Week of October 10, 2010

In class we watched a DVD of the making of Bjork's album Medulla, released in 2004. The album itself is composed almost entirely out of vocals. After the falling of the World Trade Center, she felt that her music needed to take a more primitive, primal style. After giving birth to Isadora, also, she wanted an album whose message was one of flesh, blood, and bone, which is where the name Medulla originated (marrow in Latin). The engineer on this project, Nigel Goodrich, had been working with Bjork on her albums for a decade before, so it was almost natural for her to choose him. Bjork knew his style of mixing (and likewise, Goodrich knew how to translate her quirkiness) and they were able to make a great album. Bjork enjoys enlisting the help of others from time to time, especially if she knows someone who can bring something to the table that she can't bring herself. Every guest artist that appeared on this album was found by surfing the web. How Bjork works (as far as I can tell) is seh puts everything that she can offer into an album. But she is also enlightened enough to know when there are others that have capabilities far from her range. One of which was Rahzel, formerly of the Roots. She hadn't heard of him before, but was looking for more percussive elements of the vocal spectrum. She resisted calling him to begin with because she felt that beat-boxing would be too easy to do, and it was less an artistic decision and more a fast solution. But, after doing all she could with Goodrich, she called him to help out on the album. His beat-boxing prowess brought a lot to the album as a whole, and even Bjork ended up enjoying the beat-boxing. Another artist she found was Dokaka, an internet sensation for his vocal covers of other artist's songs. Other guest artists included Tagaq, Mike Patton, and Shlomo. Each of these artists were picked especially for their talents, and Bjork took advantage of these talents as often as she could for the recording of Medulla. An Inuit singing game is also featured in one of the songs, where women try to recreate sounds around them and attempt to make the other woman mess up. Bjork was born in Iceland in 1965, where music is an integral part of the educational system. Everyone is brought up with a background in music, so musicians like Bjork may be more common over there than they are here in the US. She may have an extensive education in music, but during the DVD, her choice of descriptive directions never really seemed attainable, since her descriptions included making something more "waaaaah" (as she puts her hands together and apart, as if stretching something) at one point. The thing about an artist like Bjork, though, is that she has already proven herself time and time again that she knows her stuff, it's everyone else's fault that they can't understand her.