Interview

AUGUSTYNIAK: So you are going to release this live album, Voltaïc. Somehow, it’s the first time you’re doing a real live album. I mean, you’ve released compilations of live recordings before, but this one is different, no?

BJÖRK: I did all those box sets when I was pregnant and breast-feeding. I used the nesting hormones to become a librarian, and I went through like 10 or 15 years of live recordings—I can’t remember—and listened to them and compiled them so I would have my favorite version of each song. But I guess what’s different with Voltaïc is that we played the songs live just last year, so it’s still kind of fresh.

AUGUSTYNIAK: That’s kind of a new exercise for you, no?

BJÖRK: Yeah. We recorded the songs in a kind of radio room before the tour as we were doing rehearsals—and then we recorded them again in Paris once the tour was almost finished. The tour was 18 months total, so there was really a long time between recordings.

AMZALAG: When I was working on the credits on the album, I was amazed because the date of the recording in the studio is exactly a year before the date of the live recording. It’s the same songs, only recorded a year apart, on June 25, which by the way happens to be the birthday of Carly Simon and George Orwell—I had to check on Wikipedia.

BJÖRK: And then, of course, there’s the recording we did in the church in Iceland, which was very spontaneous. We just set up there because, with the recordings we’d done in Paris, I didn’t feel like we really reached the more quiet, calm songs. So I wanted to re-record them in a different environment. There were a lot of songs on Volta—like “Pneumonia,” for example—which I did two times in a festival atmosphere. So in a way it’s three things: It’s the radio concert; it’s the live concert; and then it’s a performance in a more quiet environment with a choir. I also never really toured for the record Medúlla before, so in a way this Voltaïc set is not only doing music from Volta, but also from Medúlla.

AUGUSTYNIAK: So basically this live album is a real documentary of your different views of your voice?

BJÖRK: Yeah, a little bit.

This is an excerpt of the June cover story. To read the full Björk interview pick up a copy of Interview.

Mathias Augustyniak & Michaël Amzalagare are Interview’s creative directors.