Bjork collaborates with many different artists. For the album Medulla, she worked with a variety of artists from different part of the world. This interested me a lot, seeing as she did much of her work on her own in the earlier days. I think she is very culturally aware, she thought to incorporate many different styles of music into this project. Bjork used the Icelandic and English languages for the lyrics in this record. A few places she went for the recordings of this album were New York, Iceland, and Brazil. Medulla is a concept album, meaning it revolves around a particular idea or concept – in Bjork’s case this was to be an “all vocals” album. Back when she was a teenager she always knew that she was going to do a vocal album, but she wanted to wait until the right time and the right place. Razhel is a famous artist that has an incredible beat-boxing talent. Bjork heard of/met Razhel in New York came invited him to do work on the album. It was really cool how he made a bass drum sound with the throat, in the pattern of a rhythm that resembled a heartbeat in a song. Mark Bell programmed some electronic beats that eventually became the beats that Razhel imitated with his skills. She worked with Mike Patton because he’s from the rock background, a very experimental, open-minded, and a good guy to work with. Bjork felt she had done all she could do by herself, and started to begin with to work with an engineer and incorporate other peoples’ voices. Voices emulating the land, or animals, or whatever is going on at the time. *The Inuit culture is one that lives in extreme weather conditions in places like Canada, in the northern and southern Arctics, northern Russia and Alaska. These people have to use the environment around them and the resources there (which are minimal) to sustain life. The September 11th tragedy got her thinking and invoked the idea of primitive elements: Back in the day, we didn’t have all of the convenient resources we have available to us today. One of the only things we are born with as humans is a voice, and she wanted to express that we can use what primal resources we might have to create the things we invision. I think Bjork is inspired by this, in that she mentioned she wanted to have an album that contained “blood, bones and meat”, or in other words, all sounds will be derived from human expression. She had made a collection of hundreds of voices and effects, but she only ended up using a few! Despite the technological capacity we have today, Bjork and other artists are making killer sounding records with a DIGI888 interface that is only 16 bit, 44.1KHz. At the time of conceptualizing the album, Bjork wasn’t focused on lyrics at first. Reading through her diary that she had written, she felt that words wouldn’t be as important as the message and emotion that human breaths, noises, and voices are capable of creating. As she gathered more and more vocal tracks, she became more conscious of how the voices were fitting in with each other, and their relationships with one another. Nigel Godrich has produced many albums, including Radiohead’s OK Computer, and has mentioned in an interview that he may dream of producing Bjork, but she’s already so interesting in her own way. Spike Stent produced Bjork’s first album Homogenic, and helped out on the production of Medulla. During the recording process, Bjork wears many different hats. Not only is she the inventor of the concept, and the mastermind behind the production and composition, she acts as a conductor and an engineer. She also acts as a translator when trying to describe to someone the sound that she is looking for.
The Mexican food was great ;)
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