Raven-haired, Northern Lights-eyed, wild lark on a glacier.

I am not sure if my Nordic roots had anything to do with my love of Björk’s music – I definitely was not thinking this when I first fell in love with her debut single of “Human Behavior.” I was in middle school I believe, right before high school, and it started a chapter in my musical evolution that I would entitle “Wild, Raw, and Ingenius: Björk’s Beautiful Musical Guts.”

The chords she creates are otherworldly. I have always loved and obsessed about creating harmonies, harmonies that explore all the different hidden corridors around the main melody. I regard Björk as a rugged-yet-elegant virtuosa of harmonies that sound simple and innocent yet exude a discovery of paired notes that have never found each other before…like an archaeologist finally finding hidden treasures from a different planet in a dark Scandinavian volcanic cave. She also seems to do so effortlessly, with untamed abandon, as well as a little unhinged…however she still controls her vocals to barely exist within a pretty disciplined set of digital or acoustic directives in the instrumentation she creates and produces. She mentions in an 2001 interview with Charlie Rose that she does exercise these two realms of her brain: the need for her vocals to be wild and raw YET at the same time the need for her to create very exact, scientifically precise digital accompaniment. The way these juxtaposed elements result in such moving soundscapes fascinates me. It can seem hard to relate to at first, yet upon deeper listening and feeling of her music, it is very soulful and cerebral at the same time, as well as almost primordial.

Here is one of my favorite songs of hers where her harmonies just explode together like blobs of lava leaping into the air and then sliding together down the volcano to become one rock…

This also exemplifies how she creates digital sounds to sing with, as well as visual artistic genius, and these sonic planets she rockets us into show us what is possible in music, within conventions as well as throughout what she creates from her own feelings in the moment. Simply stellar.

I feel like I am going to leave it right there for now with Björk…this song is a lot to digest. I do not sound like her mostly…I mostly just strive to enjoy bumping into her on my journey in creating my own sounds. I may have bumped into her in my third single to come out this summer, “Hide and Seek”…I hope you enjoy it.

Peace for now!

Tags: bjork