Photo by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

When thinking about artists who've left a mark on the musical landscape over the past 15 years, Björk comes to mind. Quickly. And her forthcoming multimedia Biophilia project confirms she's not slowing down or shifting into a complacent middle period. The Icelandic vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and voracious collaborator's interest and experimentation with technology offers a focused timeline of what's happened over the decade and a half, and what might very well be happening in the future. Unlike other aggressive risk-takers, Björk's music has never lost its core-- a very specific and intense intimacy runs through it all.

Björk and I sat down to discuss her musical past and present in the back room of the Upholstery Store in Manhattan's West Village. (I should mention that Björk is a friend and I wrote her Biophilia press bio before being hired by Pitchfork.) As we talked about the 1990s, and where she is now, the bar played a slightly-too-loud mix of Kings of Leon, Coldplay-esque balladeers, and other guitar-based bands. The panoramic cycling of big-time rock'n'rollers was weird, yet oddly fitting, as it offered stark contrast to Björk's singular dissection of music over the past three decades.

Pitchfork: What was it like making music in 1996, which was in-between Post and Homogenic, versus now?

Björk: Obviously, many things have changed. But I could say that nothing's changed [laughs]-- either you do a good song or a bad song, and that's it. Formats are just illusions, and it's about the relationship between the person that makes music and the person that listens to music. Every time there's a new format, the iron is hot, and you can mold it. On my last few albums, I maybe got a little lazy, but now several things forced me to take everything off the table and say: "OK, what works and what doesn't?"

Back then, it was very much about the vinyl and the CD because it takes forever to make them and to synchronize all the countries. For me, that was always very frustrating. You end up putting out an album, touring it for a year or two, and then you disappear and make another album. Between Post and Homogenic, I was a touring monster-- which is a very different, specific part of your character. You're alienated, and then you go berserk on stage, and then you sit on airplanes and buses with books. It's an intense lifestyle.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and I'm thinking about family more, but I'm trying to set up this thing where I can play in one city for a month, and then write music for a couple months, then play in another city for a month, write music for a month. Just so it's not these two schizophrenic, Jekyll and Hyde kind of things; you don't have to be this monster. It was really fun doing those seven [Biophilia] shows in Manchester [earlier this summer]. You get inspired and you can go write one song from that, and then you go back and play a few shows. If I could've done that in the 90s, I would have.

"Believe it or not, I'm a bit clumsy with technology. It's probably why I'm so excited about the touchscreen-- even an idiot can use it!"

Pitchfork: It seems like the album isn't such a concrete thing anymore, and it can keep extending. Do you find your conception of the album has changed?

B: I would like to think about it song by song, and I'm hoping that technology will figure out a way for musicians to live off music. I'm not as religious as some people about "the album." To be honest, that was a product of a format. You had vinyl, and you could fit five songs on each side, and that's 45 minutes. You had A-side songs and B-side songs; I always loved the first song on side B. And there's nothing wrong with that. Prog albums of the 70s adapted to that format very much. But not all musicians want to create 45 minutes of music that has to be listened to in chronological order. If you play music, you can do that in a show. But I also like album orders-- I spend a lot of sweat over what song comes first and second and third. But I think singles are cool, too. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Were you aware of file sharing early on? Were you downloading things yourself?

B: Not so much. Believe it or not, I'm a bit clumsy with technology. It's probably why I'm so excited about the touchscreen-- even an idiot can use it! I always had engineers to help me out. But one thing I've definitely been guilty of is making mp3s out of YouTube videos. I've done a lot of that. [laughs] And MySpace stuff that's supposed to only be on MySpace-- I'll hear something and want to have it on my iPod or be able to DJ it the next time I'm drunk. So I've done a lot of illegal shit like that. But, if it would be easy to press a button, I would've rather paid for it, just for the principle. But then again, I've got a lot of friends who email me links to things, and I listen to them. But I don't physically hack things myself.Pitchfork: When did you start using computers to compose music? Were you aware of software for home recording early on?

B: Actually, it is very different for me from 1996 to now in that way. I bought a laptop in 1999, and it was quite liberating, because I could make a lot of my own decisions. When I was in bands, I would be very democratic and just write my melodies and lyrics. With my solo albums, I slowly did more and more and more. On Homogenic, I made most of the decisions, but then Vespertine is where I could spend three months doing these needlepoint arrangements. Maybe because I'm a lady [laughs]-- I really like haberdashery and knitting and crocheting, and Vespertine is a bit like that. It's like five billion details, so [the laptop] definitely gave me more independence.

During that time, everyone was moaning that computers were going to kill me, so I was trying to take a laptop-- which had very bad sound at that point-- and make this whispery, hibernation-winter world where things were frozen anyway. I tried to use that as a poetic thing; you could argue that I worked around the tool.

Pitchfork: Is that the first record where you were really using the laptop?

B: Yeah. I mean, we started recording on computers even back in the Sugarcubes, and I remember when our keyboard player was pregnant and couldn't come on tour, we actually had MIDI on stage with the drummer, who would hit her keyboard scales on a drum thing. So it's always been lurking, like, "Here comes this thing. How are you going to collaborate with it in the most organic way possible?"

"Over the last 10 years, there have been so many incredible albums created in bedrooms by people who never would've gotten a record deal."

Pitchfork: There are those old photos of computers in the 80s taking up an entire room but, the way technology works, things get smaller and smaller until you can start taking them into your house, and it becomes something everyone has.

B: 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.

Pitchfork: For soundproofing, or to keep you focused.

B: Yeah, I guess it's functional. If you need to smoke weed or something. [laughs] Also, I don't like working at night; I like working in the daytime. I'm lucky because I worked in studios for 20 years before the laptop came, and then I went the other extreme. I was picking rooms that were just windows.

And when we did Debut or Post, we worked from [producer] Nellee Hooper's home studio. We were just eating food and cooking and getting drunk and partying, then working a little bit. It took the pressure off. It wasn't just like, "I am writing songs from 12 to 6." It was more about having fun, with people coming over and taking turns playing records. That home studio was pretty lo-fi, so a lot of the beats we ended up doing were pretty simple.

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.

In 96, I was in a very specific place with my own music-- I was only listening to beats. You would come to my house, and I would just play beats all day. Part of it was because I was in London, which is very much about beats. It took me all these years to realize that. Now, I walk into the Rough Trade Shops, and 80% of the stuff there is [beat-based]: drum and bass, dubstep, two-step, techno, hardcore trance. At the time, I would find these sorts of albums in pretty nerdy CD shops. And I would have pretty nerdy full-on conversations with the guys who would work there. They would put aside CDs for me. Now, I'm looking for different things when I go to a record store.

Photo by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin*

Pitchfork: Do you still go to record stores? I think a lot of people just scavenge online now.

B: I go to [Manhattan's] Other Music-- I used to spend two hours in that shop, but it's down to an hour now. I was mourning the end of the record store era, but then I went back to England, and there are even more record stores there now because Tower Records and Virgin Megastore have gone bankrupt, so the other ones are pumping up again. That was good. I definitely buy stuff online, too, because I like my Rihannas and my Beyoncés, and obviously I get that on iTunes. I go to Bleep a lot. You have to set aside a couple of hours a day. It's really good because you can listen to the songs before you buy them, and that's what you used to do.

Pitchfork: You can hear things a lot quicker than before by just typing a band into Google, too. But I feel like there's less interaction with other people when you're discovering new music now, though people still come together at shows.

B: Yeah, people talk about the negativity of online, but they don't talk about the good stuff. The fact people are finding so much stuff online means they need to go to shows more, and that's pretty exciting. People who are 18 now don't know anything else, and they've got tons of energy. People are always going to need physicality; they're going to want to meet other people even more. I've got faith in the physical angle. People have their needs. They won't forget about them.

"[In the 80s,] we didn't bathe for two months and ate sugar cubes for a month just to meet people who were like-minded. It's a little easier now."

Pitchfork: There's this idea that technology has changed music but, for you, how much of the change involves being in your 40s as opposed to your 20s?

B: When I was 20, I was a single mom, and I would do shows while my boy slept on the bus, and then I would go back to the bus, sleep for three hours, and then wake up at 7 a.m. with him in the parking lot, and we'd find a playground and a laundromat. I just don't have the energy to do that right now, and then do another show that evening. But back then, I could.

Then again, you could say that today's technology has made it so you don't have to do all this crazy traveling. I remember when I was in a band called KUKL when I was 16, and we played music that was pretty nerdy-- music that not many people liked. We kept getting the same 43 people coming to our shows. We weren't like, "We want to be famous!" as much as, "If we play for the same 43 people again, we will go insane!" So we would start writing letters to [UK punk band] Crass-- snail mail, obviously-- and they'd write letters back five months later, like, "Come and play our cellar in Berlin." So we took a bank loan and bought a transit van in London and drove to Berlin. We didn't bathe for two months and ate sugar cubes for a month just to meet people who were like-minded. It's a little easier now. [laughs]

Pitchfork: When I was younger, I would read Sonic Youth's thank yous in their albums to figure out other things to listen to because I lived in a small town, and I didn't really have access to anyone else into that kind of music. You can do that with the internet now, and it takes less legwork.

B: Also, with tons of chaotic supply on the internet, you're going to have people who become very good at being curators or stylists. It's the same sort of people that I used to go to record shops for-- I knew if certain people recommended something, it would be good. There's always going to be those people. It just depends on what they're called: curators or radio jockeys or bloggers.

"When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news."

Pitchfork: Before the internet, how did you discover music in Iceland? Cassette trading? Writing to people?

B: I was never much of a letter writer, but my mates and I were playing each other's stuff, just word of mouth. And in those days I went clubbing a lot, so I'd be that obnoxious person next to the DJ, trying to read the label, turning in circles. Usually, it would be something really obscure like a white label with nothing written on it. And DJs wouldn't want to tell-- so yeah, I had a lot of awkward conversations standing next to a DJ, screaming in his ear like, "Who's this?" Trying to write the name of something with eyeliner on a receipt and smudge it in my pocket. Then I'd find it hungover the next day and try to figure out what it was. I also grew up with magazines I looked up to like i-D, The Face, and Wired, and then later, Dazed and Confused.

Pitchfork: There have obviously been big political changes over the last 15 years, too. Has any of that impacted your music making or how you approach writing songs?

B: It was gradual for me. When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. It was, like, "Gross." But I moved to New York for half of my time in an interesting year: 2000. When Bush got elected. That was the first time I started actually reading the news. Then again, you could say that's because I had a laptop, and I was breastfeeding at home. [laughs] I used to get The New York Times and I would just read the Arts section. Then, suddenly, when I got my laptop, I was reading a different kind of news. It definitely affected me a lot.

I've had a complicated relationship with New York, and I think it has a lot to do with Bush. I think if Obama was elected in 2000, when I moved here, I would've felt very differently about it. But then again, there wouldn't have been Obama if there wasn't Bush. Then, 9/11 happened, and it was interesting to be a European and see the differences between how the U.S. and European media dealt with it. As a foreigner in New York, I experienced how people became very patriotic and anti-Muslim, and then you'd read [UK paper] The Guardian, and they'd see it from both sides. They weren't siding with Muslims, but they were saying, "You asked for it. Of course you're going to get fury." Then, a year later, [the coverage] was more similar. That was quite interesting to see.

And then, there were environmental issues in Iceland. I never thought I'd become an environmentalist. But every time I'd come to Iceland, everybody would be protesting against this aluminum smelter, and I just didn't believe it would get done. But it got built, and it was sort of like Bush getting re-elected. It was like, "What?!" There were all these people who had never gotten involved in environmental issues finally standing up and trying to have an impact. Over the last three years, I spent half of my time working on that.

"On Volta, I was moaning about everything, so Biophilia is me going, 'OK, I cannot complain anymore. Now I have to come up with solutions.'"

Pitchfork: Do you find these political things working into your music?

B: Yeah, because they forced me to take a stand; it forced me to be more outspoken on Volta. Maybe because on Volta I was moaning about everything, [Biophilia] is me going, "OK, I cannot complain anymore. Now I have to come up with solutions." After being forced into debates in Iceland with right-wing rednecks about green companies, I went to a place that I'd never been before. I don't think it's literally in my album, but the overall intention of hoping those opposites will eventually get along definitely comes from that a little bit.

Pitchfork: There seems to be a through-line line from when you were much younger and writing letters to Crass-- which was always a political band-- to making political music.

B: Yeah, I remember visiting Crass' house when I was 16 and they had an antenna on their roof where they could disturb BBC1 radio with their own statements. Pretty radical. I didn't speak much English then, I was more of a fly on the wall. I was very shy. I remember we brought a lamb with us, and our guitarist said, "Our sheep died happy! Good to eat them!" Crass just kind of got pale. They accepted us even though we weren't political-- we were more radical in a musical way. When I put my first solo album out, a lot of people asked me if I was political, and I would just say, "No no no no." I ended up saying that I did personal politics, more about how you interact with the five or 10 people closest to you.

Pitchfork: Did technology change how you conceive a song? Now, when you picture a song, is it three-dimensional in a way that it wasn't before?

B: Yeah, that's why I was so excited about using the touchscreen [to make Biophilia]-- I can, for the first time, take the patterns and structures in music that I see when I'm writing songs, and touch them. It's literally making a dream come true. When I write a song, I see a tunnel, and then the chorus is an open space, or the bassline is doing this shape. I see songs as a more of a geometric, spacial experience. Funnily enough, maybe that's why I keep tapping into my childhood and my frustration with my music school [with Biophilia]-- it's solving riddles that I wanted to solve then but couldn't. It's what I've wanted to do for 20 years. It's a reward.