Contributed By: Joanna Ester
Created On: Tuesday, 08 May 2007
Hits: 119
 Volta It's an incident that tells us much about the Icelandic singer. Björk has always done weird - it's her default setting. "She sings funny and she don't dance all that great either," as one of her fellow characters noted when she appeared in Lars Von Trier's film Dancer In The Dark. Yet she's also had a string of hits 'singing funny' and has sold an awful lot of records on the back of her uncompromisingly outré approach.
Even by her extraordinary standards, however, Volta may be her most radical creation to date. Like everything Björk does, it's full of paradoxes. On the one hand, it's a pop record that fizzes with the hardcore dance beats of Timbaland and sweetens the pill with guest vocals by Mercury Music Prize winner Antony Hegarty. On the other, there's an audacious experimentalism that's more Stockhausen than Antony and the Johnsons, heard to best effect in the dazzling 'found sound' symphony of ship's horns that opens 'Wanderlust', a song that seems to define her creative philosophy as she repeatedly chants "Relentlessly restless," like a mantra.
It's a record that confirms her as the most interesting and audacious female artist since Kate Bush was at her creative peak. There is no one else like her in contemporary pop music and perhaps only Damon Albarn among her peers has shown a similarly bold refusal to repeat himself.
Add a range of fascinating collaborators, including the Congolese troupe Konono No 1, the dreamy sounds of West African kora player Toumani Diabate, classical Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen and a doleful 10-piece all-female Icelandic brass section, and it's as if she's trying to create a time capsule of global music in the 21st century. "I've got a problem in that I get very excited about music," she once said. "I panic because I feel I don't have time to do it all."
Then there's the album's artwork. Björk's ability to turn a completely bonkers fashion sense into high art reached its apogee at the 2001 Oscars when she appeared dressed as a swan and proceeded to lay an egg on the red carpet. The cover of Volta is not far behind in outlandishness - a vividly coloured, neon-bright fantasy image of the singer as an impossibly kitsch fairytale princess. The concept, she says, was inspired by her five-year-old daughter Isadora, whose arrival has reawakened her feminism: "Part of it was having a little daughter and realising, what are we telling girls? All these books out there about finding your prince. There are actually other things than losing a glass slipper but all these little girls want to do is be pretty and find their prince and I'm like, what happened to feminism?"
Indeed, on Volta the self-claimed 'punk anarchist', who once denounced the relationship between pop music and politics as "corrupting" and insisted she would rather die than turn into a female Bono, has plenty to say about the state of the modern world. Like many, her politicisation began as a result of the war in Iraq. "In the 1990s there was so much optimism - we'd worked out equal rights for women and there was progress in feeding hungry nations, and we thought there would never be wars again," she says. The realisation of being wrong on almost every count hit her hard.
Then came the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, an event that looms large in the imagery of Volta. In January last year she visited Banda Aceh to see where the tsunami had hit worst, after she had donated proceeds from a remix album to the organisation's relief effort in the region. Unsurprisingly, the experience had a profound impact on her.
Her experience in Banda Aceh, which she visited as a Unicef goodwill ambassador, and her subsequent dream are related in the album's opening track, 'Earth Intruders', in which she describes what she saw in such harrowing lines as "Here is turmoil out there/Carnage rambling/What is to do but dig/ Dig bones out of earth/Mud, graves, timber/Morbid trenches." Another song, 'Hope', is about a female Palestinian suicide bomber.
Now in her forties, when you meet Björk in person it's hard to reconcile her mild demeanour with the public image of the puffin-eating wild child who a decade ago dated such dance music bad boys as Tricky and Goldie. Indeed, what's most striking is her ordinariness. She speaks in an appealing mix of Nordic and mockney and, without make-up and the attention-grabbing costumes, she looks little different from any other forty-something mother trying to balance the demands of career and family.
Since the split-up of her former band, the Sugarcubes, in 1992 she has sold some 14 million albums. Hit singles, including 'Hyperballad', 'Possibly Maybe' and 'Violently Happy', helped her to win four Brit awards while albums such as 1993's Debut and 1995's Post offered a brilliant mix of manic pop edge with genuinely left-field elements.
In recent years her work has grown even more experimental. Her last studio album, 2004's Medulla, was recorded a cappella and found her multi-layering her voice to create an audacious wall of sound in which the human voice took the place of instruments. "Nobody has ever told me how my records should sound," she says. "I make music for myself and at the time I'm making it, I'm really not thinking about commercial appeal or mass acceptance."
She has also dabbled in acting and her appearance in Dancer In The Dark won her Best Actress at the Cannes film festival. But she clashed with the director, who claims that when asked in one scene to wear a blouse she didn't like, she ripped up the offending garment and ate shreds of it before storming off the set.
For most of the 1990s Björk lived in London, but she quit Britain in 2000, driven out, she complained, by the prying instincts of our tabloid newspapers. These days Björk, her partner Matthew Barney and their daughter Isadora divide their time between Iceland and a house in New York once owned by Noel Coward.
Yet despite the political concerns of Volta she insists that if she has a message for the world in 2007, it remains a positive one. She says: "It's about thinking, 'Okay, wait a minute, maybe we are one tribe, and we're actually part of nature' - and trying to suggest some kind of patent for that."
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