en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 60 http://www.audioscrobbler.net/data/webservices http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal The Last.fm journal for adharadhara. Last.fm journals are a place to talk about all things music. http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p2_storm_-_song_info_ Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:42:48 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p2_storm_-_song_info_ Vocal: Björk.
Programming: Leila.
Arranging & editing: Björk.
Written by Björk & Leila.
Produced by Björk.

Previously performed as "Nameless" on the Greatest Hits tour.

"on Storm Leila encrypts a virtual chorus of Björks in a dense and terrifying sheet of distorted processing which musically models the ship's malfunctioning electronics as they are short-circuited by the creeping flow of vaseline."
Press release text by Drew Daniel

2005 - Drawing Restraint 9
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p1_bath_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:40:16 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p1_bath_-_song_info Vocal: Björk.
Piano treatments: Akira Rabelais.
Arranged & edited by Björk.
Written by Björk & Akira Rabelais.
Produced by Björk.

"Bath sets Björk's lonely voice against the shivering processed textures of Akira Rabelais' computer music to produce a tactile equivalent to the film's bathing sequence"
Press release text by Drew Daniel

Björk sings over an existing song by Akira Rabelais, called 'Aposiopesis'.

2005 - Drawing Restraint 9
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p0_ambergris_march_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:37:20 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75p0_ambergris_march_-_song_info Harpsichord: Guðrún Óskarsdóttir.
Crotales, glockenspiel: Samuel Solomon.
Beat programming: Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Björk.
Arranging & editing: Björk.
Written by Björk.
Produced by Björk, Mark Bell & Valgeir Sigurðsson.

"on Ambergris March, Bell fashions a rubbery bassline out of a pattern provided by Björk and based on a traditional Japanese folkdance to celebrate the arrival of the liquid vaseline tanker into the harbor."
Press release text by Drew Daniel

2005 - Drawing Restraint 9
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75oz_gratitude_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:33:26 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75oz_gratitude_-_song_info Vocal: Will Oldham.
Celeste: Jónas Sen.
Harp: Zeena Parkins.
Programming: Valgeir Sigurðsson, Björk.
Keyboard: Nico Muhly.
Arranging & editing: Björk.
Written by Björk and Matthew Barney.
Produced by Björk.

"In the film's moving opening sequence, we hear Will Oldham sing in English the text of a letter from a Japanese citizen to General MacArthur thanking him for lifting the U.S. moratorium on whaling off the nation's coasts; this text was adapted by Matthew Barney and set to music by Björk for harp, here played by Zeena Parkins. Its delicate delivery acknowledges the folk-culture roots of whaling, while it also subtly flags the barbed history and politics surrounding its source text."
Press release written by Drew Daniel.

2005 - Drawing Restraint 9
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75oy_wednesday_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:27:17 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75oy_wednesday_-_song_info "I just nicknamed it "Miðvikudags", which means wednesday...s, it was basically because I did it on a wednesday -- sometimes you don't know what to call them, you know. This is similar to me with "Öll Birtan" -- that it's like a little interlude and maybe shows where this whole tree came from, that it's from me being 18, or even younger - being ike 10, and having two rubbish tape recorders and recording my voice into one, and then recording on the other one, the tape recorder and me, adding a voice on top, and then back, playing with a teaspoon on an ashtray or something. Kind of just back to that, and there's no words in this one either, it's just gibberish." (Björk, XFM 25,aug 04)

Performed by Björk
Programming: Björk, Jake Davies

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75ox_mouth%27s_cradle_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:23:09 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75ox_mouth%27s_cradle_-_song_info "Obviously the line about Osamas and Bushes was a bad joke. But I guess it's sort of partly true, because it insterests me a lot with western civilization, that someone as passionate as Osama could be such a threat, and it seemed to me at times to be almost passion versus logic. I found it really interesteing that it could be so un-understandable for some people that somebody would do something like that, and how unaware the western civilization were of how annoying they are sometimes -- I'm obviously not justifying what he did. But after that, it just totally took over - it was all about arabs and americans, and if you were pro or against or whatever. It just seems curious to me, where obviously both were right and wrong. It seems like the whole world has been talking about it for the last three years, not only me. All unbelievable people are suddenly interested in politics. And maybe me in the end wanting my music to offer something else, and saying I want to look for a shelter with an altar away from the Osamas and Bushes. And maybe these politicians think that they are 95% of our lives and that we should all just worry about if Bush gets re-elected or not and what's gonna happen to the muslims or whatever. And I think it's about 5% important, and 95% is like... children going to school, the latest breakdancer, people starving and people losing their jobs and people telling awful jokes, and all these other stuff, you know. People in space, and jellyfishes in the ocean having affairs with other jellyfishes. I'm inventing marinal soap operas here, sorry. But there's just a lot of other stuff, and it just got boring after a while. So maybe this record is partly an attept to say "wait a minute, there's other stuff out there you know". That's it." (Björk, XFM 25,aug 04)

Performed by Björk and Tagaq with the The Icelandic Choir
Beats: Rahzel
Bass synth: Mark Bell
Programming: Björk, Valgeir Sigurdsson, Mark Bell

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75ow_ancestors_-_song_info Sat, 15 Dec 2007 20:17:11 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/15/b75ow_ancestors_-_song_info Performed by Björk and Tagaq
Piano and programming: Björk

"'Ancestors' was one of the last titles to come. I kept calling it 'Piano II', 'cause I did some piano experiments and this was one of them, it was a working title. In the end when I was naming the record 'Medúlla' and tried to work out what was missing, maybe it was the pagan element and the element about this record that is going back to the roots - before time, or civilization, or religion, or patriotism. Because most of the time I'm looking forward and I want to enter the unknown and get as techno as possible, but maybe this album was a bit different, because it's about me going back to when I'm 18, before I did all the work i've done - and also me going two thousand years back, in my head, anyway - to some cave where people sit together with long hair, naked, and they sing disco music or something." (Björk, XFM 25, aug 04)

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ov_sonnets__unrealities_xi_-_song_info Fri, 7 Dec 2007 22:23:47 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ov_sonnets__unrealities_xi_-_song_info Performed by Björk with The Icelandic Choir
Based on a poem by E.E. Cummings called "It may not always be so"

"Basically, there's 'Sonnets', and they have many unrealities, and this is reality number 11. It's like a chunk of poems, and this is one of them. It's kind of him taking the piss of himself, when you make up things that scare you out of nowhere - you're just paranoid. In this particular case it's about him being madly in love with a girl, things are totally euphoric and couldn't be more perfect, and then his mind starts playing games on him. He starts imagining, what if, in five years time or something, she sould meet someone else, and how he would deal with that. He asks his girlfriend then; in five years time, when she meets and falls in love with someone else, and will smell his hair and kiss him and be naked with him and all these things - could she please tell him gently, and then he would go up to her new lover and wish him good luck with his new girlfriend, take his hand and wish him all the happiness in the world, and then walk away. It's sort of "how hard can you make it on yourself", you know? I just think it was sort of funny, because it happens - the few times in your life when you feel you've got it right, your mind start going off on "what happens if this goes wrong?" and this feeling of carrying a chinese vase across a motorway... "oh it's definitely gonna break, I know it's gonna break", and you make it up in your head when everything is actually OK." (Björk, XFM 25, aug 04)

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/

Sonnets
Unrealities XI]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ou_oceania_-_song_info Fri, 7 Dec 2007 22:12:39 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ou_oceania_-_song_info Performed by Björk with the London Choir
Beats: Shlomo
Piano: Nico Muhly
Vocal samples: Robert Wyatt
Programmed by: Björk, Mark Bell, Valgeir Sigurdsson

This song was premiered at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

"Basically, the Olympics people asked me to do a kind of 'Ebony and Ivory' or 'We Are the World' type song. Those are smashing tunes and all that, but I thought, 'Maybe there's another angle to this.' When I tried to write an Olympic lyric, though, it was full of sports socks and ribbons. I ended up pissing myself laughing." Björk decided to call on Sjón Sigurdsson, Icelandic poet and previous lyrics-collaborator. Needing something epic, Sjón took a course in Greek mythology, and then wrote these lyrics for 'Oceania', a kind of aquatic sojourn and the last song recorded for Medúlla. "The Olympic version will be a little different. But it will fit the occasion, I think, because the song is all about how the ocean doesn't see boundaries between countries and thinks everyone is the same. Sjón came up with this beautiful last line that touches on how we were all little jellyfish or whatever before we made it on to land. He has The Sea saying, 'Your sweat is salty / And I am why / Your sweat is salty / And I am why.'" (Björk 13 Aug 2004)

"It was good discipline of me [to try to not use beatboxers], because it made me do a lot of other things for rhythms, like including me and Mike Patton and people that aren't beatboxers at all, trying to do rhythms, patterns and beats - trying to come around it the other way. Even the beatboxers told me that they had never worked like that before, so I had them too go out of their normal way to do things. That was good. I kept Oceania til last, because I wanted to do it especially for the Olympics. It wasn't til the last day of mixing that I though - oh! I need the sirenes, if the Greek mythology! So we called up an English choir, and we got 16 women. I had done an arrangement for piano on the computer that was insane, impossible for a piano to play, and I got them to sing that, a bit like sirenes. Then I called up Shlomo, who was recommended to me as the new bright hope of the hiphop scene. He came the next day and I asked him to do a techno tango beat - which he did. That was the most fun part, in the end. Sometimes it's good for you to work with a gun against your head and just go for it, because you can sometimes sit too long with ideas. Sometimes adrenaline is a good thing." (Björk, XFM 25, aug 04)

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/]]> http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ot_desired_constallation_-_song_info Fri, 7 Dec 2007 22:09:26 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/adharadhara/journal/2007/12/07/b75ot_desired_constallation_-_song_info Performed by Björk with The Icelandic Choir
Programming: Olivier Alary

"Olivier Alary (Ensemble) had sent me a CD with a few sketches, and said "if you ever feel like using those, please do." A year later, I wrote this melody and was singing it in a cabin by a lake here in Iceland in january 2004. That was like the first little trips away from my little girl - I would go three hours a day to this cabin by the lake and do whatever I could and then drive back to town. I would sing several versions of this melody, and then I would say "wait a minute, this is this thing that Olivier gave me a year ago" so then I sang it to that and it fitted perfect together, it was really incredible! Then when I came back from the tour and discovered that the whole album was gonna be a vocal album, I thought "wait a minute, what about this song here, I really like this song and it should be on the album". So I started doing choir arrangements for it. I did a really complicated choir arrangement, for like a sixteen piece choir, and recorded it three times doing totally different things, and it was like 50 tracks of voices, but it just wasn't right, so I kept editing it on and spent like days and weeks editing it, and it never was right. Then I emailed Olivier and said "Listen, I've tried everything with this track, but I can't just be dogmatic about this album. At the end of the day, the best music's gotta win. So I think I'm just gonna stick to your old version, because I think that's still the best one." And then he just said "Guess what! I made it out of your own voice!" So he actually took a voice of mine, saying "I'm not sure what to do with it" from Hidden Place and did a song out of that! And then he sent it it to me, and didn't tell me, just in case I didn't .. you know, whatever... it was just a secret!" (Björk - Mixing It, 20,aug 04)

2004 - Medúlla
> http://www.bjork.com/facts/lyrics/]]>