Wednesday 21 November 2018

BJÖRK GUÐMUNDSDÓTTIR: ICELANDIC PAGAN POETRY

Björk Guðmundsdóttir
What have in common Tonyi Tamaki, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma?

Lots of things. One of them is their passion for Björk the amazing Icelandic singer-songwriter. They admire her music and they declare themselves as big fans and followers.

Today, they have met to homage Björk on her birthday and to share their admiration about her and her music.

Before the meeting, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her
Elementary Language Practice manual (Checkpoint 3 & Grammar 19).

Björk Guðmundsdóttir, born 21 November 1965, is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, actress, record producer, and DJ. Over her four-decade career, she has developed an eclectic musical style that draws on a range of influences and genres spanning electronic, pop, experimental, classical, trip hop, IDM, and avant-garde music, while collaborating with a range of artists and exploring a variety of multimedia projects.

Born and raised in Reykjavík, she began her music career at age 11 and first gained international recognition as the lead singer of the alternative rock band the Sugarcubes, whose 1987 single Birthday was a hit on US and UK indie stations and a favorite among music critics.


Homogenic by Björk & Tonyi Tamaki
After the band's breakup, Björk embarked on a solo career in 1993 with the pop albums Debut and Post (1995). Initially being branded as a pixie by press, she boldly changed her artistic direction with the 1997 album Homogenic, adopting a much darker sound and image. Her follow up albums, Vespertine (2001) and Medúlla (2004), were much more toned down in nature, described by Björk herself as more introverted.

Several of Björk's albums have reached the top 20 on the Billboard 200 chart, the most recent being Vulnicura (2015). Björk has had 31 singles reach the top 40 on pop charts around the world, with 22 top 40 hits in the UK, including the top 10 hits It's Oh So Quiet, Army of Me, and Hyperballad. She is reported to have sold between 20 and 40 million records worldwide as of 2015. She has won the 2010 Polar Music Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in recognition of her deeply personal music and lyrics, her precise arrangements and her unique voice


More information: Björk Official Website

Björk was included in Time's 2015 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was ranked both sixtieth and eighty-first in Rolling Stone's 100 greatest singers and songwriters lists respectively. Björk also won five BRIT Awards, and has been nominated for 14 Grammy Awards.

Outside her music career, she starred in the 2000 Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark. She won the Best Actress Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award for her soundtrack contribution, I've Seen It All. Her 2011 album Biophillia was marketed as an interactive app album with its own education program.

Vulnicura by Björk & Claire Fontaine
Björk has also been an advocate for environmental causes in her home country Iceland. A full-scale retrospective exhibition dedicated to Björk was held at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2015.

Over her three-decade solo career, Björk has developed an eclectic and avant-garde musical style that incorporates aspects of electronic, dance, alternative dance, trip hop, xperimental, glitch, jazz, alternative rock, instrumental, and contemporary classical music. er music has since been subject to critical analysis and scrutiny, as she consistently defies categorization in a musical genre.

Although she often calls herself a pop artist, she is considered a restlessly experimental creative force. Her album Debut, which incorporated electronic, house, jazz, and trip hop, has been credited as one of the first albums to introduce electronic music into mainstream pop. Her work has been described as frequently exploring the relationship between nature and technology.

More information: Björk-Instagram

Broadly summarizing her wide-ranging integration of art and popular music, was suggested that there is no better descriptor for what Björk does than artpop. She is considered an important figure of the genre, having been variously referred to as the high priestess of art-pop, art-pop queen, and art-pop boss. She has also been referred to as a shimmering shining beacon in progressive pop over the last 25 years while in 2005, the NME called her output a consistently progressive pop agenda.

Björk's work is idiosyncratically collaborative, having worked with various producers, photographers, fashion designers and music video directors. This, however, has sometimes led to the lack of acknowledgment of auteurship in her music, something Björk attributes to being a woman.


Vespertine by Björk & The Grandma
During her career beginnings, Björk performed in bands from various musical genres: punk rock in Spit and Snot, jazz fusion in Exodus, post-punk in Tappi Tíkarrass and gothic rock in Kukl.

When working with Tappi Tíkarrass, she was heavily influenced by British new wave bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Wire, The Passions, The Slits, Joy Division, and Killing Joke.

The studio album Gling-Gló (1990) was recorded with Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar and featured jazz and popular standards sung very much in the classic Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan mould. The Sugarcubes' style has been described as avant-pop and alternative rock.

Björk's influences have been described as diverse as those she inspires. For his biography of her, Björk told Mark Pytlik: If I were to say who influenced me most, I would say people like Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Mark Bell. Some confessional singer-songwriters Björk commends include Abida Parveen, Chaka Khan, Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, the latter being a definitive influence in her career.


Björk has a soprano vocal range spanning from E3 to D6, which has been described as both elastic and somersaulting in quality as well as having been praised for her scatting ability, unique vocal stylings and delivery.

More information: The Björk Community 

Björk's years in Kukl aligned her with the anarchist Crass Collective. While she has since been hesitant to be seen as an overtly political figure, and has said so on her website, she is strongly supportive of numerous liberation movements across the globe, including support for independence for Kosovo.

She dedicated her song Declare Independence to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which caused a minor controversy in the Faroes. When Björk twice dedicated Declare Independence to the people of Kosovo during a concert in Japan, a planned performance of hers was cancelled at Serbia's Exit Festival, reportedly due to safety concerns. In 2008, Björk created international controversy after she dedicated Declare Independence to the Tibet freedom movement during a Shanghai concert, chanting Tibet! Tibet! during the song.

In 2014, Björk made a Facebook post dedicating the song to the people of Scotland as they neared the referendum on their independence that year

In October 2017, she posted a tweet dedicating the song to Catalonia on account of the Catalan independence referendum.

More information: Guide to Iceland


 For a person as obsessed with music as I am, 
I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, 
and that usually is my own tune. I've done that all my life. 

Björk

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