Interview

To say that an artist has vision can mean any number of things. It can mean that they have foresight or that they have perceived something that the bulk of us might have missed. It can also mean that they quite literally have visions—psychedelically induced or otherwise. But in Björk’s case, it means that the artist—the one with the vision—has simply dared to imagine something that does not already exist. Which is why vision is as important for a musician as it is for a sculptor or a painter—and why it’s essentialto the art of being Björk. See Photos of Bjork from Interview's Archive.

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As an artist, one of Björk’s greatest assets has always been her innate understanding of what it means to have vision. What she does as a singer and a songwriter falls somewhere between making records and writing, directing, and starring in her own quasi-folkloric, semi-futuristic, pseudo-theatrical, musical performance-art epics. But embracing her individuality is an impulse from which Björk has rarely ever veered: from the singing that she did with her Icelandic ’80s band the Sugarcubes to her constantly evolving solo career (which began with the release of 1993’s Debut) to her starring role in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) and her collaboration with her longtime partner, Matthew Barney, on the 2005 film Drawing Restraint 9, amongst a remarkably diverse array of other smart, inventive, and inspiringly far-flung undertakings. In fact, some of Björk’s work has been so extremely—defiantly—original, that attempting to explain it or analyze it would seem almost misguided. That’s because with Björk, there is no such thing as an extracurricular activity. Singing, acting, dressing, art-making, even cavorting on a boat in Central America, are all part of an intricately woven fabric that runs through a multitude of creative worlds, emotional worlds, brave new worlds, and sometimes otherworldly worlds.

Of course, there is also such a thing as revision, and that process of reviewing and re-evaluatingis one that Björk has undertaken in compiling her new two-CD, two-DVD box set Voltaïc (Nonesuch). The collection includes multiple live recordings of songs from her last two records—2004’s Medúlla and 2007’s Volta—along with assorted remixes and videos, but which are performed in different contexts: The first setconsists of a studio session Björk recorded before she began her tour to support Volta in late 2007; the second features renditions of the songs re-created in a church in her native Reykjavik; and the third captures a live performance in Paris near the end of the tour, exactly one year later.

For the past decade, Björk has collaborated with Interview’s creative directors, Michaël Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak, of M/M (Paris), and photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who took the pictures that accompany this interview, on virtually all of the imagery, packaging, and artwork for her records, as well as videos, books, and a host of other projects. This pooling of creative forces has not only served to document Björk’s ever-changing interests and output, but also the merging andmelding of five distinct visions into a singular body of work. From their studio in Paris, Amzalagand Augustyniak recently spoke with 43-year-old Björk, who was traveling and recording on a boat in Guatemala.