Björk’s sixth full-length studio album Volta has just been released and it’s more of the usual greatness. I don’t always love everything she does, but she never fails to be interesting and unique.
For a while there, she was firmly in the worlds of alternative and dance music, but at this stage, she does whatever the hell she wants. She can combine sounds from the 17th and 21st Century in the same tune. She’ll do jazz, ambient, folk, hip-hop, whatever, whenever.
Timbaland was involved in the production of three songs on the album, but the results are generally more like her than him. I could have picked the track “Innocence,” which has a classic weird Timba beat, but instead I went with “Hope.”
Here’s the story of its production:
“I walked into the studio with Timbaland with no preparations,” she said. “Usually I would have already written the song and there would just be a small little space for the visitor. But now I just wanted some challenge. We improvised for one day, and I just sang on top of whatever he did.
“You just walk in the room and it’s just” — she made an explosive sound — “pfff!, and I just went pfff!, and we did seven tracks, just p-p-p-p-p-p. You get really smitten by his energy. It’s like, why doubt? Who needs the luxury of doubt?”
After their recording session, Timbaland got wrapped up in producing albums and touring with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, leaving Bjork to edit and augment the tracks.
“I was a bit confused first, because I got a lot of stuff of his and was maybe expecting him to arrange his noises,” Bjork said. “It ended up being quite a good thing for me, because apparently he never gives other people stuff and lets them complete it for him. So he actually trusted me to do that.”
For “Hope,” a song that ponders the story of a pregnant suicide bomber, Bjork went to Mali to meet Toumani Diabate, a djeli (or griot) who plays the harplike kora. They could have exchanged musical ideas electronically. But “I wanted to sing it with him at the same moment, because it’s always different when you do that,” Bjork said.
“She wanted everything to work naturally,” Mr. Diabate said backstage after a recent concert with his Symmetric Orchestra at Zankel Hall. In Mali, he played and she sang, trying lyrics she had brought until the syllables fit and they had a few songs.
“Hope” ended up using a Timbaland beat and multiple, overlapping, tangled tracks of kora, traditionally a solo instrument. Mr. Diabate tweaked the results until he was satisfied. “She opened a new door for the kora,” he said.
You can learn more about Diabate and listen to samples from his album here.
I’m also including “Wanderlust,” which was not produced with Timba and features a ten-piece Icelandic brass section, but it still sounds like hip-hop once the vocal section starts. If you love hip-hop, you’ll know that sound, with the beats overlaid with a keyboard trumpet blaring.
Björk – Hope — BUY
Björk – Wanderlust — BUY