I've been having a Björk obsession lately. Her avante-garde approach to music is inspiring, yet she always makes something that's still accessible. Easier listening than Schoenberg, yet still very unique and visionary.
Here are a couple of quotes I found from Björk about the process of making music, from a Pitchfork interview last year, and these other interviews: here, and here.
"Over the last 10 years, there have been so many incredible albums created in bedrooms by people who never would've gotten an album deal. People keep thinking of [professional] music studios like they've always been this way for hundreds of years, but they're very much a child of the 70s. Even the interior is very 70s, like Fleetwood Mac just were there a couple of moments before you. Everything's brown and it's wood-- somebody told me the wood panels are all by the same company. We're always mourning things that have died. It's a bit much sometimes. These studios have no fresh air, and there's this unwritten rule that they don't have windows, either."
"My favorite people, like Panasonic [now Pan Sonic] or Aphex Twin, were the ones who would just work in their house-- they don't even know what a studio is. When guys that have worked on beats with me suggest, "Now should we mix the song?" I'm like, "Mix? What's that mean? It sounds fine, right?" So, this whole old 70s way of doing things was already out of date."
"I guess I learned after being in bands for fifteen years before I did my solo stuff, and we were punks and we were like: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter how things look it’s all about how they sound’ and then somebody would just take a picture of us and put us in the papers and you would be upset – not that it was ugly, nothing to do with vanity – just that it didn’t fit the music. So I guess I had fifteen years of kinda…” she shrugs indifferently, “and then once every few years I would meet somebody who totally got it. So I learned, almost like I was a pupil. So for fifteen years I learned that if you match the right image to the right sound it makes my life a lot easier!"
“The other idea is to do with electronic music, because I love electronic music. I’ve been doing it for a very long time, but it had its limitations and one of the criticisms I’ve heard for twenty years from people who prefer indie music or classical music or jazz or whatever is that they’ll be like: ‘Yes, but it has no soul’ and I’ve been doing that debate for twenty years now!” She laughs. “It’s like, well, it’s because nobody put it there!”
“You know, a hundred years ago, if you wanted to do music you would probably be playing on street corners. I could have been in a hundred Rokk í Reykjavíks and fifty Sugarcubes then and still not become famous. But when all the money started coming into music it attracted a new type of person who hadn't been there before, gambler types who like to wager a lot of money on this and that, hoping for giant returns. Now, with the internet, people are going to have to ask themselves whether they want to go into music even if they may not become multimillionaires.”
"It’s no big deal putting out an album. I think a lot of musicians think it’s this kinda thing where you have to send your music to all the big labels. It’s more of a psychological, confidence thing: ‘If I’m good enough, they will like my demo.’ But I mean I did it all for ten years. I’ve done it: making the album in somebody’s bedroom, making the poster yourself.”
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