classical repertory, regularly attending new-music concerts
and performances of twentieth-century composers whom
she admires. In recent years, during her periods in New York,
she has seen Metropolitan Opera performances of Bergs two
operatic masterpieces, Wozzeck and Lulu; she has also heard,
Des Canyons aux toiles (From the Canyons to the Stars) and, at
the Park Avenue Armory, Stockhausens final electronic
composition, Cosmic Pulses. She has been more reserved in
her response to American minimalismMinimalism is my
abyss, she told me, in 2004but she cherishes Steve Reichs
Tehillim, as her Favorite Records list attests, and also admires
the work of Arvo Prt, Vladimir Martynov, and the late John
Tavener, all of whom lie on the outskirts of the minimalist
movement, often joining repetitive processes to pure, spare
sonorities suggestive of old church traditions.
Bjrk Meets Karlheinz Stockhausen: Compose Yourself,
Dazed & Confused 23 (August, 1996).
Cover artwork for the self-titled
Bjrk as a child. album Bjrk released in 1977 at
She attended the Barnamsikskli the age of twelve, art directed by
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk in Reykjavk from the age of five. her mother, Hildur Hauksdttir.
 Many of Bjrks favorite classical pieces involve a bracing
collision of opposites. In Bergs Lulu, passages of melancholy
lyricism in the manner of Mahler are overpowered by thunderous
dissonances. Likewise, in Messiaen, pure major triads are
frequently juxtaposed with cluster-like masses of tones. Bjrks
own work is tilted strongly toward the tonal end of the spectrum,
yet there are moments of crisis at which the familiar markers
of Western tradition fall away and we are confronted with
a darker, stranger sound world: the abrasive, metallic timbres
of Pluto, on Homogenic; the distant, dreamlike choral cluster
that inaugurates An Echo a Stain, on Vespertine; the spastically
revolving tone-row that drives Declare Independence, on
Volta; the low, groaning organ discords of Dark Matter,
on Biophilia. Almost all of Bjrks albums contain at least
one tense stretch where the spell of beauty is broken, perhaps
so that beauty will matter all the more.

Bjrks relationship with Stockhausen has special

significance in light of her longtime preoccupation with
the merging of music and technology. A pioneer of electronic
music in the postwar years, Stockhausen offered a utopian vision
in which technology could serve human and even spiritual
ends; Gesang der Jnglinge, or Song of the Youths, his electronic
masterpiece of 1956, features a boy soprano singing phrases
from the Biblical tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
In later years, as Stockhausen adopted the profile of a guru
and dabbled in mystical arcana, he lost credibility in modern-
music circles, but Bjrk kept faith with him. Now that more
of Stockhausens later output has come into view, her faith
is vindicated; recent stagings of parts of his grand operatic
cycle Licht have generated more awe than derision.

After Stockhausens death, in 2007, Bjrk wrote,

When Karlheinz harnessed electricity into sound and showed
the rest of us, he sparked off a sun that is still burning and
will glow for a long time I remember sitting in his studio
in Cologne, surrounded by twelve speakers, him creating
a current traveling up and down, swirling around us like
the force of nature that electricity is, my insides pulsating
to his noiseprimordial, modern and futuristic. 6 The same
adjectives apply to Bjrk herself.

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Bjrk, Why I Love Stockhausen,
The Guardian, October 29, 2008.
Primordial, modern and
futuristic: Bjrk photographed Photo from the Medlla era
by Stephanie Pfriender Stylander, by Warren du Preez and
24 Alex Ross Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk 1999. Nick Thornton Jones, 2004.
 The Singer as Composer
there were many other influences on the young Bjrk.
Indeed, the sway of classical music can be felt more in
the spiritual background of her music than on the surface.
At the age of eleven, she recorded an album of pop covers,
including songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. A few years
later, she dived into punk and hardcore, becoming the lead
singer of an abrasive anarcho-punk outfit called Kukl. In
the late 1980s, she acquired international fame as the lead
singer of The Sugarcubes, a free-spirited, mildly surrealist New
Wave group. And, in 1990, she recorded a remarkable album
of jazz standards, called Gling-Glan inviting path not taken.
The art of singing often consists in hiding the physicality
of the voicethe noise of the breath, the click of the tongue,
the croak of the throat, the innumerable nuances that fall
between the twelve chromatic tones. Bjrk, by contrast, has never
tried to disguise that visceral aspect: her voice has a raw, abrupt,
outdoor character, even at its airiest and most unearthly. While
you can hear intimations of that sound in her earliest recordings,
she labored for many years to refine the vocal presence that so
often elicits such adjectives as organic, natural, authentic. the medium is entirely different: the voice conveys a personality,
The development of the voice went hand in hand with her
emergence as a songwriter and as a producer of complex
electronic and instrumental textures.
While artists as various as Maria Callas and Joni Mitchell
shaped her sense of the capabilities of the voice, perhaps
the most enduring influence on Bjrks career, from Debut
to Biophilia and beyond, has come from the American composer,
singer, dancer, and theatre artist Meredith Monk, who shares
with Bjrk a fundamental unclassifiability, a tendency to invade
the interstices of institutionalized culture. Monk belongs
to the great vanguard of artists and musicians who thrived
in the unheated lofts and makeshift galleries of downtown
Manhattan in the 1960s and 70s. Where so many of her
contemporaries, including Reich and Philip Glass, adopted
a cool, impassive mien, Monk brought a touch of ritual mysticism
to the New York avant-garde, cultivating an otherworldly yet
piercingly immediate vocal style that suggested some lost,
nameless folk culture. She aimed for a voice as flexible as
the spine, and connected it to a self-invented dance vocabulary
and a mobile theatre of gesture and image. The resulting work
caused a certain panic in critical circles: the New York Times once
sent a trio of music, dance, and theatre writers to assess her.
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26 Alex Ross
Monk provided a clear precedent for Bjrk, even if the two
artists seem to inhabit fundamentally different worlds. Having
admired each other from a distance and exchanged letters over
the years, Bjrk and Monk finally met in 2005, in a conversation
mediated by the pianist Sarah Cahill. 7 Bjrk described her
early encounter, at around age sixteen, with Monks 1981 album
Dolmen Music, which gives perhaps the purest demonstration
of her invented-folk style. Bjrk recalled that up until that point
she hadnt been greatly interested in vocal music, preferring the
buzzing complexity of instruments and electronics. But Monk
showed what could be achieved when the voice alone, divorced
or distanced from language, is treated as the most malleable
of instruments. Speaking together, the two artists found other
common ground: a family tradition of collective singing; an early
love for Cage; a tendency to compose while walking outdoors;
an abiding interest in how the voice is linked to the body.
In traditional realms of classical music, the voice is prized
as a medium through which a musical or dramatic idea is
expressed. In pop, a similar expectation applies, even if
a style, an energy, a brand. In the cases of Monk and Bjrk,
the voice itself becomes the center of gravity of the composition,
the fount of the creative idea. To sing is to compose. We may
be aware of the biography behind the voice, but we care most
of all for the grain of the singing itselfof the fictive landscape
that forms around the voice as it moves. Wallace Stevens
seemed to anticipate the phenomenon in The Idea of Order
at Key West: She was the single artificer of the world /
In which she sang.
7
Radical Connections: Meredith Monk and Bjrk,
Counterstream Radio, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/
radical-connections-meredith-monk-and-bjork.
Singing live with a choir
on theVespertinetour at Photographed during a live
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk Le Grand Rex, Paris, 2001. performance, 1994.
 Composition as Collaboration

bjrk resists being called a composer, even if she has drawn
extensively on the notational classical tradition. The cult
of the solitary genius is alien to her. Instead, she sees her
work as an essentially collaborative enterprise, one that calls
for an entire community of musicians, studio technicians,
instrument-makers, producers, programmers, videographers,
fashion designers, and other creative individuals. She is not
the kind of pop star who makes a game of donning masks
and disguises; her vocal identity has changed remarkably little
over two decades as a solo artist. But almost everything else
has changed: the instrumentation, the arrangements, the
production techniques. Her albums tend to react against one
another, with extroverted moods giving way to intimacies,
dense textures followed by transparent ones.
To a great extent, Bjrks career can be narrated in terms
of her collaborations. In the early and mid-1990s, she was
living in London, keeping close tabs on the citys club scene and
maintaining a hectic nocturnal schedule. Debut and Post were,
in a way, portraits of a multiculturally swinging city, with
purring trip-hop beats layered beneath the sinuous strings
of Talvin Singh and more opulent parts that Bjrk co-arranged
with Eumir Deodato. Synthesized sounds met up with the
tootling and plucking of a community band or orchestra:
flute, harp, accordion, harmonium. The tone of these first
albums is caught by the title of a song toward the end of Debut:
Violently Happy.
Homogenic, from 1997, marked the end of Bjrks London
phase; she moved back to Reykjavk the following year.
The producer Mark Bell became a crucial member of Bjrks
team, injecting cooler, more brittle timbres. The Icelandic
landscape can be sensed in the volcanic spasms of songs like
Pluto, or in the pummeling rhythms of Hunter, which
suggest a terrain being trampled by hooves. At the same time,
the record suggests a turning inward. In the song Jga, Bjrk
sings of emotional landscapes, of a state of emergency.
This exploration of a sometimes inviting, sometimes forbidding
inner geography goes even deeper in Vespertine, which appeared
in 2001. Here, Bjrks collaborators, apart from Bell, included
the producer-songwriter Guy Sigsworth, the electronic musician
Matthew Herbert, the avant-garde harpist Zeena Parkins, and
Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt, of the electronic duo Matmos.
Yet the glistening, twitchily sensual musical fabric of the album,
which includes parts for glockenspiel, celesta, and music boxes,
was largely Bjrks creation, with most of the beats created
on her laptop and musical parts written in the Sibelius
composition program.
In 2004, I had the opportunity to watch the making
of Bjrks fifth solo record, Medlla, and could see first hand
how her music gestates in a matrix of creative exchanges. 8
The recording process took Bjrk from the Canary Islands
to Iceland and on to Salvador, Brazil, and London, where
the final mix was done. Partly in homage to Meredith Monk,
Bjrk set out to demonstrate the myriad textures, from
the ethereal to the percussive, that can emanate from the human
voice: solitary folkish song, choral swells, breathy feminine
whispers, raw heavy-metal shouts, beatboxing, and various
other techniques. The avant-garde rock vocalist Mike Patton,
the Inuit throat-singer Tagaq, and the human beatboxes
Dokaka and Rahzel joined the ever-expanding, ever-changing
Bjrk community; unfortunately, plans to add the R&B superstar
Beyonc to the mix ran up against logistical difficulties. Given
the meandering itinerary of the creative process, it was striking
how cohesive the album turned out to be: working in conjunction
with the recording engineer Valgeir Sigursson and the mixing
engineer Spike Stent, Bjrk shaped disparate material into
a potent whole.
Three years later, with Volta, Bjrk again reversed course
and reclaimed the extroverted mood of her early albums,
although she kept hold of the more adventurous resources that
she had been deploying since Homogenic. This party tended
toward the darkly chaotic. The hip-hop producer Timbaland
added tribalistic beats that happened to resemble Afro-Brazilian
drumming tracks that Bjrk had recorded for Medlla and
then set aside, sensing that they didnt fit that albums tone.
An all-female, ten-piece brass ensemble provided glowering brass
sonorities. The indie soul singer Antony Hegarty sang duets
with Bjrk on several tracks, establishing a contrasting mood
of sensuous otherwordliness. If the record lacked the thematic
unity of Vespertine and Medlla, it again demonstrated Bjrks
knack for disrupting the pop consensus.
Biophilia, from 2011, is perhaps Bjrks most ambitious
project to date. Part album, part stage spectacle, part iPad app
emporium, part new-instrument laboratory, and part grade-
school curriculum, it is almost Stockhausenlike in its joyous
disregard for the constraints of genre. As often before, Bjrk set
about mapping the intersection of art, nature, and technology,
presenting analogies between scientific and musical elements.
Crystalline compares crystal structures to the efflorescence
of songs from small motifs; Solstice likens swinging pendulums
to overlapping contrapuntal lines; and Virus, whose folklike
melody seems to come from the depths of the centuries,
has an unstable, ever-shifting accompaniment that suggests
cells subdividing and multiplying. The battery of bespoke
instruments includes the gameleste, a MIDI-controlled device
that incorporates gamelan-like bronze bars in a celeste housing;
and the Sharpsichord, a forty-six-string automatic harp controlled
by a pin cylinder.

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See Alex Ross, Listen to This
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2010, pp. 23858.
28 Alex Ross Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk
Bjrk performing on the Biophilia
tour, 2011, with a specially
commissioned gravity harp
Bjrk in the studio during that she designed together with Pendulums for the gravity harp, Bjrk rehearsing for Biophilia
a Medllasession, 2004. Andy Cavatorta. built by Andy Cavatorta. with her Icelandic choir, 2011.
 The circle of colleagues now included the organ craftsman
Bjrgvin Tmasson, the sound sculptor Henry Dagg, the
percussionists Matt Nolan and Manu Delago, the engineer
and programmer Damian Taylor, and the sound-artist and
educator Curver. They joined such longtime confederates
as Zeena Parkins, Matthew Herbert, Mark Bell, the Icelandic
poet Sjn, and the Iranian producer Leila Arab. Grown-up
audiences thrilled to the high-tech spectacle that Bjrk unleashed
in live performanceplasma bolts zapping inside a Tesla coil,
producing organlike blasts of soundbut most of all she wished
to serve the starved imaginations of schoolchildren, many
of whom now enter adulthood without having studied music
in school. I want the kids to feel like theyre superheroes
of sound, she told me, before a series of performances at the
New York Hall of Science, in Queens, in 2012. One afternoon,
I watched as a group of kids from Queens middle schools raced
around playing with the instruments and the attendant software,
their eyes glittering with unsuspected possibilities. 9

In the wake of the cosmic effort of Biophilia, another

change of course seems inevitable. Lately, with an eye toward
a new album, Bjrk has been recording more intimate,
confessional songs with strings. There is no doubt that these
records not only document an intellectual journey but also
a personal, psychological one. How the work matches up
with the life is a subject on which only the artist herself can
speak, and the biographical details are, in any case, somewhat
immaterial; what counts is the sense that each song is an attempt
to transmit honestly and unabashedly an inward state, rather
than to concoct a calculated, knowing image for the outside
world. As in Schuberts final string quartet or Bergs Lyric Suite,
the music has a seismographic action, recording shocks and
sensations that we may not see first hand.

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See Alex Ross, Bjrk Ed,
The New Yorker, February 27, 2012.
Bjrgvin Tmasson designed Inventor and sound sculptor
two instruments with Bjrk, Henry Dagg with his The organs and the gameleste
a gameleste (shown here) and a Sharpsichord, complete with at a rehearsal for the Biophilia
30 Alex Ross Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk pipe organ, both MIDI-controlled. amplification horns, 2011. tour, 2011.
 Postlude: Declaring Independence
the great musical event of the past hundred years has
been the rise of pop and the concomitant marginalization
of a formerly dominant classical tradition. Walter Benjamin,
in his famous 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Mechanical Reproducibility, observed that technologies
of reproduction had brought about the decay of the aura
attaching to bourgeois works of art; modern forms such as
photography and film had eroded the uniqueness of the sacred
artistic object. The same dynamic could be seen in music,
as Theodor W. Adorno noted. Yet, as Adorno pointed out
in his correspondence with Benjamin, it is not the case that
the phenomenon of aura has disappeared altogether; rather,
it has migrated from the older tradition to the newer one,
so that pop is now sacralized in turn. 10 It is a nave fiction
of contemporary American culture to believe that bourgeois
art is an affair of the lites while pop culture is a celebration
of democratic virtues. There is, in fact, a straight line from
the bourgeois cult of the solitary genius to the mass cult of
the stadium celebrity. In both venues, a musical object radiates
ritual power within a radically unequal capitalist society.
It would be too much to claim that Bjrk breaks that cycle
of sacralization and domination. No artist who participates
in the give-and-take of the music business can escape it. But
something in her work rejects a cultic function. As a performer,
she does not strive to dominate; even when her voice acquires
a ferocious edge, she remains a figure within a landscape, a voice
within a collective. This is not to say that she fails to attract
fanatical admirers or elicit adulation; rather, that she undermines
the machinery of celebrity by playing against type. The fact that
she is routinely described as idiosyncratic, eccentric, weird,
or even crazyadjectives seldom employed by those who know
her welltestifies to her oblique strategy in the public sphere.
In this respect, her in-between status in genre terms, her liminal
position between classical, popular, and folk worlds, has
subversive power, and not just in aesthetic terms. By refusing
to be classified, Bjrk also resists being commodified.
10
Adorno wrote to Benjamin on March 18, 1936:
if anything can be said to possess an auratic character now,
it is precisely the film which does so,
and to an extreme and highly suspect degree.
Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
The Complete Correspondence, 19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz,
trans. Nicholas Walker (Harvard University Press), 1999, p. 130.
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32 Alex Ross
The singer who composes, the composer who sings;
the pop figure who embraces classical music, the classical
student who has branched out into pop; the solitary creator
who thrives on collaboration, the Nordic woman who meanders
through global culturesBjrk presents us with a complex
mass of dualities and contradictions. What is most impressive
about the overall trajectory of her work is that each swerve
or seeming detour contributes to a steadily ascending arc.
Despite constant changes of style and rotations of personnel,
her music-making displays long-term continuities, not only in
the fabric of her voice but in the melodic and harmonic contour
of the songs. The integration of a distinct composerly sensibility
into an open-ended, communally evolving output is perhaps
Bjrks signal achievement. It overrides a false opposition that
has confined music in predictable social functions.
Make your own flag! Raise your flag! Bjrk cries
on Declare Independence. We dont usually think of Bjrk
as a political artist, and yet her music can acquire an insurgent
edge, as became clear when, singing those lines in Shanghai
in 2008, she added a shout of Free Tibet! The idea of raising
ones own flag, of drawing ones own borders, runs all the way
through Bjrks career. It transcends the marketing clich
of Think different and espouses a philosophy of aesthetic
anarchy, whereby the redrawn map of the musical world becomes
the image of a future society. In this way, too, Bjrk is a faithful
follower of Cage, whose vision of utopia consisted, simply and
majestically, of a multiplicity of individuals who have the habit
of respecting one another. 11 ||
11
Joan Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music
(Wesleyan University Press), 1996, p. 293.
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Bjrk
 Nicola Dibben is a professor of musicology at the University ALL IS FULL OF LOVE || Words & music by Bjrk || for celeste Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation || Nicola Dibben
of Sheffield. She researches and teaches in the science
and psychology of music and in popular music studies.
Her publications include the books Bjrk and Music and
Mind in Everyday Life.

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III

3 moma_dibben_cover.indd 1-4 14/11/2014 13:46

 Nicola Dibben Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation

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 Creator || Producer
stories of bjrks creative process abound in interviews and
critical reception of her music: from accounts of composing by
singing outdoors, through working at digital audio workstations,
to jamming with other musicians. Yet, the discourse and ideology
of creativitywho and what we consider creative and why
remains relatively opaque. In this essay I briefly outline some
of Bjrks working process, before showing how her work
itself has something to say about the nature of creativity which
challenges deeply embedded notions of creation.
Bjrks solo work can be thought of in terms of projects,
which are realized as albums, associated singles and remixes,
promotional images, music videos, documentaries, performances,
and in the case of Biophilia (2011), a pop-up music school and
an app for tablet computer. Music is at the core of these projects.
For example, in the case of Biophilia, which I worked on
as musicological consultant, 1 Bjrk spent at least two years
researching and composing with assistance from a recording
engineer, personal assistant, and management. By the time
I met Bjrk in September 2010 she had already created working
versions of the tracks that would form the album, at least one
of which was awaiting lyrics (the track Melody, which was
later titled Cosmogony). At this stage she had identified most
collaborators, and was communicating her idea for each aspect
of the project to the relevant people, working with the individuals
concerned to achieve it. Hence, design, art work, costume,
videos, and apps emerged during that process and were executed
to the music, with some changes to the music in response to
those interventions and the needs of the different types of
artefacts. The reason this sequence is important is that it points
to a distinctive feature of Bjrks workthe way in which she uses
all media at her disposal to communicate consistently a central
idea particular to each project, which is first manifested musically.
1 and personal communication, February, 2013.
In this case, musicological consultant
is a grand title for a variety of tasks,
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from writing liner notes to identifying
key centers of songs for a package of tuning forks!
34 Nicola Dibben
In terms of music-making, some musical collaborators such
as engineers and producers are akin to performers brought in to
play music that she has written. One example of this relationship,
according to Bjrk, was her work with Markus Dravs, credited
with production of Homogenic, whom she asked to make big,
distorted rock beats. She gave him reference samples and asked
him to create beats that she listened to and corrected, and by
the end of the Post tour they had created a library of beats that
she could use in Homogenic. Another example is Matmos, who
she brought in to provide a textural and percussive layer of beats
to tracks she had already created. 2
Significantly, Bjrks account of these working relationships
used procreational metaphors, such as her description of studio
engineers she worked with as the midwives to her creative
projects. 3 Such a description runs counter to the idea of the
studio as the preserve of the male engineer and producer, and
of the patriarchal model of creation and creativity as divine
inspiration which derives from sacred or phallocentric models
of the father/god. 4 It is in this context of patriarchal ideologies
of creativity, and difference politics, that interpretation of Bjrks
work from a feminist perspective is particularly interesting.
I argue that her work challenges the stereotype of the patriarchal
God-like creator, and replaces it with a matriarchal alternative
premised on procreation. The most obvious place to look for
this matriarchal creator is in the visual and lyrical dimension
of her work, but, as I will show, they are just as apparent in
the sound of her music.
2
Matmos, When Matmos met Bjrk,
Red Bull Music Academy Magazine,
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/
when-matmos-met-bjork, June 26, 2013.
3
Homogenic (1997) CD liner notes;
4
Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice
(Psychology Press), 2005.
Live performances for Biophilia, A screenshot of Solstice, from
Manchester International the interactive Biophilia digital The Cosmogony homescreen
Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation Festival, UK, 2011. app, first released in 2011. from the Biophilia app.
 Procreator || Mother || Nature
bjrks performances of femininity are notable for avoiding
the sexualized objectification of womens bodies that permeates
mainstream popular culture. Her costumes are often thematically
connected to the particular project shes engaged in and flout
conventions of acceptability, catwalk fashion trends, or body-
conscious dressing. 5 Citing Bjrk as a feminist icon one
blogger wrote: her clothes are never about being pretty
or sexy, which I love. Theyre clothes as art and as something
to play with and explore. 6 Her movements in performance
similarly avoid clichd sexualization: the choreography eschews
coy looks, or simulated sex typical of female pop icons and
instead is characterized by child-like cavorting, by movements
that express and visualize sonic structures, or reflect almost
absent-minded absorption in the act of singing. Nonetheless,
some of her work has been erotically explicit: the music video
Pagan Poetry (dir. Nick Knight, 2001) shows Bjrk semi-naked
with beads sewn into her skin. In sum, Bjrks visual technique
avoids sexual objectification by disavowing, to some extent,
the conventional representational style of heteronormative
sexual attractiveness, fetishized body parts, and patriarchal
modes of looking. Instead, the visual becomes an outlet for the
expression of a different kind of female experience and identity.
5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge), 1999.
Edwin F. Faulhaber III,
Communicator Between Worlds:
Bjrk Reaches Beyond the Binaries.
Diss. Bowling Green State University, 2008.
6
Franca, Fashionable Feminist Icon:
Bjrk, March 2, 2011. Oranges and Apples:
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http://www.oranges-and-apples.com/2011/
03/fashionable-feminist-icon-bjork.html.
36 Nicola Dibben
Procreator || Mother || Nature
bjrks work makes an unusual alliance between a womans
sexual identity and motherhood. In a culture where motherhood
is often deemed de-sexualized, Bjrks focus on sensual
experience in Medlla is striking. Bjrk attributed this thematic
aspect of the album project to her experience of pregnancy,
birth, and mothering, describing the album as blood, bones
and meat. 7 In this context, the song The Pleasure is All
Mine can be understood as a celebration of the sensual and
emotional experience of mothering, and Mouths Cradle
as a rumination on breastfeeding. The voice is one place where
gender is performed, 8 so places where the voice does not
comply with the codification of sexual categories and roles
disrupt identity categories. 9 The panting and groaning performed
by Bjrk and Canadian throat-singer Tanya Tagaq break
conventions of vocal femininity because they can be heard as
eliding both a maternal and erotic identity.
In interviews contemporary with Medlla, Bjrk
described the project as an attempt to return to a time prior
to civilization, and to hark back to a mythologized past in the
wake of 9/11. In musical terms this is manifest in the primitivist
and body-centric vocal album. The very personal, family-centered
focus, and emphasis on the voice, can be understood as a form
of embodied protest which voices the physical and emotional
experience of motherhood in opposition to the (male) oriented
contemporary political scene. 10 This celebration of sensual
experiences of breastfeeding and mothering is an articulation
of peace politics which is arguably congruent with tenets
of third-wave feminism and its valorization of the feminine.
From a feminist perspective Bjrks work can be understood
as affirming female sexual autonomy and identity by avoiding
sexual objectification, and concomitant ideologies of male sexual
entitlement, and by celebrating identities of motherhood. This
is extremely important in so far as it counters a situation in which
womens sexuality is defined by men. However, one problem with
this projected female identity is that it affirms constructions of
the female subject as natural and pre-technological, which can be
seen as problematically essentialist. One place this is apparent is
in the construct of Nature which appears throughout her work.
7
The Inner Part of an Animal or Plant Structure,
dir. Ragnheiur Gestsdttir, 2004.
8
9
Freya Jarman-Ivens,
Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities,
and the Musical Flaw (Palgrave Macmillan), 2011.
10
Bjrk has described some of the songs as being
about family members. The lyrics of Mouths Cradle
refer to building an altar away from all Osamas and Bushes. Stills from the erotically
charged video for Pagan Poetry Photographed for
(directed by Nick Knight, 2001), the Volumen VHS/DVD Bjrk and her son Sindri,
Bjrk wearing a dress by Inez van Lamsweerde photographed in Iceland by
Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation by Alexander McQueen. & Vinoodh Matadin, 1998. Juergen Teller, 1993.
 Procreator || Mother || Nature

the natural world is one of the most common tropes

in Bjrks work, whether as the self-proclaimed source of her
creativity, the thematic subject of her work, or dominant
interpretive mode of critical reception. This perspective
is typified by the way she understands her voice as her
primary compositional tool, which she describes as shaped
by and a reaction to the natural world, untutored and hence
preserving something otherwise changed or destroyed. 11

Bjrks work articulates a celebration of and continuity

of humans with the natural world. 12 Imagery of the physical
and animal natural world abounds in the music videos and
lyrics of her solo career: volcanic and winter landscapes, the sea,
and animals. Notably, whereas in her early solo career (Debut
and Post) she was usually the lyrical and visual second-person
observer of nature, in later work she was more often the first-
person embodiment of nature: for example, as cyber-polar-bear
in the video of Hunter from Homogenic, as the now infamous
swan at the Oscars for Dancer in the Dark, or as the sea
in Oceania from Medlla. By personifying nature Bjrk
performs the continuity between human and animal, human
and physical, self and other.

Bjrks performance of Oceania at the Opening

Ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games (2004) is a good
example of this aesthetic practice of embodying nature.
In this work, written for the Olympic Games, Bjrk takes on
the persona of the Ocean-Mother who watches over humanity
(thereby disavowing differences of religion and nationality).
The main visual cue to this embodiment in performance was
the blue, billowing, and encrusted dress by designer Sophia
Kokosalaki which unfurled across the stadium, while the lyrics
(co-written by longtime collaborator, Icelandic poet Sjn) speak
from first-person perspective. Musically, the scalic passages
and choral flourishes can be heard as mimetic of waves, while
the fermatas (the long held notes disrupting the regular beat)
manifest the sea-goddesss power and control in musical form
by halting the temporal flow.

Bjrks identification of Woman with the natural

world in much of her work could be seen as problematically
essentialist in so far as it seems to reinscribe binaries that
ultimately preserve male power. Yet this interpretation would
ignore the extent to which her work engages with the idea
of technology and, by doing so, the extent to which it challenges
these very categories. So it is to the technological that
I turn next.

11
Inside Bjrk, dir. Christopher Walker, 2003.

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12
Nicola Dibben, Bjrk (Equinox), 2009, pp. 5371. Bjrk personifying the sea
in her performance of Oceania
at the Olympic Games, Athens,
A portrait by Stphane Sdnaoui, 2004, in a dress designed
38 Nicola Dibben Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation 1994. by Sophia Kokosalaki.
 Feminizing Techno
bjrks treatment of the technological has to be seen
in its wider cultural context. The construct Technology
is associated with a worldview of scientific progress, objectivity
and rationality, and of domination over the natural world.
In the West this is a legacy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century reaction to industrialization and mechanization and
associated fears of routinized human labor that would
then be replaced by the work of machines. In popular music
the technological came to be associated with electronic
instruments and sound sources, epitomized by the synthesized
timbres and repeating beat patterns of electronic dance music
this, despite the fact that a guitar is just as much a technology
as the Digital Audio Workstation. 13 This association between
the sounds of electronic dance music and the concept of the
technological is manifest in Bjrks artistic output, statements beats are made from the ultimate sonic signifier of human
in interviews, and critical reception. This is significant because
it means that if we look closely at her use of beats we can better
understand the idea of technology in her music.
One innovation of Bjrks compositional style was
the unusual combination of vocal, instrumental, and electronic
sources, which integrated sounds culturally coded as natural
with other sound sources and compositional practices
conceived as technological. 14 One place this can be heard is
in the relationship between her voice and the sonic background.
The sound of Bjrks first solo albums was innovative in the
context of 1990s electronic dance music for its combination
of vocals and beat-based electronic dance music. Her voice
works with the technological, represented by the beats, but
is not subservient to it, as can be heard in the expressive timing
of her relatively unprocessed vocals around the quantized beat
(a relationship described by British musician and co-writer
Guy Sigsworth as the unforgiving pulse of the machine and
the human resisting it). 15
13
Simon Frith, Art versus technology:
The strange case of popular music,
Media, Culture & Society 8.3 (1986), pp. 26379.
14
Nicola Dibben, Bjrk (Equinox), 2009.
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15
Guy Sigsworth, personal communication, 2006.
40 Nicola Dibben
A second feature of Bjrks sound that presents
this integration of the natural and technological is the mimetic
character of her beats. For example, the timbre of her beats
deliberately mimics aspects of the natural world such as seismic
movement of the earth (Homogenic), and winter landscapes
(Vespertine), associations that are primed for the listener by
contextual information such as Bjrks statements on her work
and accompanying videos. In Nature is Ancient, for example,
the industrial-sounding beats coincide with shots of a foetus-like
creature, and the filtered frequency spectrum evokes a sound
heard through some other substance or device, and can be
interpreted as a uterine soundscape. In some cases, beats and
other materials are directly sampled from everyday sound
(cracking ice and footsteps in snow on Vespertine), and in Medlla
subjectivitythe voice.
A third example of the way Bjrk inscribed the beats
of electronic music with alternative meanings was through
the use of microbeats on Vespertine. Microbeats are high-pitched,
short-duration, percussive rhythms that derived from avant-garde
and experimental glitch music of the 1990s which used the
clicks of a CD skipping as musical material. One way microbeats
subvert traditional beat-based composition is by miniaturizing
the sonic experience. The term micro refers to the idea of
working with a smallest particle or grain of sound, and
Bjrk used this within a broader aesthetic of miniaturization
particular to Vespertine. The design intention was to create
the impression of something small that had been magnified. 16
Miniaturization of objects opens up the everyday world to
the imagination and is a sonic manifestation of Vespertines
utopian delight in the domestic. 17 This was achieved by using
high-frequency sounds of short duration and in rapid
rhythmic patterns (sounds emitted by small objects/events
in the real-world), and positioning them around the virtual
space of the recording so that they become more akin to
something organic and mobile (insects, perhaps) rather than
the fixed-location, loud, low-frequency beats characteristic
of some electronic dance music. By virtue of this treatment,
technology was made human-scale, and brought into the
private, domestic realm.
16
This is also evident in the title sequence
and credits to Bjrks documentary Minuscule (2004),
in which the cameras gaze travels through a miniature world.
17
Bjrk explained her use of microsound
at this time as a compositional strategy
that emerged from working with a laptop computer,
and a state of domesticity and retreat in response
to the concurrent filming of the Lars von Trier-directed film
Dancer in the Dark, in which she took the leading role
(Inside Bjrk, dir. Christopher Walker, 2003).
Bjrk performing at the Brit
Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation Awards, London, 1994.
 Microbeats also make technological mediation audible.
With digitalization at the end of the twentieth century came
the apparent absence of a physical artefact, 18 and this was
accompanied by aesthetic practices that made the digital visible
and audible. This opaque mediation 19 is evident in some
of Bjrks videos at the time (for example, her transformation
from human to animated bear in Hunter). The sonic glitches
of a CD skipping are the sound of the perfect workings of CD
technology interrupted, making audible the otherwise inaudible
digital artefact itself. In this sense microbeats acknowledge
and embrace the technological realm, rather than using it to
create a fantasy of (unmediated) audio perfection.

As this indicates, microbeats are premised on the failures

and unpredictabilities of technology, and in this sense Glitch
music can be understood as a critique of digital technology.
Talking of Vespertine, Bjrk remarked: its sort of conquering
the fact that most people think that technology is cold because
it has no mystery, and its very calculated So when you take
technology and use the areas where it breaks, where its faulty,
youre entering a mystery zone where you cant control it.
Its reacting more like an animal or person to you, and you
have to react with it. 20

Mechanical technology is also explored by Bjrk in this

way: for example, while the digital is sonically present in the
use of CD glitches on Vespertine, that album in addition includes
the sounds of a mechanical music box whose idiosyncratic timing
variations present a more imperfect version of the technological.

It is possible to see this set of Bjrks compositional

practices as a critical response to the binary opposition between
human and machine, the natural and the technological.
The construct of technology as systematic, predictable, and
invulnerable is not played out in Bjrks treatment of sonic
signifiers of the technological; instead, technology, as represented
through her sound, is unsystematic, unpredictable, vulnerable
and ultimately rather life-like. From a feminist perspective,
she loosens the binary constructs and opens the way for an
alternative relationship with and between nature and technology.

18
The absence of physical artefacts
with digital technology is apparent
rather than real because digital artefacts such as MP3s
still need physical playback technologies.

19
Ragnhild Brvig-Hanssen,
Music in Bits and Bits of Music: Signatures
of Digital Mediation in Popular Music Recordings.
Diss. PhD thesis, University of Oslo, 2013.

20
Bjrk interviewed in CDNow, August, 2001,

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Cocoon Special, 2001:
http://www.bjork.fr/Cocoon,114. Video stills from Hunter
(directed by Paul White, 1998),
showing Bjrks transformation
from human to animated
42 Nicola Dibben Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation polar bear.
 The Creator-Procreator
i have suggested that Bjrks artistic practices present a version
of technology that does not fit the cultural stereotypes. As
Charity Marsh and Melissa West pointed out over a decade
ago, 21 Bjrk blurs the distinction between technology and nature,
and in doing so she dissolves the polarization of masculinity
and femininity. Elsewhere I argue that the music video All
is Full of Love 22 epitomizes this idea of the human-technology
relationship. 23 In that video Bjrk embodies a human-machine
hybrid 24a cyborg modeled on her facial features, lovingly
tended to by robotic arms in a sci-fi futuristic setting, who then
appears in sexual union with another. The close-up shots
of cylindrical protuberances, milky substances flowing over
cyborgian body parts, the tangled cables linking cyborgs
to robotic arms suggestive of bondage, and the moment
of sexual union inferred from the few seconds blackout
at the tracks Golden Section are an explicitly sexual and
sensual visual representation of a non-heteronormative
and cyborgian subjectivity.
This feminization of technology is also accomplished
sonically: the cyborgs lip-synch to Bjrks singing voice, and
musical materials culturally coded as feminine and magical
(for example, short, scalic clavichord passages) are aligned
with visual shots of the robotic arms tending to the cyborg.
The noisy filtered timbre of the slow looped beat pattern
that runs throughout the track has a mechanical character and
starts with the movement of the robotic arms, as if the track
itself is a piece of machinery (0:19). This is in stark contrast
to the moments of human subjectivity associated with the
cyborgs: the chorus in which the cyborgs duet accompanied
by sonic signifiers of emotion and altered states of consciousness
(vocalize, crescendo of the high-frequency wash on the upbeat
to the chorus, harp-like glissandi, vocal reverberation).
It is possible to understand Bjrks treatment as presenting
a new hybrid entity which confounds dualist categories
of masculine-feminine and technology-nature.
21
Charity Marsh and Melissa West,
The Nature/Technology Binary Opposition Dismantled
in the Music of Madonna and Bjrk,
Music and Technoculture (2003), pp. 182203.
22
All is Full of Love, dir. Chris Cunningham, 1999.
23
Nicola Dibben, Bjrk (Equinox), 2009.
24
Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds.,
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Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk:
Cultures of Technological Embodiment (Sage), 1996.
44 Nicola Dibben
Whereas All is Full of Love presents a cyborgian
embodiment of a feminized technologythe human-machine
hybridelsewhere Bjrks work conceives of humans as part
of a bigger system in which the hybridity is more explicitly
between organic and inorganic matter. An early exemplar
of this is the music video Jga, at the end of which the
camera enters Bjrks chest to reveal she is made of rock
identical to the land she stands on. Whereas this music video
can be understood as a nationalist identification by Bjrk
with the Icelandic landscape, 25 her more recent work encourages
less place-bound interpretations, pointing instead to a conception
of nature in terms of planet rather than place.
This difference in scope is illustrated by comparing
All is Full of Love with Mutual Core 26a music video
made thirteen years after the former, yet which shares structural
and thematic similarities with it, and has been described
as a feminist treatise against patriarchy in creation theory. 27
Mutual Core depicts the emergence and sexual union
of two hybrid creatures in a creation myth narrative. Rock-like
creatures emerge and submerge in aquatic movements in sand,
in which Bjrk stands rooted up to her midriff. They rise up
and display anthropomorphic features: rock strata meet and
caress like tongues, the rockface takes on human features.
At each of the two choruses the hybrid creatures come together
in a violent eruptiona visual realization of the lyrical reference
to tectonic plates colliding. The audio-visual climax is the union
of the creatures in the final chorus as the rock and lava thrust
upward, creating two androgynous Buddha-like figures.
Here the categories of organic and inorganic are as inadequate
as those of female and male.
25
Nicola Dibben (in press),
Affecting landscapes: popular music and environmentalism
in a Nordic context, Popular Music in the Nordic Countries,
eds. Antti-Ville Krj and Fabian Holt.
26
Mutual Core, dir. Andrew Thomas Huang, 2012.
27
Cacy Forgenie, Bjrks Mutual Core
video is fantastic, feminist & repeat play worthy,
berBice [MRKT], November 15, 2012:
http://berbicemarket.com/sports-music-film-art-books
/bjorks-mutual-core-video-is-fantastic-
feminist-repeat-play-worthy-video/
Bjrk revealing that, inside A still showing human-machine
her chest, her heart is Iceland. hybrids in the video to
Stills from Jga, directed All is Full of Love, directed by
Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation by Michel Gondry, 1997. Chris Cunningham, 1999.
 Similarities between the two videos encourage comparison:
they share a narrative of creation, organic-inorganic hybridity,
the falling ash/sparks during the creation process, the flowing
liquids and unification evocative of sexual union, moments
of visual symmetry of entwined hybrid creatures surrounded
by and linked to other smaller creatures, and significant visual
events at the Golden Section of each track (sexual union when
the lights flicker off in All is Full of Love and the touching
of hands in Mutual Core). Both celebrate non-heteronormative
sexuality, and both challenge our perceptions of the categories
of organic and inorganic (human/machine in one case;
human/mineral in another). But whereas All is Full of Love
emphasizes peace, love and sex, Mutual Core represents
a more violent unification.

This focus on hybridity disturbs familiar conceptual

categories: organic and inorganic are combined rather than
representing a duality. This questioning of dualist categories
is particularly significant in the context of Bjrks ecopolitical
activities, hinting at the human relationship with, rather
than domination over, the natural world. 28

28
Nicola Dibben (in press),
Affecting landscapes: popular music
and environmentalism in a Nordic context,

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Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, Stills from the videos
eds. Antti-Ville Krj and Fabian Holt. to All is Full of Love (Chris
Cunningham, 1999) and Mutual
Core (Andrew Thomas Huang,
2012), showing powerful unions
46 Nicola Dibben Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation of inorganic/organic hybridity.
 Conclusion: Disturbing the Categories

i have argued that Bjrks artistic output is characterized
by themes and narratives of creation and unification that
problematize familiar gendered dualist categories. I focused
on sonic examples and compositional practices, but the same
themes are evident in more obviously representational
aspects of visuals and lyrics: her videos feature androgynous
characters, non-heteronormative representations of sexual
union, avoidance of sexual objectification of Bjrks own image,
and the presentation of Woman as simultaneously sexual
and nurturing.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the feminist reading of her
work that I have presented, Bjrk herself had until recently been
reluctant to identify herself as a feminist. Subsequent to her
increased politicization after 9/11, and the birth of her daughter,
she became more outspoken about gender inequalities, 29
contrasting her own perspective with that of her mothers
generation of second-wave feminists. It would be easy to read
Bjrks work in terms of difference feminism in which women
are aligned with nature and its associated attributes. Indeed,
such a reading is supported by a track such as Sacrifice
from Biophilia, which ponders on how nature positions women
to care for others first. Bjrks author-image prioritizes her
emotional authenticity and her voice as signifier of the natural
and pre-technological congruent with dominant constructions
of the female subject in Euro-American culture. Moreover,
her embodiment of nature is redolent of an ecofeminism
reliant on a mystical connection between women and nature.
This amounts to an espousal of third-wave difference
feminismthe idea that there are real differences between
the sexes and a reclaiming of the traditional female roles which
some believed to have been jettisoned by second-wave feminism.
The problem with such an approach, or interpretation
of her approach, is two-fold. If we understand her work as
showing that constructs normally thought of as binary opposites
are in fact compatible with one another, then this simply
reinscribes the oppositionconstituting the dualities in the very
process of unifying them. 30 In fact, I find this interpretation
unpersuasive because it ignores the way her work destabilizes
gendered categories. As I have argued above, the human-machine
binary is challenged by the entity of the cyborg; the organic-
inorganic distinction is disturbed by creating hybrid entities;
and the differentiation of science and myth (Big Bang creation
theory and Mother Nature mythology in Cosmogony) is
made indistinct. There are no clear categories. Instead, we are
presented with a non-gendered, non-heteronormative subjectivity
in which creation and procreation are one.
Hence, I suggest an alternative perspective on her work:
namely, that Bjrk challenges the binaries from the outset. None
of the categories comprising the apparent dualities we might
find there are inscribed in her work; rather they are shown to be
there only in our own realization of their inadequacy as systems
of thought to make sense of the material at hand. And so for
the duration of a song, a performance, we can experience an
alternative way the world might be. ||

29
Its interesting for me to bring up a girl.
You go to the toy store
and the female characters thereCinderella,
the lady in Beauty and the Beast
their major task is to find Prince Charming.
And Im like, wait a minuteits 2005!
Weve fought so hard to have a say,
and not just live through our partners,
and yet youre still seeing two-year-old girls
with this message pushed at them
that the only important thing is
to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you.
Its something my mum pointed out to me
when I was littleso much that I almost threw up 30
but shes right. Bjrk interviewed by Liz Hoggard, Andrew Robbie, Sampling Haraway,
Maybe Ill be a feminist in my old age, Hunting Bjrk: Locating a Cyborg Subjectivity,
The Observer, March 13, 2005. Repercussions, 2007, 10: 1.

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48 Nicola Dibben Bjrk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
 Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English Page 61, above Photo courtesy of Timothy Morton. AURORA || Words and music by Bjrk || for harpsichord This Huge Sunlit Abyss from the Future Right There Next to You
at Rice University (Houston, USA). He is the author of Realist Page 61, below Home video courtesy of Bjrk Gumundsdttir. Emails between Bjrk Gumundsdttir and Timothy Morton || October, 2014 || Edited by James Merry
Causality; Hyperobjects: Philosophy
Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality;
World; The Ecological Thought;
and Ecology after the End of the World; ought;
Nature, nine other books and 120 essays
Ecology Without Nature,
on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design, and food.
Morton is a proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO),
a new philosophy that shows how nonhuman thingsa fox,
a pencil, the biosphere, a song, a quasar, a mixing deskare
as rich and alive and special as we think humans are, and
how they influence each other in a sensual, molten ether.

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IV

4 moma_timothy morton_cover.indd 1-5 14/11/2014 13:46

 hi timothy

i wanted to write this letter for a long time

i have been reading your books for a while and i like them a lot

next year there will be a MoMA exhibition

on my work including a book .
i was wondering if youd be interested in taking part in it ?

warmth , bjrk

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 Dear Bjrk,
It was very kind of you to write to me, and Im very touched
by your kind words. I am always quite surprised anyone reads
my stuff!
I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue.
Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking
and life in general. I like to be given homework in terms
of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about
what specifications you might like.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening
towards ecological awareness--not just in terms of PR
for the science. I have heard this in your work since I started
to listen to it.
Yours, Tim
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thank you so much for writing ...
im thrilled youre interested
and sorry , i went offline ,
was hiking in iceland and filming a video .
so i have been doing a little reading and trying to find folks
who could help me define what ism i am ... i guess i managed
to avoid being analyzed for all these years but now since i am
a little older and supposedly wiser i would like to offer up
a collaborative hand and wave hi to theory . well , if i dont do it ,
the art critics will and that seems destined for misunderstandings .
i ended up reading several books on posthumanism .
it is not exactly what i was looking for but closest yet ...
most interesting is that it is the first ism where the human
is not at the centre of the world , and the stuff about anthropocene
is also spicy !! not only to define it for me ,
but also for all my friends , and a generation actually .
i feel in many ways we icelandic people are a bit different from usa
and england . somehow we missed out on the industrial revolution
and modernism and postmodernism and are now coming straight
from colonialism , getting our independence 1944 and going
straight into 21st century ! we have a chance to enjoy our still
almost untouched nature and combine it and headbutt our way
into green techno internet age . so somehow there is way less
apocalyptic feeling over here ... we dont have an army ,
havent been burned by wars or by the guilt that comes with it ...
somehow we are still continuing the romantic age of the 19th
century but it is not back to nature , it is forwards !! i feel this
has been a little misunderstood so far as naive and cute
( a la grizzly man werner herzog
or even worse dolphins and shit !! )
and i havent seen much written stuff in the western media
where this ism is given a mature voice .
then i guess there is also the woman matriarch factor .
would be incredible to somehow address that in a fertile
non patriarch rocknroll way ? without dissing a single male !!!
 Oh gosh, its my pleasure, and thank you in turn for replying
with such richness.
I think Ive had your music and words in me for decades--I mean
this word i use, hyperobject for instance, it sounds like one
of your words. You have so many nonhuman beings in your work,
both obviously alive and not so obviously. I tend to see things
in an animistic way. I try to argue that everything is alive
(or undead--almost as good!).
Your sentence made me smile. Help me define what ism I am
is kind of its own ism in a way, and a very lyrical phrase
(I dont really know how to write poems but I can read them...)
I have no idea what ism you are really of course (he said sincerely
and truthfully), and my own ism doesnt seem to have made itself
very obvious! That is part of the whole ism dynamic, of course,
which we humans have been in for about two hundred years...
I argue that art comes from the future (and I can prove it?!)
so I think art of whatever kind is always ahead of thinking.
Its my job to sort of channel it into the present in words.
As your art is obviously very clearly open to the future (and from
the future) I thought Id like to tell you, with helping you on
the 2015 projects in mind.
I think art is a way to talk about the way things are in general:
an umbrella, Sagittarius A, coral, breadcrumbs, photons. I believe
art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
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By weird I mean the Icelandic and Old Norse roots of that word,
urth. What things are is inextricably looped, twisted or entwined
with how they appear, yet different--so things are weird and also
fragile, even black holes. I will now not take up five hours of your
time proving it! All my stuff right now is explicitly about this word
urth, which for me is a strange coincidence since you wrote me.
I could find a million examples in your work. The description
of the snow in Aurora leaves the snow to be exactly what it is,
yet at the same time there is this tantalizing sensual appearance,
yet one cant quite grasp it, which is why its beautiful (The way
it melts...). Kant says something very similar about raindrops.
In his funny old clunky way.
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening
to the future, which is just how things are--I think time is a sort
of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt
crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what
it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too. You have
to play a long time to sound like yourself (Miles Davis).
This is where I think maybe your work is mysteriously realist.
Each work is very unique, quite startlingly so when you compare
it to how others proceed. So in a way the works are also these
nonhumans I keep banging on about.
And this is why it doesnt quite fit into an ism because so far
isms have been historically about ignoring reality, in other words
nonhuman beings.
You did say youd read my books. Me being a bit daft I suddenly
connected with the fact you read Realist Magic, and am even
more touched. I care about all my stuff but that is the one I wrote
from my core. Im so delighted you are into it.
The sentences in that book are really just a fuzzy photocopy
of what you do.
So glad to hear someone has been hiking and not online.

magic : am filming : will reply properly soon,
but in the meantime i thought id send you this
around 10 to 15 years ago i read an interview with an architect
where he talked about the difference between people who invent
things and people who collect things : he said he was a collector
of ideas , he travelled often to india and other places for this .
and that he felt really threatened by people who just wake up
and they have thought of something original .
he called it the tyranny of the oblivious .
i found this incredibly interesting . at the time i had just moved
to new york and was breastfeeding a newborn baby at home
writing music . 9/11 had just happened and i was following
the news of the michael jackson trial : a public execution
happening . it seemed extraordinary that something so sweet
and generous could be such a threat ...
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Hope the filming goes excellently!
Magic is a very positive word for me.
Being a newborn babys dad was one of the most psychedelic
things that ever happened to me. The corny phrase is children
are the future but its quite true in another way. This huge sunlit
abyss from the future right there next to you...
That Michael Jackson trial, it was like that, wasnt it? I found
out about Michael Jacksons death in the middle of a class I was
teaching and the first words out of my mouth were, Of course
we are all responsible for this (by putting him up on a pedestal
to be the perfect pop puppet, etc.). One of the most conservative
students even snorted derisively but I guess he was just reacting
to his own heavily shielded vulnerability...
Creation comes out of vulnerability, doesnt it? Some kind
of attunement to something that isnt you. Susceptibility.
You seem to allow your voice to be vulnerable, which is very
powerful in fact: threatening vulnerability. Sometimes
it seems to be in between crying and laughing. Or roaring,
growling, ululating.Allowing it to be itself, which is a physical,
visceral entity.
In this your voice seems to be staying in a place of creativity,
which for me means being close to things.
This is a reason why I really like your song Virus. Being alive
means being susceptible to viruses and so on. And far more
generally, viruses, patterns, appearance, flowers, art--these are
all far from useless, they are intrinsic parts of being a thing at all.
Causality itself is something to do with magical seduction.
(Five-hour argument compression!) How that amounts to tyranny
just beats me. To me, reality is literally an anarchy. Artists just
arent tyrants. They cant be.
In a way art is the opposite of collecting, because it must
be more like listening to something one cant quite hear--its an old
idea of channeling, sort of nonviolently allowing things to beam
themselves down.
 For instance, the work on Biophilia--its just brilliantly about
how life cant be contained to prefabricated concepts of life, that
it contains things like crystallization and viruses and moons.
And also, of course, this is a basic thing I find everywhere in your
work: you become the thunder and lightning (for instance), and
yet you dont, just as the voice entwines around the instrument;
or how an instrument can be an agent all by itself, not just telling
a (human) story. There is this playful both-and that I think
is a basic quality of what a thing is at all.
What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing
(oblivion), but from an electromagnetic tenderness--from
remembering, not forgetting.
You allow the songs on theBiophiliaapp to be remade, which
is very courageous, but also realistic, because I think entities
never exhaust their possibilities by being used or interpreted
by anything. You also seem very open about having songs remixed,
and I wonder whether its for the same reason.
The song as entity is a physical being in its own right and creating
it means letting it be, which is absolutely the opposite of collecting,
where there is a frame into which things fit already.
It is itself precisely because it can be changed, remixed, re-heard.
It is mysterious.
Earth needs this tenderness--I think there is some kind of fusion
between tenderness and sadness, joy, yearning, longing, horror
(tricky one), laughter, melancholy and weirdness. This fusion
is the feeling of ecological awareness.
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you might find it funny but i was trying to explain OOO
to a friend last night in an email after a few whiskeys , ha ha
thought id share it with you :
i have been reading some OOO stuff ,
the guy i once sent you a link about , timothy morton
i guess he is SWERVING the apocalyptic angle into hope ,
or at least there is an attempt
his thing is that the apocalypse has already happened
and we have to get out of our paralysed state and react .
he has a lot of humour too , which is incredible .
i guess i relate most to the more sonic angle of OOO ,
about string theory and how in the core of the atom all vibrates
and resonates and the 20th century was the century
of cause and effect and the element table .
but now it is more about the magnetic force of the sun ,
how we are discovering that now : both on a subatomic level
and also on a large scale : how the magnetism of our solar system
is way more effective than the pathways of our stars .
sorry , crazy farfetched , but if you think of it as a sound
it is super exciting how we are finally opening up to resonance ...
hmm ... perhaps too ambitious to explain in a short email
( i blame the whiskey )
ha ha ha and to take it even further : my favorite favorite favorite
thing is how it connects to animism , that in each object
there is soul . and therefore asks for different reaction to ecology ?
each laptop , each bird , each building
you got me! i cant tell you how nice you can feel these entities coming out the what an inspired post to receive !!!
it is to be got. gotten? gotted? rocks up here in the north of england, the
pools and fountains. whether you like gracefulll all over ...
i am indeed trying to find ways to hope it or not, or believe or not. irish woman
and not be totally caught in the headlights i heard once: sure i dont believe in them, im in the mountains in iceland now herding sheep :
of all this stuff.but theyre there all the same. bang on... one has to run and pull horns and receive polka dot bruises on
ones thighs : smashing !!!! it was magic today .
also--thats an OOO sort of list there: somehow the further north you go the it was so sunny and crisp and no wind at all , kinda miraculous but
laptop, bird, building. i love to make more vivid it becomes. i expect its super in slomo , without the boom .
such lists. spoon, quasar, frost on an iron vivid in iceland?
r a i l i n g . smell of wool and jarm and the volcanic mist from the eruption
bohemians, punks, everyone who ever had finally arrived here in the west so all was in soft focus but not
the humour--thanks!! i find so much allows and responds to some kind lazy hazy style , but metallic w/definition ! during dinner i shuffled
humour in your work too. theres a whole of dream that sprays out of things even my latest sound discoveries : irish house with punk sounds
mixture of different kinds, sometimes if its totally mundane like a hammer or ( the fresh young are doing this apparently )
s u p e r i m p o s e d . a bottle of coke--all are in fact shamans
who dont quite know it. btw , talking of this fresh young generation, i adore them .
the resonance: yes x 10. i cant help writing and i agree : rediscovering enchantment through science
about sound. and the kind of connection i think this is the story of art in the last and allowing the inner space to sparkle madly
of everything. i think things are telepathic, two hundred years that art scholarship something so so so MAGIC is finally happening !!
really. frogs, balls of string, auroras and is blocking, mostly out of fear.
flight attendants. causality is telepathy. i saw an article saying that majority of hollywood movies last year
our mission maybe is to allow people were about the apocalypse and i was like : sort your hope out ,
your art is like trying to hook up all these to feel this and think this with full crystal usa ! im so bored with that only possible ending . soooo limited .
telepathic wires between everything. clarity, not departing from reason for one i love how you write in your book about that :
second, yet allowing the inner space to
my friend and i were just talking about sparkle madly. nor succumbing to someone nihilism wants to empty its pockets of everything including
poetry and how almost-now eco society elses old bad belief juju but allowing the space in the pockets--as if one could pull the nothingness out
is actually about rediscovering things to be magic, rather than totally of the pocket itself to rid oneself of the inconsistency of the thing .
enchantment yet with full on science--not inert? thats my mission anyway haha believing in nothing is a defense against nothingness ,
fighting it, but revealing it. fearless a metaphysics of presence disguised
exploration of phenomena. earth needs more magicians as a sophisticated undermining of all presence.

there is this part of me that just wants scientists, stop trying to persuade wrong
to talk about elves and sprites yet i disguise people that you are right! just blow them
it because others might think it was away with some magic...
believing in something solid. or probably
just laugh at me if they are cool kid you and i should do the news conferences
a c a d e m i c s . . . together about global warming
people would soon submit hahahaha
obvious bankruptcy ?
helllo ?
ha ha ha ha
we might have to discuss the north later : so much to say .
but overall i feel its underrated how much space is here .
plant / people / sound / animals .

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im so bored of that apocalypse stuff too! this is my philosophy slogan: thinking he has this great thing about this attitude nice one!!! I just knew youd dig it.
i had no idea it was so dominant but yes should know how to laugh, and cry. he calls the beautiful soul.
it is very cool and often goes to number i still cant get over the fact that you
1. it is a way to block the tender subtle for some reason in 2008 i started to talk the beautiful soul (i call it bs for short!!!) quoted the two most important things
alive reality... about death, for real. instead of the usual sees the world (everything else) as evil. i have ever said
academic game: i am so clever and i am me, pure over here, world evil over
like, yes--pain destruction agony. yes. now, so beyond emotion and full of cynicism there. all is corrupt. its the dark boys in anyway, look at this beautiful tiny sparkling
scrape yourself up off the floor. lets figure and despair, therefore i am right. a nutshell really. i am pure in my total void, it isnt nothing at all, its beautiful.
out how to love. horror at the state of things wordsworth made it, as a way to channel
i get a vanishing number of 20-something the wetness to his home... [picture file]
boys who want to do some kind of so...this is the really really amazing bit:
im smarter than you because my horror
is bigger than yours ****-measuring... hegel argues that this very attitude
IS THE EVIL . like the way you see the
they think i am stupid because i cant see world as evil IS the evil
how hopeless everything is lol
the logical solution: kill yourself or kill
maybe the dark boys are obsessed because the world or do nothing, frozen in the
they sense something already there thats h e a d l i g h t s
missing in their sense of who they are and
of reality? we are spokespeople for the its like a super super addictive attitude
realm of physical otherness? the scary to the ecological panic, right?
land of cause and effect? aka the sonic very OOO ,
yess !! ocean...aka the sensual ocean... so, one owns this--one accepts that ones heres a waterfall in my land
very gaze directly is the evil that one that opted
hegel has this really good idea. which is thinks one is seeing over there. realizing for a subterranean life :
that ideas and philosophies come with that the way you see the world is the evil the river that isnt.
attitudes coded into them. they select for you see in it. its awesomely loopy and not [video file]
attitudes like viruses select for certain p r e a c h y
susceptible lifeforms.
it has that essential goth twisty
when you sort of own the attitude rather
than letting it rule you, it dissolves and what do you think??
you are on to the next one. so ideas are
always on the move.

THATS
SO
SPOT

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ON
!!!!!!


the river that isnt!!!

this unseeing is so vivid.
a mountains haiku about a waterfall.

were carving out new hope spaces. i just created headspace to go back read
sadness, longing, hope, susceptibility, all of our emails so farand
laughter. good ecological recipes. all these words are so internal now !!!

then how about this: between music and i guess i have a habit of physically
words you are allowing the unspeakable absorbing things which comes in handy
to manifest when i sing . so i guess my only clumsy
way to do this is in a round about way ,
i like this word unspeakable around theory
it feels ego-puncturing yet beautiful yet and that might become
weird yet fascinating yet spooky yet the subtheme of our little quest:
physical nonhuman yet human. like slippery-hand-reaches-even-slippery-tail
batailles idea of spirituality
i feel also there is a reason why i havent
when one feels prana it is like that. the embroidered elaborate phrases so far
rushing quality and the tendrils climbing about my stance in this world .
up quality and the hairs on ones body probably because it doesnt sing well !
waving like coral quality.
yes youre right about the unspeakable
... my lyrics are more like signposts
on musicmoods to kinda shortcut
to the feeling
ha ha
in your message, theory and art as my isobel was perhaps partly overcoming
the slippery hand chasing the slippery tail the ridicule of the singer/songwriter
mission , why this possessed need
p e r f e c t to tell your tale ? so most of my lyrics
i have written myself , but roughly
you know im arguing all the time now that one lyric per album ive sat down
reality is like jrmungandr, and everything with my oldest mate and author sjn
in it is also a tail-biting loop, because of and weve documented together
u r t h . . . this separate mythological character ,
isobel ... but im not sure how much
or in your language everything is an isobel it travels to the listeners that it is sort
??? much better than object i do declare of taking the piss a little , i find
it hilarious !!! her name is a little magic
realist drama , kinda sensationalism ,
over-romantic , ha ha .
and she has an urban/rural dilemma
she is constantly trying to solve , ha ha .

as if !!!

you could.

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hahaha yes yes
well of course! a line that says my name
isobel might be pretending somehow
there is always a gap between the one who
is narrating and one who is narrated
also the gothic-ness is a giveaway--i love
that mode as its like pure fiction plus
seriousness and you cant tell exactly
where the two join or separate...like robert
smiths hairdo. objects are comical like
that: they are totally what they are yet
never quite what they seem...they are
always doing slapstick
this isnt just silly. i think that there is
a deep connection in your work between
self-care and care for other beings, which
is ecology. think about all is full of love
and its video, or the line from unison:
one hand loves the other so much
on me. this is really significant for me
as sensual relations with the self or
the body are missing in much of western
ideology, and i think its very destructive.
nietzsche: love your neighbor
as yourselves, but first be such as love
yourselves. isobel had a point.
only the wounded narcissist accuses
the other of narcissism, like when a bully
goes i dont like bullies just before they
bully you. the human relation to nature
is a massive narcissistic wound
we need to heal it--not to sound too
superego, like filthy-look-from-the-perfect-
hippie kind of way. to care for ones self
as another: being in a loop. there are
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always at least two things, never just one.
narcissism has a bad rap. its not solipsism.
sophisticated modernity culture seems
to want to laugh at protectiveness or fear
for other lifeforms. yet in an ecological
age, even if you have indifference, thats
a form of caring. your skin cares about
being burned by the too strong sunlight,
even if you think you dont care about
global warming. paneroticism would be
care turned up to 11 haha.
im so familiar with depression and i know
its a trap, like an allergic reaction of the
yes it is sssoooo important indulge me while i try to go a bit hi def intellect to its poor host being.
not to sound too superego, with this very same concept trying to kill desire is the modern sport,
like filthy-look-from-the-perfect-hippie including looping it through plastic
first, i really do want to put you outside sexualized (actually the opposite)
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha the ism world as currently defined. you do w h a t e v e r s .
have a whole style that burns through
that could be our downfall , your work, so thats not what im saying-- narcissism is the favourite accusation
the pit we should avoid hang on! of the one who is wounded--especially
when its a deliberate, self-inflicted wound
i love this in your art, it seems these non-you entities of coolness.
caring for yourself take the lead and you merge. not the same think about the overture of wagners
= as being passive at all. more like making tristan and isolde, the aching chord
caring for another entity love with them. allowing them to exist of doomed love. tragedy.
= from their own side. leaning into them. everyone dies when they melt together,
the beginnings of ecological care just like listening comes before language e t c .
or music ???? kind of
a scared boy attitude to the eroticism.
there is no ism to describe this! im not
sure there can be because like i say ism i put that wagner against your unison
implies there is a mapped out grid for how in class yesterday. powerful, remorseless
to approach beings. gentleness. merging but not to death.
disappearing into the music but not
how about erased. merging, which is not one and not
two. [compliment warning] joyful, funny,
P A N E R O T I C I S M g o r g e o u s
even that isnt it. i cant stand putting you the final score: wagner 0 bjrk 10.
in a box. cant stand it! [compliment forgiveness please]
 !!!!! a miracle of a post !!!!!

sorry i didnt get to read it until now

what a pleasure to read !!! and the tone of it , that tilt between humour all my stuff: you can never truly exit the
and awe and humility and yet slightly cocky : i absolutely adore it !!!!!! s w e l l . . .

such a precise mood .......... yes : we can merge and survive some anonymous someone said in the
1 + 1 is three house scene in 1988: just dance until your
i know it ego splatters all over the floor. then dance
on that. because in the inner space,
my author/philosopher friend oddny eir varsdttir pointed out a website to me you find escape routes for people dont it might be like this: there is never ego,
once, with a theory : that if you could put religions on opposite ends of a certain you? i know i can find them for others but there is just this dancing fire. quivering,
homemade scale , where one could measure the amount of feminine emotive sometimes hard to find for myself. t r e m b l i n g .
values and then other pole masculine abstract ( which we all have both of )
zen buddhism would be furthest to the abstract point , where one takes oneself devotion. you know its not necessarily to so the point is to make things that cause
outside the swell and looks at feeling and stuff from afar and empties oneself , a teacher or a human but could be to the the inner space to sparkle or quake. to
empties , empties and if one empties enough one merges with all and nirvana ! teacup, lover, song, dance. not to mention make some kind of subject-quake. its nice
the pomegranate bleeding all over ones in german: einschtterung. inner
and on the other opposite end is sufi , where you fall in love with your day fingers deliciously. s h u d d e r i n g . . .
and your pomegranate and your teacup and your lover and the song you are turning
in circles to : aim is to merge merge merge and if you merge well enough its like enlightened lust. like passion is the impossible to describe--like a mute tasting
you empty and become one with all .so whatever suits your character , basic fundamental force of this universe sugar.how can the river that isnt speak
go this way ... eventually it leads to the same place . and you shouldnt delete that, unless you its merging into the rock.
was thinking about when you wrote : this is my philosophy slogan: thinking want to go crazy or start world war 3.
should know how to laugh, and cry. how you seem determined to include feelings or is it 4 already?! just love this lifeform. you will soon find
in philosophy . no prizes for guessing i feel i belong to the latter group . soooo sufi . yourself in a dance. in this dance, your
( but maybe some dark beats are buddhist , and melodies sufi ? ) intellectual buddhists think its about total partner and you are not one and yet not
abstraction. you never need to handle two. there is a pomegranate, its not just
and it made me think perhaps it is even simpler : you told me you were a pomegranate or evenmeditate. you can an illusion. but its a faerie pomegranate
surrounded by music as a child , the music in my household was like loud get there by understanding.zen can tend bursting with [unspeakable]
like all the time . so this became the ocean i lived in . like physics . sonic liquid . to look at feeling from afar and so they
and all else like life and such were berries on top . and i get so lost without it , have some kind of hangover from that, oh bjrk that is so good, empty empty
like literally a fish out of water . very masculine and careful. empty >> merge vs merge merge merge >>
i didnt really take this thought that much further , empty.that second one is the right way
but it somehow went with the river that isnt and wordsworth dam and but for me understanding = standing for me.emptiness is a kinda abstract word
under surface of the river that isnt. for kind of a sensation, in fact, i reckon.
and perhaps your dark boys and my euphoric matriarchs ?
oh wow yes one takes oneself outside the without the idea that philosophy can cry
hmm .... swell and looks at feeling and stuff from and laugh, the game becomes pure cold
throw in a afar and empties oneself , empties , empties wisdom rather than philo-sophy, the

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span
ner in and if one empties enough one merges love of wisdom. just being totally right,
the water
with all and nirvana ! which is totally wrong.
 you find escape routes for people dont you ?
im clumsy at a lot of things but youre right , so far ive been kinda ok
at emotional strategy : perhaps see all as emotional chronology somehow .
that is the continuity i connect to , swallow that pulse and hike trancelike
onwards on that emo dna ... the spine of time , ha ha ha ha ha ,
im not having it any other way ! and often i can explain to my friends
like a sport commentator what is happening to them ...
but then last year and a half , all that I knew so far : wasnt . isnt and gone .
so i tried to dervish me out of it , wringer ranger rotator in that magma
before it coagulatedbut non of the old tricks worked anymore ...
so i have been casting me a new set of spanners .
i guess i got like fired from the patriarchs but hired by herds of matriarchs
surrounding me offering ecstatic beats and djing ...
and ive been thinking a lot about that dark beats are buddhist and melodies sufi...
your comment cracked me up look at feeling from a far so they have
some sort of hangover from that , very masculine and careful ha ha ha ah ha ,
careful hangover from too much distance ... ha ha ha ha ha ha
anyway here comes one of my favorite discoveries of last few years ...
it is by a russian minimalist , vladimirmartynov . but instead of some of the
usa minimalists : being post modern , often ironic and distant , this is full full full
passion ! he decided to take favorite pieces his parents played him when he was
a child : small sections and loop them . ( talking about the ocean of our parents ! )
so it could have been a pretentious concept job but what is so marvelous is that
it is kinda the opposite . in this piece he takes a 10 minute section from mahlers
der abschied and with spirally looping it over and over extends it into 40 minutes .
so he sort of took one of the most overdramatic moments in recent classical music
and magnified it up like 138457 !! for me somehow the looping serves as a truthful
tunnel into his childhood so it doesnt feel like stealing at all . the telescope
is obvious . not hidden . and then of course the amount of rearranging and
craftsmanship and work he puts into it adds to the refinement and quality of it ...
it is extremely dramatic so be careful but there is light at the end of the tunnel :
if you get through it it ends super prettily ...
[mp3 file] Vladimir Martynov || Der Abschied
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anyway : this made me think of that a lot of the minimalists
are actually buddhists ... my favorite of theirs are the exceptions :
where they have passion . like steve reichs tehillim.
( ha ha hadoes remind me though of one of my favorite venezuelan matriarchs
getting uncontrollable laughing fits over the wooden classical wrist of the maracas
shaker in that one , ha ha ha ha , passion but some lack of merge in his bones )
i love so much when you mentioned in them rave years everyone
was djing some kind of truthjust dance until your ego splatters all over the floor
i remember so well from that period when like ALL music like ever made
got divided into if you could dance to it or not . ha ha ha ha ha ,
just too much thinking had entered music ...
so even classical shit or world music or whatever genre
was like erased if it didnt swing ... and the further reach the better :
ARTIST
like drones , buildings or them buddhist things ? looped and gridded
GAPS
streamlined and abstract swirling sufi style all around you
PHILOSOPHERS
we must unite the two , tim
MIND
in the music now--oh thanks for sending! i love it so much already
and im only at 7:06. all the overdrama sucked out and my soul
can breathe.
indeed martynov has found the really hurty bit. well, by isolating
that small part martynov seems to let all the human ego drama
narrative melt away until you are left with this non-ego emotion.
that is just total [swear word swear word] genius.
you can study it as it rotates and be in it at the very same time
mahler minus ego. it is after all the song of the earth not the song
of mahlers strangulation of tim
or even better: just pure pain, no suffering
???
thank you martynov, the ego-stripper, you have contributed
to world peace

i adore this email !!!
when you talk about he sucked the ego out of him !!!
and only pain no suffering ...no flamboyance in this drama , ha ha
ha ha ha , no feathers .... hopefully not too boring the polarizing
of the sufi merge and the zen abstract.
sorry i zoomed out ,
once we were getting on a good elevated airy whirl ,
i needed a map... i needed to northsouth me somehow ...
and you have helped me so much !! to NAME my original
coordinates on this map .
how to rediscover the natural merger .
this time im not exiting the swell ...
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i loved the zoom and the wonderful map.
we were getting on a good elevated airy whirl -- still there!
if there is any money made from this i would like mine to go
to lifeforms, coral perhaps? i love coral and its dying and
bleaching, and its such a total world down there. i think of OOO
as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most
philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemones with
tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant,
could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds
of things that dont add up to it. we are sewn into this reef,
with clown fish cleaning our nostrils while looking up at illusion
reflections of us looking down with underwater scopes from
the scientific surface...
as i read through our emails, im finding something wonderful.
if you strip away the you and me lines you get two very very
clear things. first there are really crystal statements about art
and politics and ecology and objects and on and on and on,
all integrated and very meaningful !!!
and then you get these incredible things: sheep horns, dams, jarm,
foss, voices, antlers, norns, magnetic shields, sun, atoms...it goes
on and on... !!!
i can see these two channels mixed together yet separated,
like in a paradox: our human statements about art, from which
emerges a manifesto; and nonhuman beings, crowding in,
laughing, crying and supporting and undermining and shadowing
the human
we really did something, and continue to do so
really really
like a lot
 i just arrived in iceland

!!!!! what a miraculous letter !!!!!!

so so so sensual and connected ,

every constellation included on tip-toes !!!!

!!! yessss , lets give it to corals !!!

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 COVER ME || Words & music by Bjrk || for organ The Triumphs of a Heart: A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of Bjrk || Sjn Sjn is a novelist and poet, and the lyricist of many
of Bjrks best known songs, including Isobel, Bachelorette,
Oceania, and Cosmogony. His novels The Blue Fox,
The Whispering Muse and From the Mouth of the Whale have
won numerous awards and have been published in more
than thirty languages.

The Triumphs of a Heart: A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of Bjrk || Sjn
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V V

5 moma_sjon poem_cover.indd All Pages 14/11/2014 13:45

 Sjn

The Triumphs of a

Heart:

A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums

of
Bjrk

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73
 (Based on first-hand witnessing of all the events described with
confirmation of the testimonys accuracy by its main subject, Bjrk, and
truthful quotations from her own works acquired by the author in situ

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in New York City, April, 2014.)
75
I debut || 1993

once upon a time

there was a girl

who sang and danced

on the platform of a flatbed truck

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I

once
once there was a girl

a girl who lived alone

in a lava field in a forest

by the ocean
in a small hut made of earthly materials
a hut that was as open to the natural elements
as it was sheltering
from the wind
the sun
the rain
the snow it was
a hut that stood in the middle of a field
of dark lava formations
in the clearing of a forest
on the black sands of a northern beach

and a girl lived in it

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I

and once
once there was a heart
a human heart

that lived inside a girl

was sheltered inside a girls breast

embraced by her rib cage

a beating blood-warm heart

living inside the body of a girl

a girl who was the girl who lived in a hut
in the lava field
in the forest
by the ocean

in the comfort of her own company

her isolation

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I

at all hours nature staged its spectacle for the girl

and found its existence confirmed
in her senses
she was there

in the wee hours of the morning

when the birds in the emerald foliage
twittered their multitude of melodies

throughout the days and nights

when the ocean took on all the colours of the sky
at dusk when the black lava formations
became beasts of wonder

she was there as natures participating audience

its witness

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I

still

the girl was not truly alone

the heart she sheltered in her breast

was her companion

when the girl was happy

the heart beat faster

when she was sad

the heart slowed down to a lull

as her eyes reflected the full moon

as her ears welcomed the cry of seagulls

as her body moved with trees on a windy day
as she sang back at the echoing rocks

the heart tuned itself
to her every experience

every night was the night of the hunter

every day saw the birth of a new living being
and she noted it all down
in her notebooks

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I

but then there were the thoughts and feelings

the girl didnt know were stirring within her

and could only be heard by the heart

could only be witnessed by someone

inside her body

heard even louder

than the things that knowingly rushed
through her mind

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I

one night the heart listened

as the girl dreamt a new dream

in the dream

she opened a door to a long narrow room

without walls and without a roof

as she stepped into the room

the floor started to move under her feet

to keep her balance

she had to stretch out her hands
to float like a bird
steadying itself in the air

the floor turned into the platform

of a flatbed truck
taking her away
bringing her close to a human
to human behaviour

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I

the morning after the girl was confused

at the end of the dream
she had seen another being like herself

but different
was she maybe one half of a whole?

she paced back and forth

as she tried to make sense of it

did she need another one to feel complete?

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I

the girls pacing back and forth

made a path in the ground

and her heart

started beating with curiosity

about where it would take the two of them

go!

the heart said

look for the other

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II post || 1995

the path of trodden earth

under the girls naked soles
gave way to a narrow lane
strewn with gravel
the narrow lane
became a road
paved with stones
the road became a street
covered with asphalt
and she walked the path
she walked the narrow lane

walked the road

the street
until she found herself on a circular patch
of hardened cement

she was surrounded by rocks higher

than any she had seen at home

it was in the moment

when there is neither full light

nor fading light

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II
and then

the electric lights came on

the girl stood

in the middle
of what she was to learn is called a square

she saw
that she was surrounded
by tall buildings
with lights in the windows
with people moving in bright rooms
behind the window panes
with blinking words and images
on their outside walls

people rushed from one building to another

in cars on motorcycles
by the underground trains

and those
who went walking
came to the square for rest
to demonstrate
to hold hands to fight to dance

yes
the girl had come to a place called city

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II

in city

the man-made lights made it possible

to live at night as easily as day
night and day were no longer sharply divided
instead of the sky reflecting in the ocean
here city reflected in itself
in glass walls in wet raincoats
in shiny hubcaps
at night darkness could be made
by turning off the lights

during the day it was possible

to take a break from the daylight
in the artificial
light of cellars and back rooms

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II

here
the basic elements of the girls former existence
had been taken apart
particle
by
particle
and put together anew
in ways unthinkable
back home in the lava field the forest
by the ocean
liquids were transformed into fabrics
sand was made transparent
gases burned in colourful glass tubes

electric currents
were harnessed in sound

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II

the girl felt like she was inside

a vast
and welcoming body

that she pulsated like a heart

embraced by a giant ribcage
and the sounds of the world
reached her from the outside
and just like the heart inside her breast
reacted with her
now she picked up
on everything city was experiencing she listened
to the hum of its undercurrents
listened to the sounds that were native to city

as well as the new ones others like her

had brought to it

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II

it was synthetic

it was scintillating it was mercurial

it was mesmerising it was electrifying

it was exhilarating

and for the first time

in her life
she felt the power of the colour pink

pink
the colour of innocence
that responds to the colours
black and violet
by turning sensual
and erotic

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II

and every hour of the day and night

the heart was one with the girl

in her celebrations
in her brass-
and breakbeat-fuelled urban enthusiasm

beating faster than ever before

only slowing down

to revel in new pleasures

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II

city

was the place to go hunting for mysteries

to prove the impossible did exist

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III homogenic || 1997

one day the girl woke up to a new feeling

she wasnt whole anymore or rather

she realised she wasnt made of one thing

but many
in the mirror she saw a girl

who had become a collection

of all the diverse influences
she had embraced

rhythms shaped like obscure half-gods

fragrances that exploded like fireworks

once they reached the brain

words used to describe moods

belonging to southern latitudes

fabrics that spoke of eastern flora

melodies that twirled

like smoke from incense

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III

yes

just as city was the ever-changing sum

of its history

the girl had become an evolving hybrid

of her encounters with its inhabitants

the culture of city had put its mark on her

her posture
spoke of pavements and dance floors
her six senses
had adjusted to the navigation

of urban geographies

a song could be shaped

like a coconut with purple fur

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III

but the girl was as fragmented

on the inside as the outside

love had also put its mark on her

instead of being a two-way street

the heart in her breast had become a crossroads
and she herself had become a tree
that grew a heart on every branch
her smile came quicker
and disappeared quicker

her anger rose faster and declined faster

her sense of human relationships

was informed
by the puzzling
emotional
landscapes
she had explored

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III

the girl responded to her new state of being

by matching the energies she had grown up with
with the energies of city
she matched city with nature

she analysed its building materials

it all came from the same source as herself

the glittering streets

reminded her of the tiny droplets
shining on the moss-covered stones
in the lava field back where she came from

all that sparkled

all that glowed

it was also natures work

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III

and suddenly city

didnt seem so big after all
compared with the size
of the natural forces
she knew from her childhood

the erupting volcanoes

the hissing of water boiling in a hot spring

the shaking of the ground

the lashing of giant cliffs

by tidal waves

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III

with the electric equipment

in her bedroom laboratory
the girl brought to life the forces
that had shaped her

that had sent her forward into the world

she wrote a hunting song

if travel is searching

and home whats been found

im not stopping

im going hunting
im the hunter

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III

the girls ears

picked up
on the timbre of strings
vibrating
under bows
their resonance
in the wooden bodies
of the instruments
that supported them
they sang of her old country

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III

nothing was forgotten

she was the hunter

and all was full of love

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IV vespertine || 2001

the heart became

transparent

its four-chambered body

took on the glassy whiteness

of those underwater medusas known as

jelly-fish it slowed down

its movements became as graceful as those

of a snowflake drifting
down to earth from up high

every beat of the heart

became as distinct
as a shiny pearl spit
from a girls mouth

over the ocean

to a boy

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IV

the messages reaching the heart

from the girls mind

were about calm and contemplation

discovery through delaying desire

recovery through relaying response

in pagan metaphors
the plucking of silvery strings
the touch of fingertips on clear glass

pedalling through /
the dark currents /

i find an accurate copy /

a blueprint /

of the pleasure in me

swirling /
black lilies /

totally ripe

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IV

outside

the girls warm body

the world had begun its wintering

snow covered city and its squares,

cultured gardens
and streets

the man-made landscape lost

its hard edges

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IV

sheltering inside their buildings

and looking out at city

in
its
white
and frosty uniform

the people were reminded

that they themselves were nothing
but advanced cave-dwellers

the flickering fire

that yesterday had inspired the minds
of their singing storytellers had been replaced

by the moving images of their lit-up

home-screens

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IV

security was to be found in stillness

human breath was temporarily halted

halted
like the swing
of the handle
on a music box

and when it returned

breath
had become visible

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IV

with steam
on her breath
the girl took to the city limits

she came to a place where it wasnt possible

to see where nature
took over from city

where city from afar

looked like a natural phenomenon

a panorama of man-hills built

by the human animal

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IV
the heart swam in the girls breast

it had gone dark inside

the light from the winter sun

was reflected off her white parka

the time
between morning and evening

had never been shorter

she travelled from twilight to twilight

treading the glacier head

looking hard for moments of shine

calling upon the goddess aurora

by melting snow
in her mouth

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IV

and once again

it was proven

that travel

is searching

all along the girl had been hunting

in a mountain shade she was approached

by a boy

possessed

of magical sensitivity

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IV

the girl knew she was ready to say:

I do and the heart echoed

a young brides emotions:

spark the sun off!

spark the sun off!

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V medlla || 2004

the girl returned to city

but this time city was also an island

an island with a forest in its middle

a man-made forest surrounded by buildings
higher than any in old city
on the other side of the ocean

like gigantic needles crowding

a sun dial sticking
high into the sky
the buildings threw their magnificent shadows
on the two rivers surrounding the island
and as the sparkling sun circled city
the rectangular shadows crossed the tumultuous
waters like bridges on the run

new city was bigger louder busier

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V

but while the metropolis and mother sun played

light
and
shadow
the girl played
cave with her magical boy

his embrace was her fortress

it placed a skeleton of trust beneath them
bone by bone
stone by stone

and she asked herself

patiently and carefully:

who is it?
who is it that never lets you down?
who is it that gave you back your crown?

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V

she carried her joy

on the left
her pain on the right

for such is lifes balance

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V
one day the girls heart
noticed the faint sound
of another heart nearby

so vague it almost wasnt there

to create the moments silence needed

to confirm its discovery
it skipped its next beat

and

yes

it really was there

a beating weak in volume
but strong in rhythm
a rhythm much faster
than the girls heart
could remember ever having performed
even when the girl was
at her most excited

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V

and it was not the heartbeat

of the girls boy of magical sensitivity
his beat was a beat the girls heart
sometimes felt penetrating her body
when the two were pressed up close to one another
a beat which sometimes could be heard
through the flesh and bone
separating the girl heart
from the boy heart
and when it happened
they found each others rhythm
and beat as one

in unison

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V

no

this time around the heart beat was closer

much closer
and oh!

the joy!

the joy when the heart realised

that the beat was really on the inside

the girls body had become a home

to a new heart
a quick and tiny one
a tiny baby girls growing heart

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 155

V

as she was to become a mother

the girl braided her long dark hair

and her long dark braids twisted

and turned like an umbilical cord
twisted like a helix

and in her mind she saw herself standing

on endless black sands
with her long dark braids
braided into the dark
and not so dark braids of the childs grandmothers
and their dark
and not so dark braids
were braided into the dark
and not so dark braids
of the childs great-grandmothers

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V

it was a triumph

that could only be celebrated

with many voices

harmonious breathing

lullabies from the mouths cradle

a mothers joy and pain

craving a world in balance

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 159

VI volta || 2007

with her newborn baby in her arms

the girl paced back and forth
rocking her little girl

sharing with her tiny one some

of the sweet nothings
that are as soothing for the grown-up soul
as the young one

but she was a mother-girl now

a girl-mother

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 161

VI

and from within her girl-mothers skull

she could clearly see with her two green eyes
that on earth
there were things
to do

yes

from a mother-girls perspective

it was obvious that certain things
had to be set right

the girl felt the urge to rearrange things

into new
and just forms

patterns that would make the strong

accept the weak
as equals

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 163

VI

since the girl left her hut

in the middle of the lava field

in the middle of the forest by the ocean

she had encountered many kinds

of human behaviour
they ranged from the peaceful to the corrupt
from the gentle to the nasty
from the arrogant to the meek

she had endured its darker sides

but did it have to be like this?

forever?

also for her little one?

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 165

VI

a primitive urge to protect set in

primitive as in primal

primal as in original

original as in primordial

and the thought of protection

through action stirred her movements

her right hand acquired the shape

of a word

the word justice

her mother-girl fingers

outstretched and quivering
from the excitement of rebellion

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VI

and all the while

the tiny girl
was suckling
at her mothers breast

for a mother-girl
can do many things at the same time
feeding a child
and challenging the worlds order
at the same time
was the most natural thing

to her

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 169

VI

the mother-girl armoured herself

with colours

colours applied directly to the body

colours sprayed on her full body-armour

her pacing became a stomp

her rocking became a dance
the sweet nothings
became an anthem

she set forth into the world

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 171

VI

declare independence
dont let them do that to you
declare independence
dont let them do that to you

independence is a synonym of freedom

action is a synonym of resistance
urge is a synonym of wanderlust

the mother-girl started fires

people gathered around the fires
the tribal fires burned
they moved on to start new fires
the journey took them from island to island
continent to continent

they were united in movement

they let off the steam
that had been filling them
for months
for years

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 173

VI

the heart in the mother-girls breast

beat faster

faster than ever before

it rejoiced in being
one heart of many hearts
hearts beating in unison

and for a little while

there was balance on earth

innocence was still possible

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 175

VII biophilia || 2011

the heart
like the earth in space

slopes in its seat

inside the girl
inside the womans torso

the heart

in its house of flesh and bones

bathed in red light
a visceral cosmic body

pulsing pulsing

it pumps the oxygen-rich blood

through the veins of her body

she breathes in
the rib cage expands
she breathes out

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VII

the girl the woman one morning

she stands on the edge of a cliff

looking out to the ocean
the tide is coming in
the vast expanse of salt water rushes towards land
as if it were exhaled from the lungs
of a magnanimous beast

the frothing waves spread out on the black sands

like warm breath hitting a cool window pane
as she returns to the shore

it is evening

the vast body of water is being sucked back

towards the horizon
the beast inhales
it is only matter of size
of speed
of volume

for if air moves like water

the waves of the sea
are repeated
in the sand dunes
of deserts

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VII

i shuffle around /

the tectonic plates in my chest

you know i gave it all

i try to match our continents / to change seasonal shift
to form a mutual core

as fast as your fingernail grows the atlantic ridge drifts

to counteract distance

you know i gave it all

can you hear the effort of the magnetic strife?

the shuffling of columns

to form a mutual core

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 181

VII

in the distance
across the water
the lights of city

a cluster of lights
bodies
above her
across space

the lights of cosmos

a cluster of lights
bodies
dancing
to the silent rhythms
of gravity

matter majestically sprinkled

into the void

the music-box of the spheres the girl
the woman

she sets out to recreate it on earth

with technology and poetry
with her notebooks and new instruments

with love

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VII

there is only matter

only movement
only
matter and movement
matter in movement

and all that is made thereof

energy
heat
sound

the unheard sounds

as well as those pleasant to the human ear

the high frequencies and the low
the harsh and the soft
the crackle of the lightning
and the whistle of wind

songs in the name of biophilia

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VII

move the h

to the back of the word HEART

and it becomes a new one: EARTH

move it to the front again:

HEART

move it back: EARTH

EARTH-HEART Earth-Heart

earth-heart

earth heart
oh yes

the heart
the heart keeps beating
beating triumphantly
beating with the earth

the earth

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 187


debut || 1993
Page 77 Bjrk wearing a mohair sweater by Maison Martin Margiela
for the cover of Violently Happy, 1993.
Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
Page 79 1995.
Photography by Alain Duplantier.
Page 81 Photo taken for the cover of Human Behaviour, 1993.
Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
Page 83 Video stills from Human Behaviour,
directed by Michel Gondry, 1993.
Page 85 Cover photo for Big Time Sensuality, 1993.
Photography by Juergen Teller.
Page 87 1993.
Photography by Glen Luchford.
Page 89 1994.
Photography by Rankin.
Page 91 Video stills from Venus as a Boy,
directed by Sophie Muller, 1993.
Page 93 Cover photo for Venus as a Boy, 1993.
Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
post || 1995
Page 95 Bjrk wearing an Airmail jacket made of envelope paper,
designed by Hussein Chalayan, for the cover of Post, 1995.
Art directed by Paul White.
Photography by Stphane Sdnaoui.
Page 97 Video stills from Its Oh So Quiet,
directed by Spike Jonze, 1995.
Page 99 1996.
Photography by Nobuyoshi Araki.
Page 101 Stills from the video to Hyperballad, 1996,
filmed by Michel Gondry at Telecine Cell in London
using a motion-control system.
Page 103 1995.
Photography by Juergen Teller.
Page 105 1996.
Photography by Gavin Evans.
Page 107 1995.
Photography by Glen Luchford.
Page 109 1995.
Photography by Snorri Brothers.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
homogenic || 1997
Page 111 Cover for Homogenic, 1997, featuring
a kimono, sash, and necklace designed by Alexander McQueen.
Photography by Nick Knight.
Page 113 Video stills from Bachelorette,
co-written by Bjrk and Sjn;
video directed by Michel Gondry, 1997.
Page 115 Bjrk wearing a white leather dress with chiffon wings,
designed by Jeremy Scott, for her Homogenic tour, 1998.
Photography by F. Albert.
Page 151 Video stills from Nature is Ancient, directed by Lynn Fox, 2002.
Page 117 1997.
Photography by Craig McDean.
Page 119 Cover image for Bachelorette, 1997.
Photography by Paul White.
Page 121 Michel Gondry and Bjrk, photographed on location, 1999.
Photography by Benni Valsson.
Page 123 1997.
Photography by Phil Poynter.
Page 125 Video stills from All is Full of Love,
with software and special effects utilized to impose Bjrks facial features
onto a pair of robots, directed by Chris Cunningham, 1999.
vespertine || 2001
Page 127 Cover photo for Vespertine, 2001,
featuring the Swan dress of tulle and feathers designed by Marjan Pejoski.
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Drawing by M/M (Paris).
Page 129 2001.
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 131 Vespertine shoot, 2001, featuring a costume design by threeASFOUR.
Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Page 133 Video stills from Hidden Place,
directed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and M/M (Paris), 2001.
Page 135 Bjrk wearing a dress by Alexander McQueen, 2001.
Music box and shoes by Matthew Barney.
Photography by Nick Knight.
Page 137 2000.
Photography by Mert & Marcus.
Page 139 2000.
Photography by Nan Goldin.
Page 141 Bjrk wearing an Alexander McQueen
dress in the Pagan Poetry video, 2001.
Photography by Nick Knight.
Page 143 2000.
Photography by David Sims.
medlla || 2004
Page 145 Bjrk photographed for the cover of Medlla, 2004,
wearing a hairpiece by Hrafnhildur Arnardttir (a.k.a. Shoplifter)
and a necklace designed by M/M (Paris).
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 147 Video stills from Triumph of a Heart,
directed by Spike Jonze, 2005.
Page 149 2004.
Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
biophilia || 2011
Page 177 Cover photo for Biophilia, 2011,
Page 153 Medlla shoot, 2004. featuring a red nebula-style wig by Eugene Souleiman,
Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. a dress by Iris van Herpen, and a harp-belt
in cherry wood and bronze by threeASFOUR.
Page 155 Video stills from Who Is It, Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
shot on location in Iceland by Dawn Shadforth, 2004, Constellation by M/M (Paris).
Bjrk wearing a dress of silk and metal bells
designed by Alexander McQueen. Pages 179 and 181 2012.
Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Page 157 Bjrk wearing the Medlla hairpiece, 2004.
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 183 Photo taken for the cover
of the 200th edition of Dazed & Confused magazine,
Page 159 2000. guest-edited by Bjrk, 2011.
Photography by Mert & Marcus. Art and photography by Sam Falls.
Page 185 Video stills from Mutual Core,
volta || 2007 directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2012.
Pages 161 and 163 Volta cover shoot, with crochet costume Page 187 Strata portrait developed for the Mutual Core video,
by The Icelandic Love Corporation later used as a cover for the remix album Bastards, 2012.
and make-up by Andrea Helgadttir, 2007. Image by Andrew Thomas Huang.
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 165 Bjrk wearing a dress by Kokon To Zai, 2008. black lake || 2015
Photography by Vera Palsdttir.
Pages 19091 Still from the Black Lake audio-visual installation
Page 167 Concept art from Wanderlust video specially commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
made in stereoscopic 3D, with large-scale puppeteering, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, introducing
live-action acrobatics, miniatures, and computer graphics. a new character into the Bjrk universe;
Image by Encyclopedia Pictura, 2007. a version of the song was released on her eighth solo studio album.
Page 169 2007.
Photography by Bernhard Kristinn. All video stills:
Courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.
Page 171 Bjrk wearing a yarn mask All photographs: Courtesy the photographers.
designed by The Icelandic Love Corporation, 2007. All art: Courtesy the artists.
Photography by Bernhard Kristinn.
Page 173 Video stills from Declare Independence,
directed by Michel Gondry, 2007.
The flags of Greenland and the Faroe Islands are featured
on the shoulders of the characters jumpsuits:
Bjrk dedicated her lyrics to both territoriesruled by Denmark,
just as Iceland once was.
Page 175 The cover of Volta, 2007, featuring a Styrofoam and
lacquer spray paint costume inspired by Luigi Ontani
and designed by Bernhard Willhelm.
Photography by Nick Knight.
189
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191
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