Björk on nature, new music and working with AI: ‘I’m a digital craftswoman’

“Sorry, I’m on a tangent now, the coffee is kicking in,” says Björk, calling in from a cabin in the Icelandic countryside. In fact, she is about three tangents and ten minutes away from my original – and, for that matter, first – question. Her words arrive like wind on a cliff-face, rapidly picking up speed and whipping in new directions as she lets herself get carried away by her thoughts. All of this, of course, is to be expected – across her 40-year-career, Björk’s creativity has been as mercurial as Mother Nature herself – but this time in particular she has something she wants to get off her chest.

Björk has called, in her words, to “prevent a misunderstanding”. It’s a small, but – to her – vital misconception that has emerged in the wake of her new exhibition, Echolalia, at the National Gallery of Iceland, which renders three of her songs (two old and one new) in both digital and physical space, alongside a collection of masks created with long-time visual collaborator James Merry. “I’ve been doing interviews in Iceland and they’re all like, ‘Oh, so you’re an artist now? A visual artist?’ And I’m like no! Absolutely not!” she says with gusto, panting as she plods through the wilderness around her cabin. “I’m not trying to be an artist. I’m still a musician. I think I’m happy with the creative director-slash-worldbuilder title; that’s more what I am, and quite common with musicians.”

“Creative director” and “worldbuilder” are titles Björk has settled on recently, after adjusting to the art world’s practice of crediting every contributor on gallery walls. “It was really interesting having to credit everything because we, in the music world, have never really done that,” she says, explaining that she and Merry have long worked through a fluid, “de-ego” creative process that doesn’t lend itself to clearly defined roles. “It was tricky analysing it all and finding titles for myself. Then [FKA] twigs, Eartheater and Rosalía all came out with albums and I was like, ‘Oh, they’re the same!’ It’s like the traditional singer-songwriter role: very often you’d go and make a video with someone and you’d sort of become a creative director with them. We just never used to call it that in the 90s.”

For Björk, now 60 years old and ten albums deep into her career, these titles capture something fundamental about how musicians create. “All my albums have super strict…” she trails off, grasping for words once more. “For example, my last album, Fossora, was dark green, dark red mushrooms, nocturnal winter, you know? Each album has a list of references. On a podcast in Covid I called it ‘sonic symbolism’, which sounds kind of pretentious, but it basically means how musicians work. All the visuals come from a sound first.” Elsewhere in the exhibition, the scores for Fossora tracks “Ancestress” and “Sorrowful Soil” have been translated into knitted textiles stretching more than 40 metres in length.”

Outside of this vital misconception, though, how has the exhibition been received? “To be honest, I haven’t been!” Björk answers with a mischievous, fae-like giggle. “I just moved on. I was so excited to get back to making music again that I just went straight to that.” She is referring to her currently unnamed 11th album set to release next year – she isn’t ready to speak about it just yet, but it’s around halfway complete. 

“I’ve become a digital craftswoman, more and more elaborate in my idiosyncrasies”

Still, one small window into Björk’s new musical direction can be found in the Echolalia exhibition. There, “Nerve Bloom” – a so-called “remix” of the version set to appear on the album – plays alongside spectral, horse-like figures grazing on digital screens. In fan-recorded videos of the installation shared online, Björk repeats the refrain “I bow”, the words stretched through her signature idiosyncratic delivery. “I’m as idiosyncratic as they come, I like irregular things and prime numbers,” Björk says when I bring up the track. “I was in a pretty merciless band when I was 16 here in Iceland. It was part of the jazz-punk movement and we never did anything in 4/4 [time signature] – everything was prime numbers. I think I was baptised for life then. Now, with computers, you can go into even more elaborate irregularities. I’ve used [music software] Sibelius for 26 years, which is insane; it’s like second nature to me. I spend weeks on each arrangement making it as irregular as I can. I’ve become a digital craftswoman, more and more elaborate in my idiosyncrasies.”

Björk views these idiosyncrasies as a more accurate reflection of the natural world, which rarely flows in straight lines and at right angles. “I was brought up in Reykjavik and walked a long distance to school in the mornings,” she recalls. “There was a lot of nature and crazy weather so, for me, that’s normal. To be put in a four-four box, like a city, is abnormal – but that’s just me, thank God we’re all allowed to be different!” 

Our conversation is aptly timed. In recent years, technology and nature have seemed more incompatible than ever, their relationship strained by an age in which AI is increasingly scrutinised for its environmental costs and tech CEOs fantasise about transcending the natural world instead of existing within it. Björk’s work, however, offers a parallel future: one in which music software like Sibelius can help express the beautiful irregularities of nature, and computer-generated artwork can invite reflection on the human experience.

“With humans and tools, the original purpose was to be an extension of themselves, to express themselves,” says Björk. “In the beginning, it was always clumsy – you had a knife, the wheel, fire, whatever it was – and then it got more refined and complex. That’s technology, too – they’re clumsy at first and you have to go through the moral question, the justice question, the ‘does-it-have-a-soul’ question, and figure out a way to put meaning into it. We always go through the, ‘Oh there will never be a soul again!’ doom-and-gloom-style prophecy, but I think we all have to figure that out as we go.” 

Björk uses “Nerve Bloom” as an example, which appears in the exhibition alongside AI-powered visuals created with painter Natalia Kleszczewska and computer programmer Natalie Liu. “We could have just pressed a button with AI and created it in one minute, but we decided not to do that,” she explains. “It took us eight months to do and every little scene was really worked on and bespoke, like moulding. Now, I’m not saying that the solution to everything about AI is to make sure you’ve spent eight months and then it’s OK! What I mean is that you have to put meaning into it. Overall, AI isn’t that good, you have to look at it and change it and move it to get something interesting.” 

As Björk speaks, I’m reminded of a lyric on heartfelt Fossora track “Ancestress”. Eulogising her late mother in line with Iceland’s indigenous funeral traditions and concluding with the words “I am my mother’s hope-keeper”. Given all we’ve spoken about, then, where does Björk find hope today?

“Definitely in nature,” Björk answers slowly, the wind whistling down the phone line. “Even though I live in a cosmopolitan European city like Reykjavik, I live on the beach and try to walk for an hour every other day-ish. All these epidemics of our age – isolation, loneliness, too much phone use – I feel like if you can just walk for an hour, they won’t actually feel that bad. I’m not saying it can solve all the world’s problems, but a good 60 per cent! Then, you can deal with the 40 per cent that’s left… that’s where I find my hope.”

And, with a courteous “thank you for being curious,” Björk is gone. The phone line beeps shut and the wavelength on the audio recorder in front of me flatlines. Despite all her ruminations on creative direction, world-building and ‘sonic symbolism’, I’m left feeling more lost for words to describe Björk than ever. She truly seemed to call in from another world – and, for that brief moment, hers seemed more real than mine. 

Echolalia is on show now at the National Gallery of Iceland until September 20. Catch a peek inside the exhibition in the gallery above.