good morning
sooo i’m all sleepy but happy here, just having sent the last files to mastering, album ready...! and then got asked to write questions to myself...hmm...what would i want to be asked? tricksy. i kinda do have a soft spot for some of them cliché questions like what would you tell your teenage self? perhaps i could reverse it?
like what if i could ask a future self stuff?
ok
how about i envision a place in nature, with all the warm headspace possible for music making and love in the air, will that happen to me? i mean, i kinda already have this with my cabin in iceland, but like a full-time thing? i have craved it for so long...
also i’d probably ask about health and happiness of my loved ones? and if there is something i could assist with...?
but mostly i’d probably want to know if i remain brave with music?
before i fell asleep last night i tried to think of some like normcore magaziney questions, but i didn’t feel too inspired, but maybe i should answer them, perhaps they are just a warm-up into some ice breakage later? like any lush daily rituals, like the bridge or the tunnel...which reminds me of the bridge in noh theater and the slowest walk ever of the actors from the dressing room on stage in full view of the audience. kinda more epic or important than the show.
anyways
so first proper question, here we go:
what is your relationship with flutes?
well, i wanted to learn the oboe as a child and my mother couldn’t afford it so i learned the flute and a little bit had this strange immature feeling that it was my second choice for the 6 or 8 years i studied it, depending how you count (recorders included or not). my main interest in music school was always music theory which i think overall was unusual and nerdish especially from a girl. everyone was focusing more on their instrument. i do remember putting my foot down around 10 or 11 years old though and refusing to play music by old dead german guys, i couldn’t relate to them and being an icelandic girl in the late twentieth century there wasn’t much in common. so they got me this young flute teacher who introduced me to recent finnish flute music which was so gorgeous and kinda folk and very connected to nature but also had a bit of atonal avant-garde in it. it kinda liquided back and forth between ancient folk melodies and the sound effecty abstract. what’s not to love? then i started in punk bands and played flute in a couple of them, for example “anna” with kukl and “glóra,” i think it’s on youtube? i think also looking back it really trained my lungs well with breathing and stamina so when i started singing which was also my second choice (wtf) because i wanted to be a drummer, i probably had a very naive clumsy voice but i had killer lungs even though i say so myself. but it was crazy for this album now coming back to it after all those years later, like looking at a not so “cool” part of my childhood, flutes were always a bit naff, and looking at it so much later through a timeglass and seeing another thread and linking it together and bringing it forth to now. i feel also doing my last album vulnicura which was me letting it all go into the most darkness of loss and grief that i’ve done so far, suddenly all sounds that were light and fluffy sounded so appealing.

It goes on like this

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where do you really think she got the idea from? Squarepusher of course. he's written a few manifestos and I love the one about musical ghettos (she wanted aphex twin, then squarepusher to produce her electronic/ish album circa 98? I think she settled for her then-BF Goldie. Lol)

Also aphex got back at her (outside of that THINGS RICHARD HASNT DONE bit on the old warp come to daddy website where it included "get back to bjork about producing that album" =) by getting back in her good graces circa 2004 so he could open for her at a London show as DJ Smojphace where he spun an hour or two of music that was described by bjork fans as "a cacophony of jet engines turning into babies crying" and speaking of they slagged off afx good like MUSICAL LEGEND MY ASS HE HURT ME!!!!!! and we sat on watmm just laughing at the little bjork fans.

True story: my ex was a bjork fan with a lower case bjork B sticker on her window. I found an analord 10 picture disc out in NY/C so I left her with a capital 7\ in her room.

We were broken up shortly after cuz she was trying to move out here and colonize me and shit. The breakup message was 45mins of uncontrollable sobbing. Mom's called up the next morning like "you know you'll be best friends forever" and i was like "OHHHHHH just send me my records plz" and yeah, you know, need that original press fearless four - rockin it I got out there.

Anyways, far be it for me to emulate bjork, who's emulating squarepusher, so have some squarepusher

Some people would say, in looking at my career, that it betrays a confused musical standpoint; optimistically it is termed unpredictable, more derisively it is said to be self-cancelling, in that within the wide aesthetic range in the work, one part contradicts and undermines another, resulting in something akin to the mixing of all the different paints on the palette. This is an important point to realise: I take no refuge behind standpoints. This has manifested itself as part of my fundamental creative aspiration- to see across as opposed to seeing from.

At first, there needs to be the presence both of a view rooted in inherited opinion, effectively treated as transparent and assumed to be inherently correct, and a will to play with that view, to endlessly distort it and to ultimately be prepared to destroy it. A kind of simultaneous faith and critical ingenuity are required as, without the latter one is bound to a reverential repetition of received wisdom, and without the former ones sparks quickly die away once the entrenched standpoint is supposedly vanquished.

To make a lethal attack on, say a musical standpoint, that standpoint must first be loved, understood and accommodated before it can be assailed, and this problem is exemplified with much youth culture that seeks to destroy its perceived antithetical enemy simply by contradicting it. It is not enough to behead your enemy, they must first be invited in and made to feel welcome in order to be comprehensively destroyed i.e. they must be in some way incorporated.

This process should seem familiar as it is the time honoured way of dissipating polarised energy away from musical movements: by making them popular. What I am doing is turning this system on its head: instead of incorporating isolated views into mainstream equivalents, for the sake of destroying culture in the name of the corporation, I incorporate isolated views into my standpoint, indeed to the point of seemingly cancelling out a coherent view, for the sake of destroying culture in the name of the individual. In this sense I advocate completely respect-less exploitation of all forms available, as this is the only road that could possibly render an individual immune to being dissolved into mainstream castration, insofar as the music industry as it stands feeds most happily on artists with discrete viewpoints:identity-cults can only be effectively generated from one dimensional personalities. Personal identity must be entirely subjugated and rendered formless in order to have any sort of freedom in our era.

A common error is mistaking contradiction or negation of a consensus view for freedom; this leads to phenomena symbiotic with mainstream culture and equally poisonous i.e. movements who identify themselves exclusively with a cynical commentary on the mainstream. This is a dustbin for so called artists: diametrically opposed to the mainstream, they are still very much obliged to march to its tune, or of course its inversion. Being conscious of the fallacy in their claim of independence, the views always deliberately remain self-contained, and just as a surfeit of cultural control gives rise to overweight smug cretins, an almost total absence of it gives rise to the revolting snide dinginess of the eternally subjugated. The lesson is that no punks have yet been punk enough - rejecting and negating the mainstream just as quickly becomes subsumed in its own poisonous cliches, (thus often becoming eligible for mass production).

It is essential for any creator to want to negate and to reject, but this has to be coupled with a consummate understanding of the phenomena one seeks to reject. Otherwise, not understanding the language of negation, the object of the negating will misunderstands what is being shouted at it, and carries on regardless. I have learned to see inside every musicians head because, in order to prevent myself from being fully incorporated into any musical ghetto, I have to incorporate every musical ghetto into myself. I aspire to make music useless as a commodity i.e. a prop for the identities and personalities of the mindless; and if this is all that music constitutes in our era, then to maximise every conceivable parameter until it completely destroys itself.

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