Bjork

Björk Gudmunsdottir enjoys early status as a child-star. She joined the Reykjavik Conservatory at the age of five and recorded an album at the age of 11 with The Pops, her father-in-law's band. A baffled gamin, she foams bars with short-lived bands like Spit and Snot's teen punkettes or Tappi Tikkaras , with which she releases two mini-albums, Bitid Fast i Vitid (1982) and Miranda (1983). At the same time, she writes more personal songs on small notebooks. She soon remembered the Icelandics among the avant-garde punks of K.U.K.L., who released two albums The Eye (1984) and Holidays in Europe (1986). Following the collapse of their label, the members scattered and met as soon as possible, under the name The Sugarcubes, between new wave and English pop.
The album Life's Too Good sells half a million copies in 1988 and places Iceland on the international music stage. The same cannot be said of the next Here Today Gone Tomorrow, badly received and badly sold. In 1990, Björk returned to Gling Glo, an album of traditional Icelandic songs revisited in jazz, before collaborating with Graham Massey's Manchester 808 State on two electro tracks. She's relegated to the Sugarcubes with new ideas, leading up to Stick Around Your Joy, released in 1992, which is worth the band making the first U2 game in the United States. Their split comes soon after.
Symbolically titled Debut , Bj örk's first solo album is a mine of diverse sounds and collaborations with musicians from all walks of life (including Graham Massey , but also Nellee Hooper ex- Soul II Soul and tabla player Talvin Singh ), who came to help the artist shape a brand new pop, a true standard meter of multiple musical collages to come within the musical landscape. Powered by a huge hype, Björk became an international star, to the point of writing the song Bedtime Stories for Madonna in 1993. The following year, she went to the Caribbean to record Post with producer Marius De Vries and Howie B., the rising value of the London electro scene. She also collaborates with Tricky on two tracks on this new album, as well as with the faithful Talvin Singh , arranger Markus Dravs and Brazilian musician Eumir Deodato. Released in 1995, Post shines by its extraordinary musical quality, crossing natural landscapes tense between multiple electronic variations. It's Oh So Quiet's clip from Spike Jonze captures the lion's share of MTV's rotations, which still helps to establish Björk as a pop superstar.
Released in 1997, the following album is entitled Homogenic and follows the emotional sinusoids of a inhabited Björk, declaring his love of Iceland through ten fracasing compositions, such as Bachelorette, whose clip perpetuates Björk's status as a visual artist with Frenchman Michel Gondry, for the third time at the production (after Human Behaviour and Isobel).
Exhausted by his incessant creative activity, Björk retired to Iceland at the end of 1998. This is where Danish director Lars Von Trier ( Breaking the Waves, The Stupids) comes to pick her up for the lead role of Dancer in the Dark. Initially reluctant, Björk eventually accepted. It was his second film after The Juniper Tree (presented at Sundance in 1991). She signed Dancer in the Dark's BO , Selmasongs , Selma's testimony, "this introverted and passive little girl" for which she collaborated with Thom Yorke (Radiohead ) on the beautiful duo I'Ve Seen It All , surpassing the version filmed with Peter Stormare. Although the film earned him a lot of beaks with Lars Von Trier (especially on his work as a composer), he won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2000 and won him the prize for female performance. During the shooting, the singer appeals to her compatriot Valger Sigurdsson with whom she begins the recording sessions of what will become Vespertine . Intimate disc, especially after his meeting in New York with contemporary artist Matthew Barney, he allowed him to surround himself with harpist Zeena Parkins, electro duo Matmos and composer Mark Bell. Ode to the carnel, worn on intimate dreams, Vespertine causes vertigo with complex instrumentation and castings, like so many pearls. She visits the Matmos duo to reorches many of her compositions for an amazing symphonic tour.
His next record, Medulla, is disconcerting. Nanti of guests as prestigious as Mike Patton, Icelandic composer Jonnus Vidar or Razhel of The Roots, among his faithful Bell, Matmos, Sigurdsson and Guy Sigsworth, this very intuitive album uses only one instrument, the voice of Björk. The same cannot be said of the latter, Volta , which allows him to collaborate with American producer Timbaland or the crooner androgyne Antony ( Antony&The Johnsons ). Volta is tribal, percussive, mineral and, to say the least, non-conventional in the discography of an artist who in any case never was. For the occasion Björk asks the French Michel Ocelot ( Kirikou ) to sign the video of his first environmental single Earth Intruders .