Introduction
After completing and launching Drive XV, our tribute to R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People, we gathered at 11th St Bar one night to figure out which album we should tackle next. OKX, our inaugural step into the compilation world, had been a no-brainer: 2007 was OK Computer's 10th Anniversary, and we wanted to honor the milestone. This time, though, when we started off thinking of possibilities based on release dates -- Drive XV was celebrating 15 years of Automatic after all -- nothing seemed quite right. (We've already discussed our decision not to go with the recently 10-year-old In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, for instance.)
After discarding our release-date almanac, someone suggested Björk. It was late, and we don't remember who said what, but it was a great idea. Debut, her first post-Sugarcubes album came out in 1993, which could count for a nice and even 15 years in 2008, but Post was the obvious choice: It's a stronger album top to bottom -- a culmination of her work to that point. It includes any number of iconic tracks and due to the richness and variety of Björk's self-described "spastic" palette, an infinite number of interpretive possibilities. Think, for example, of "It's Oh So Quiet," Björk's big-band cover of Betty Hutton's "Blow a Fuse," the almost industrial noise of "Army Of Me," the wispy, avant ambiance of "Cover Me," etc. When we spoke with Björk about her thoughts on Post, our choice seemed even more appropriate.
I listened to it when we did the surround mixes of it like two or three years ago [Note: Post was re-released in 2006 with surround sound mixes] and I have to say I was kinda surprised how the odd spastic thing of the album had actually aged well. I was very aware of it at the time that I needed to be musically promiscuous and have almost every song [a] different mood/style and so
on. The picture on the cover is me on Piccadilly Circus (Times Square of London) too excited, too many things, Bright Lights Big City kinda thing, and me eager to consume. So my musical heart was scattered at the time and I wanted the album to show that.
We also asked the contributors for their thoughts on Post. Accordingly, each track has its own page with the artist's statement, as well as a dedicated comment section, so please click around.
Completing Enjoyed took a number of hands and plenty of elbow grease. We are deeply thankful to Björk for taking time out of her tour to answer our questions and offering commentary. Þakka þér kærlega, Björk! We'd also like to thank to Scott Hansen for his gorgeous album art, Phillip Klum for the absolutely amazing job mastering the project, the video team of Jon McMillan/Matt Neatock/Raphael Rodriguez/Shea Hess for shooting the band interviews, everyone at Sacks & Co., and Haukur S. Magnússon for help with our Icelandic. Finally, a major major thank you to all the bands for their participation -- folks juggled hectic tour and personal schedules and managed to get us amazing interpretations of Björk's originals. All is much appreciated.
As you may have noticed, this is our first compilation without Roman Numerals in the the title: We took the name from track "Enjoy." Of course, we also get the possible plays on "Post." We are bloggers, after all.
(Click here to read our essay A Post About Post.)
Download Enjoyed as a .zip file or stream it in a YouTube playlist below.
Björk: The Stereogum Interview
We first caught up with Björk via email while she was in Australia as part of her Volta tour. Later, we did a couple follow ups shortly before she premiered her Encyclopedia Pictura-directed "Wanderlust" video at Deitch's Long Island City space (today it shows up on the interweb). Despite this flurry ofrecent activity, we centered our questions on Post. Thank you, Björk, for talking about the old times...
How did you decide on the title Post?
It was a combination of things. I felt the album was the other half of Debut, so it made sense to call it Post -- before and after kinda thing. Also, my friend Hussein Chalayan had made a whole [clothing] collection on Belgian envelope paper (I wear a jacket from it on the cover), so it sort of was in the air at the time. This word was waiting to be used.
Do you listen to it anymore? If so, what do you think of it thirteen years removed?
I listened to it when we did the surround mixes of it like two or three years ago and I have to say I was kinda surprised how the odd spastic thing of the album had actually aged well. I was very aware of it at the time that I needed to be musically promiscuous and have almost every song [a] different mood/style and so on. The picture on the cover is me on Piccadilly Circus (Times Square of London) too excited, too many things, Bright Lights Big City kinda thing, and me eager to consume.So my musical heart was scattered at the time and I wanted the album to show that.
For me, Volta is a similar album in that sense. The style of it is all styles, sailing around the world going to new places making new friends. It is a beginning of a new period. Then Homogenic -- that came after -- was something more stable.Post was looking, Homogenic was what I found. Volta is definitely looking, and I can feel my next one is going to be more centered.
How did you decide to approach the various dance producers at the time?
The people I collaborated with were all people I was hanging out with in clubs in London. I had known them all for a while before we ended up working together.
If you went back, would you do anything differently? Sequencing? Song selection?
Not really. You do the best you can at the time. That's all you can do. You only get one shot.
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"Army Of Me" sounds huge, this massive sorta opener. Had you envisioned the track sounding so big at the start of its composition?
I had written two tracks with Graham Massey before I did Debut: "Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things." Then I met Nellee Hooper and we ended up doing a whole album's worth of stuff together, so I decided to keep those two songs, wait, and put them on the next album. Post then ended up being more schizophrenic with collaborations of a lot of people, so it was a better match.
Graham came up with ["Army Of Me's"] bass riff. I had written that melody earlier in Iceland. It matched very well together, I felt. I then did the sarcastic scratch noises in the chorus with a coin on a deep bass string that Graham sampled for me.
It's a great opener -- a call for hard-ass self-sufficiency -- especially considering later tracks like "Possibly Maybe" or "It's Oh So Quiet," where another person, or a gentler set of emotions, come into play.
My younger brother was having a bit of a crazy period at the time, so I wrote this for him. It is sort of a big sister telling little brother off song. The other song I have written for him is "Where Is The Line" on Medúlla. It was written under similar circumstances emotionally.
Lyrically, what went into "Hyperballad"? How did you come up with the idea for the story it tells?
I think it was a dream I dreamt...
"The Modern Things" reminds me of themes picked back up on Volta: The inevitability and destruction of technology. Unlike "Declare Independence," where we're reminded we can plant a flag and start our own state, "The Modern Things" ends ominously, these objects taking over. When you wrote it, what were your thoughts on the line: "It's their turn now"?
I guess it has some tongue sticking out in it. Cheeky. Kinda reminding the humans not to be too sure of themselves.
"It's Oh So Quiet" still shocks with its Busby Berkeley/showtune stylistic differences from what comes before it. How did you decide to cover Betty Hutton?
It was the last song we did. Just to make it absolutely certain that the album would be as schizophrenic as possible, that every song would be a shock.
"Enjoy" and "You've Been Flirting Again" both have mysterious or open-ended lyrics. Are they to be seen as some sort of pairing? The idea of sex without touching and flirting?
Hmmm, at least I wasn't conscious of it ... but there was a lot of flirting going on.
Lyrically, "Enjoy" feels central to Post's storylines: A need for the tactile, exploration, etc. Do you remember what/who inspired the song?
I guess it went with the mood of the album, to be greedy, to be eager to consume a city ... to merge. Promiscuous musically and city-ally.
Can you briefly discuss "You've Been Flirting Again"'s lyrics? There's a weightiness to the words that's quite different than the playfulness of the title.
I guess the title is taking the piss out off myself more than anything else.Hmmm ... It is hard to pin it down ... I guess that is the nature of flirting, it is ambiguous and slippery. The lyrics are an attempt to describe that.
Like "Hyperballad," "Isobel" has a visually rich narrative: What's the story behind it?
On most of my albums there has been one mythical song, [a] kinda literature based thing. And I have usually asked my friend poet/author Sjón to help me with the lyrics on that one. To make it epic. For me there is continuity from "Human Behaviour" -- "Isobel" -- "Bachelorette" -- "Oceania" -- "Wanderlust." I guess it is slightly autobiographical but times one hundred. A heightened mythical state. Which I believe we all have ... it just depends from what angle we look at ourselves from...
Opposed to the content solitude of "Isobel" there's "Possibly Maybe." Who'd you have in mind when you wrote "mon petit vulcan"?
An impossible Frenchman. I guess I was taking the piss out of myself after breaking up with a boyfriend -- how your mouth misses kissing.
The last lines -- "I'll suck my tongue / as a remembrance of you" -- create a strong image. Do you remember how you came up with it?
I just thought it was kinda comical to walk around sucking ones tongue.
"I Miss You" is highly percussive. To bring up Volta again -- this has the percussive quality of some of those songs.
Volta is definitely for me very related to post. Similarly scatterbrainy. Searching for new things.
Who was "I Miss You" written for?
No one in particular. It's a math thing. A play with words.
"Cover Me" seems to extend the quest of "I Miss You": "I'm going to prove the possible (and then impossible) really exists..."
When me and Nellee decided to work together again on Post, I wrote this to him. I guess I was trying to make fun of myself, how dangerous i manage sometimes to make album making. And trying to lure him into it. but it is also a admiration thing from me to him. I wouldn't have trusted anyone else.
Lyrically, "Headphones" finds sleep -- "genius to fall asleep to your tape last night." It's also quieter than most of the record, outside of "Cover Me." Are we supposed to see Post as the tape that saved the protagonist's life? The album opens with "Army Of Me" (relying on no one but your own self) and ends with "Headphones" (relying on these headphones, a tape someone else made).
It was written to Graham Massey as a thank you. He was the best tape maker there was. He would make compilation cassettes and I would play them non stop. But, of course, it is also a love letter to sound. The sound of sound. Resonances, frequencies, silences and such ... a music-worship thing.
Stereogum Presents... Enjoyed: A Tribute to Björk's Post
1. Liars - "Army Of Me" [Download]
Liars On "Army Of Me"
"We were in Belgium when we got this call. I became sleepless with excitement -- tossing and turning thinking of Post. Immediately my brain got stuck on that bass line from 'Army of Me.' All night in my head it went: Duh nu nuh nu nuh nu nuh de Duh nu nuh nu nuh nu nuh ... In the morning when i woke up i was convinced those notes were the same as some Rage Against The Machine song. I told the guys, we thought it was funny."
--Angus Andrew
2. Dirty Projectors - "Hyperballad" [Download]
Dirty Projectors On "Hyperballad"
"I think what I took from Björk when I was obsessed with her in high school was her way with deconstruction. She writes these classic melodies but breaks them apart so that it's sort of up to you as the listener to put them back together.The song ends up meaning so much more because of the effort you have to give to it. Out of a perverse habit, I tried to do the opposite with this recording: present the song like the unbroken stone it might have been.But I think I probably just arrived at a new deconstruction: Björk's essence remains elusive!"
--Dave Longstreth
3. High Places - "Modern Things" [Download]
High Places On "Modern Things"
"Covering Björk is on par with covering other personal faves such as Morrisey, or Joni Mitchell, i.e., somebody who has become iconic/cult-status to their fans, and who also has such a distinguishable voice. Add to that, a large portion of 'The Modern Things' is sung in Icelandic. We went into it with the idea of somehow making it seem like us (although we experimented with being a little more stripped down, not so noisy/dense as our usual selves), as opposed to trying to do a very accurate rendition of the original."
--High Places
"When I was eighteen and living in the dorms at college, my boyfriend would pick me up in his Honda Civic with massive sub-woofers in the trunk, blasting Post. For the longest time, I couldn't listen to the album without feelings of nostalgia for my early college years. But after visiting Iceland last spring and viewing the desolate, wild interior of that country, I now picture the mountain and dinosaurs of 'The Modern Things' living alongside beautiful seabirds and sheep and elves."
--Mary Pearson
"I have a Björk dorm memory as well. The first night in the dorms, I made out with someone who felt the first Agnostic Front LP would fit the mood. It didn't go anywhere, but we started a band. A couple weeks later, I made out with someone else who put on Post; definitely a much better soundtrack to a first kiss. That turned into an undergraduate-length relationship. Ever since then, the record's stuck with me. However, Victim In Pain is a pretty good record, too."
--Rob Barber
4. Bell - "It's Oh So Quiet" [Download]
Bell On "It's Oh So Quiet"
"Oddly enough, I can't remember the first time I heard 'It's Oh So Quiet' -- the song has just always felt familiar. Like most of Björk's music, it's been going around and around in various formats, players and parts of my brain since, well, probably since fifth or sixth grade, when everything suddenly became very superlative, urgent and emotional. (With great difficulty I resist punning here about blowing fuses and pubescent devils cutting loose.)
Both Betty Hutton's original 'Blow A Fuse' and Björk's version of the song are held together (or not, or barely...) by these crazy pinball shifts, the screaming and the shhhhing, the twinkling and the slamming. I wanted to keep that same energy in my version, so a soft/intimate/acoustic take was out of the question. Luckily I don't have a big band at my beckon call, so the arrangement was free to be completely and incongruously bonkers...
I told [my collaborator] Jason Nazary [drummer/beatmaker] that the choruses would be filled with alarms and crazy sawing synths, while I had this funny Steve Reich vs. Mozart piano idea for the verses. We spent a few days tinkering around with our laptops, an evening assembling our respective beat/synth/birdie tinkerings, and about a day and a half in a proper studio with my engineer friend Albert, mixing and recording vocals and minimoogs. Happily, nobody blew a fuse."
--Olga Bell
5. Pattern Is Movement - "Enjoy" [Download]
Pattern Is Movement On "Enjoy"
"Björk's music informs nearly every one of Pattern Is Movement's songs.We've always been completely enamored with her ability to combine universe-sized grandness with the intimacy of lips on your ear. We are thrilled to be a part of this love letter to her. Our approach was to substitute the density of the percussion with harmonic and melodious density, all the while maintaining the exotic-groove-with-steamy-organ motif. To us, the end result wound up sounding like Perry Como in the Congo."
--Pattern Is Movement
6. Evangelicals - "You've Been Flirting Again" [Download]
Evangelicals On "You've Been Flirting Again"
"This is a mysterious song, I think. It's unclear who the 'you' in the title is and and the string arrangements hint that lyrics like 'How you reacted was good' aren't quite what they seem. Is this Björk talking to an ex-boyfriend, saying 'hey, it's good to see ya gettin out there and playing the field again'? Maybe she's trying to tell a dude putting the moves on her to be patient'cause ya know, she's Björk.
I'm not sure of her intentions but on the particular night our version was recorded I imagined what if, despite how beautiful the song is, she was really seething at seeing an ex flirt withsomeone she knows at a party in Iceland. In Björk's version she controls her raging jealousy at witnessing such a a situation, but in our version the narrator (Björk or whoever really)slowly comes unglued and ends up freaking out and going on a murderous rampage at the party. We tried illustrating this with string stabs and creepy 'witch' voices swirling around towards the end."
--Josh Jones
7. Xiu Xiu - "Isobel" [Download]
Xiu Xiu On "Isobel"
"It is easy, I think, to miss Björk's lyrics sometimes. Not because of any lack of shine on their part, but only because the production and orchestration on her songs is always so unique and wonderful. As much as I love the arrangement of 'Isobel,' it is the, as you might have guessed by now, the lyrics that have killed me. They are, at least as I read them, almost an inward transgendered desperate affirmation and fantasy moth love song.'When she does it she means to' is such a powerstation of 'fuck you, I am on a fit and rampage and destructive sex hyper revelation frenzy.' In it, the line says 'I know what I am doing, I know I have taken it too far, I know that I love my downward and upward spiral. BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ.'
For the music Gabrielle Athayde played about 30 minutes of improvised cello, which I edited/arranged in the computer. Ches Smith, wearing head phones, played drums along to an Okinawana folk music record. I bought a new microphone -- that is, for this song appropriately, made of wood -- and sang into it."
--Jamie Stewart
8. Final Fantasy & Ed Droste - "Possibly Maybe" [Download]
Final Fantasy & Ed Droste On "Possibly Maybe"
"I realized recently that Björk is probably my most listened to and adored artist thus far in my life. It occurred to me as I was looking back at music I'd listen to in high school and noticing that the large majority of it, even though I respect and love it, I at some point or another OD'd on ... yet to this day I still listen to all of Björk's albums fairly religiously and it was then that I concluded that no other artist in my life has had the longevity that she has had in my listening habits. Covering Björk is a scary task because as both Owen and I discussed, so much of what makes her music amazing is distinctly her voice, and nobody, nowhere can ever really recreate it ... So attempting to was a challenge to say the least.
Ultimately I wanted to give it a shot given my life long love of her music, and to boot it was an excuse to fly up to Toronto for a week and visit Owen. Once there we put together some string arrangements and had a string quartet record them in a lovely church I once played at that goes under the venue name of 'the music gallery.' Owen also had a friend that played the oboe, so we decided to enlist his help as well to create a more orchestral interpretation of the song. Owen's other half of Final Fantasy, Leon graciously recorded the song in his new studio he built in his garage in Toronto. Granted the tempo, vocal melody and structure are largely still in tact and as they originally were, we just realized that changing it felt wrong. 'Possibly Maybe' was so perfect as it was, to butcher the up and down melodic tics would be sacrilegious. So for all intensive purposes this was a fun exercise for Owen and I and is very much a cover vs. a reinterpretation. Hopefully some people will enjoy it for what it is, because we certainly enjoyed making it."
--Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear
9. White Hinterland - "I Miss You" [Download]
White Hinderland On "I Miss You"
"I didn't grow up listening to Björk, but have always liked whenever something of hers would come on a friend's stereo. The first time hearing this song, I was simultaneously attempting to learn it. I think that leaves little in the way of previous architecture to battle with while making the song "your own." Since Matt's drums were stolen, he ended up using pots & pans for percussion. The rest involved a RCA mic from '52, a borrowed Casio SK-1, a distortion pedal, and a suitcase rhodes. Just for a laugh, we also mixed a version where the entire song runs backwards, and I almost sound like I'm singing in Icelandic. We plan to listen to soon while in an altered state."
--Casey Dienel
10. El Guincho - "Cover Me" [Download]
El Guincho On "Cover Me"
"At first, I asked my ex-girlfriend to record some voice tracks for the song and tried to figure out how to fit it with another idea that I had: Like a 6-8 minute trip inspired by the remix Walter Gibbons did for Indian Ocean's 'Treehouse/Schoolbell.' But I ended up discarding the Indian Ocean idea and went a little bit old school UK garage! The other track I was working on sounded kinda similar to the original, like I was looping some all the original parts of the song and using a female voice, too, so I thought it was interesting to try a simple 2-step beat under the same universe, keeping the structure but changing the vocals and the vibe, kinda like dressing Björk in dirty clothes and taking her to the place she's trying to avoid in the lyrics. I am super excited to be a part of this."
--Pablo Díaz-Reixa
11. Atlas Sound - "Headphones" [Download]
Atlas Sound On "Headphones"
"What has always interested me in Björk's music is her ability to change her identity with each album. She always seems to present a new concept and audio-visual presence. My favorite record of hers is Vespertine. I can't help but feel nostalgic every time I hear it. If I had to pick a favorite song it would be 'Undo.' At the risk of sounding trite and overly-sentimental (me?!? trite?!? AND overly sentimental?!?!?) that song makes me cry or at least want to cry. Around the time Vespertine came out, my sister gave birth to twins several months premature, one of the twins -- a daughter -- lived only a day. It was a very dark time for my family. I listened to that song over and over on an endless loop. I've never listened to music expecting a message or wisdom, but that particular song meant a lot to me and still does. I always wanted to play it for my sister but was afraid she wouldn't quite get it. Björk is an artist I love to admire and follow."
--Bradford Cox
12. No Age - "It's Oh So Quiet" (Alternate Take) [Download]
No Age On "It's Oh So Quiet"
"'It's Oh So Quiet' is such an amazing song, played by what sounds to be a full orchestra. Dean and I being only two people had to approach it in a different way. We went more full guitar drums on it, just 'cause that's what we had available to us. I think the original's so incredible, so instead of trying to fit into its shoes, we used it as a jumping off point to inspire us to go towards something totally different. Hopefully it still retains the spirit, but in a different No Age sense."
--Randy Randall
COVER ART
