Inspecting the inner mechanics of her television set, Björk’s face lit up with wonder. “It looks like a little model of a city, all the houses and trees, and here are the wires, they really take care of all the electrons…” It was 1988, and Björk was two years removed from the dissolution of her gothy post-punk band KUKL, which released music on the UK punk label Crass. But as the lead singer of art-rock tricksters the Sugarcubes, she still looked the part. In the interview clip, Björk explains that an Icelandic poet once made her painfully afraid of her television—a TV program can hypnotize you, the poet said, going “directly into your brain and you stop judging if it’s right or not, you just swallow and swallow.” When she read the scientific truth about television in a Danish book, she was much more calm. As the segment concludes, Björk looks into the camera: “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
Not unlike the music Björk would proceed to make—going solo with 1993’s Debut—the effect of this footage is a little bemusing, quite soothing, entirely spellbinding. Björk is fearless, funny, slyly political, absurd. She is drawing an unlikely intersection of technology and intimacy, embodying what would become her eternal promise: It is possible to be both weird and understood.
By her second record, 1995’s Post, Björk had become well-acquainted with the bustling cosmopolitan energy of cities. She had relocated from Iceland to London in the early 1990s as a 27-year-old mother of a 6-year-old son, but her Arctic home was always with her. Björk attended music school in Reykjavík from ages 5 to 14—her precocious introduction to experimental electronic composers such as Stockhausen and John Cage—and released her first album at 11; her “hardcore hippie” mother did the psychedelic cover art.
But nature was her ultimate teacher. Björk said Iceland itself, not other singers, shaped her voice. It is an extreme landscape of glaciers and volcanoes, of barrenness and eruptions, endless daylight in summer and mostly darkness in winter. Walking 40 minutes to school, a young Björk entertained herself by singing: sneaking down to the moss on the ground to whisper a verse, running up a hill to unleash a chorus loudly against the wind. Björk absorbed the peaks and valleys, light and dark, twists and turns of her reality, arriving nowhere conventional. When she sang in accordance to the moss and the hills, perhaps it was a result of studying Cage in school: music was everywhere.