![]() Here’s one we should have really seen coming, as the pairing of helium-voiced Antony Hegarty and Björk was surely inevitable. ![]() Raczynski’s demo version (retitled the ‘Shooting Stars & Asteroids Mix’) eventually made its way to vinyl in 2005, and now stands as a curious reminder of what could have been. Sadly that never actually happened, and that version of ‘Who Is It’ was alarmingly missing from the album’s final release. When Björk calmly dropped the demo of ‘Who Is It’ on her website prior to the release of 2004’s Medúlla, plenty of us assumed that Rephlex-signed breakcore weirdo Bogdan Raczynski would have a hand in the majority of the album’s production. ‘Who Is It (Shooting Stars & Asteroids Mix)’ Singing a prayer from the Eastern Orthodox church, Björk is stretched to her limit, singing in three languages – Greek, Coptic and English – and flitting from soaring soprano into half-spoken passages and guttural, almost primitive howls. ‘Prayer of the Heart’ was written for Björk by the late British composer John Tavener, whose strong feeling for religious mysticism found a powerful vehicle in the singer’s elastic voice. Though they later tried to recreate the practice take in the studio, they couldn’t recapture its spontaneous charm, and it’s that first attempt you’ll hear on Glennie’s album. “This piece, with all the pops, rattles and other unrefined noises, shows that this was a totally spontaneous effort – without ‘make-up’ or doctoring of any kind,” Glennie explained. (from Evelyn Glennie: Her Greatest Hits, RCA, 1997)ījörk’s dalliances with the classical world have been as unorthodox as you’d expect from someone who once laid an egg on the red carpet, choosing to work with unusual outliers like deaf Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie. ‘Oxygen’ was their first collaboration, recorded in 1995 just a few hours after their initial meeting. ‘Keep Your Mouth Shut’ splices lyrics from Björk’s ‘You’ve Been Flirting Again’ with discordant, industrial clanks pinched from Das EFX’s ‘Hold it Down’, and what should be an ugly collision emerges as a gorgeous, disarming meeting of minds and sounds. The pair were an item romantically (something which Tricky spoke about soberly in his 2013 interview with FACT’s Joseph Morpurgo), and also managed to rack up a healthy amount of musical collaborations, two of which made it to Tricky’s “collection of brilliant demos” released under the alias Nearly God. ‘Kata-Rokkar’ is up there with her strongest, most avant-garde vocal performances check the middle section and trying singing that into your hairbrush.įor a time Tricky was a charged influence on both Björk’s musical direction and personal life. While the instrumentation of Gling-Gló is fairly pedestrian, the album’s selection of original songs and jazz standards (sung in Icelandic) is lifted into the stratosphere by Björk’s powerhouse voice. A collection of folksy sing-along songs filtered through the synth-led Eurodisco of the day and a smattering of hippy-dippy orientalism, the record showcases Björk’s flute talents and already idiosyncratic vocal style, littered with exuberantly rolled Rs and bold excursions into her upper range.ījörk Guðmundsdóttir & Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonarįans of her brash, brassy take on ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ should know that there’s an entire album of jazzy Björk in the archive, recorded in 1990 as a Sugarcubes side project. After you.ĭespite its reputation as juvenilia, Björk’s very first album is a must-hear for anyone with a taste for oddball reissues of the Finders Keepers variety. Not everything with Björk’s unique stamp on it has stood the test of time, mind – for every glittering ‘Unravel’ there’s a tired-sounding IDM remix or three, and with that in mind we’ve donned our waders and ventured into the depths of her sprawling back catalogue to pick out the 10 deep cuts and hidden gems that deserve to be put back in the spotlight. In 2011, she wrapped up her gargantuan, multi-platform Biophilia album project, and now appears to be enjoying a bit of a breather after nearly four decades at the avant-pop coalface. She’s lent her multi-octave voice to classical composers, dance producers, film directors and fine artists, and worked with everyone from David Attenborough to Dave Longstreth, from junglists and trip-hoppers to the anonymous scruffs of Sheffield’s electronic scene. We all know the big hits – but what are the lesser known tracks in her back catalogue that have been cruelly overlooked?ījörk’s official Debut came out in 1993, but in those intervening years Björk strayed into punk, jazz, goth, pop and house through dozens of projects and collaborations, soaking up the sundry ideas that would fuel her 20-year (and counting) career as a solo star. The incomparable Björk Guðmundsdóttir released her first album as a precocious, flute-toting 12-year-old, and has barely stopped innovating since.
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