n 1967 the Beatles said, All you need is love, to soundtrack the summer of love. Now, four decades later, in a climate of war, fear and terrorism, Iceland’s Björk also appears to be on a hippy trip.
Love is all/I dare to drown/to be proven wrong, sings Björk on Hope, one of the startling new songs on her seventh full-length album, Volta (Universal).
Driven by a glitchy tapestry of tribal rhythms, exotic instrumentation and droning horns, Volta is Björk’s most extroverted album since 1995’s Post.
Gone are the celestial musings on the recent past, replaced by a feminist, personal-political album that seeks to examine the disconnect between humans and nature.
Björk has described Volta as a “full-blooded, up-tempo, tribal album” and the cast of collaborators, as usual, make for interesting listening.
Björk has established a reputation for weaving diverse musical styles into new creations, but this album sees her at the top of her game.
The fact that she can fuse the talents of Malian kora-player Toumani Diabate, Congolese percussionists Konono No 1, beat masters Timbaland, Mark Bell and singer Anthony Hegarty into a soundtrack as consistent as Volta is testament to her craft.
The Timbaland-produced Earth Intruders and Innocence hark back to Post, but, while Björk’s reworkings of Timbaland’s beats are catchy, they are still off-kilter enough to guarantee that they won’t be rotating on radio anytime soon.
Björk’s duets with Hegarty on The Dull Flame of Desire and My Juvenile are utterly breathtaking, while her collaboration with Chinese pipa-player Min Xiao-Fen is one of the albums more intimate moments.
As always, Björk has created a dense soundscape that offers a wealth of riches to music listeners who is prepared to devote time to her albums. A return to her pop roots Volta is not, but a tribal, ass-shaking monster, it is indeed.
Do you feel there is a global movement calling for change in society, or is this album a shout to the world for change?
I think there is some sort of hope, maybe, on this album … trying to suggest, or at least remind myself that there is some sort of solution to the situation today … that is sort of above and beyond religion. Maybe we will just have to drop this idea that we cannot separate from nature and be these perfect humans that have nothing to do with nature. I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea and we just have to accept that we are a human tribe, and we can unite and sort of set up a global beat. Pretty utopian fantasy, but I would be lying if I say there wasn’t a pinch of this on this album.
Can you tell us about your collaboration with the African band Konono No 1.
[If] musical nerds like me land up in the small record shops I like to go to, a band like Konono No 1 can explode it a little bit underground. Electronic music is like a computer grid — very like a machine. But Konono No 1 are unusual because here were people playing electronic music but it wasn’t to our grid. People were very, very excited about this. So this was just a course of events that happened as I’d started the album. Somebody pointed the band out to me and I was just like, “Ahh, I want to meet them now.” They just happened to be from the Congo. They tried to play on a lot of my songs, but Earth Intruders the song I did with Timbaland, was the song where it sort of clicked.
There is a beautiful change in the song The Dull Flame Of Desire, when the voices enter. Can you talk a little bit about the structure of this song?
After meeting Anthony [Hegarty] a few times, we went at very short notice to Jamaica. We went to a studio there. All the songs we were doing were quite whispery and quiet. We were probably afraid of stepping on each other’s toes. But for this song, one morning I woke up and said, “Listen, we are not going to do any more quiet songs. We are going to be like Barbara Streisand and Donna Summer and do a diva duet. And we are are going to use all our muscles in our body and blast it out and be very physical.”
Did you go to Mali to work with Toumani Diabate?
I guess with a song like Hope, the lyric was a speculation that I wrote in my diary, that had to do with a news item about a Palestinian woman. It was a response to a little article that said she had pretended to be pregnant, but had a bomb strapped to her stomach. She had gotten into a hospital and [it] had exploded but not killed anyone. You could read at the end of the article the journalist trying to be neutral, but saying how dare she play with something as sacred as pregnancy and pull that into terrorism.
I thought that was a very strange thing. Two days later they found out that she actually was pregnant and then somehow she was forgiven, which I thought was very curious. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “if she felt strongly enough about her cause and she was ready to sacrifice her foetus, that is beyond her just playing on people’s emotions and pretending to be pregnant.” So this lyric is sort of about the media and their role in the whole terrorism thing.
I had wanted to work with Toumani Diabate and I decided to go to Mali. I went into the studio and was just doing a run through and putting up all the microphones for the kora when Toumani Diabate pulled out a mat and rolled it out on the ground. Then I realised he’s a Muslim. And he started praying. I wondered how he was going to feel about me singing, us doing a duet and singing about a pregnant suicide bomber.
I took him aside and we talked about it and, of course, he was very open and educated, saying that this is something that everyone should be talking about. It should not be such a taboo — this is not something we necessarily have to feel against or for, it is just something that is happening in the world. We should definitely be writing pop songs about it, especially ballads.
Interview supplied by Universal Music Group