Homogenic

Robed in silver satin, luminous against iridescent grey, Björk stares out as us from the cover of Homogenic. Filigreed flowers crawl across the background like frost crystals, mimicking the embroidery on her gown. The Alexander McQueen-designed garment looks vaguely Japanese, with a kimono-like sash; her elongated neck is wrapped in rings reminiscent of those worn by tribes in Burma and South Africa, while her pursed, painted lips smack of Pierrot. Behind narrowed lids, her eyes glaze like camera lenses. The longer you stare into those enormous black pupils, the more adrift you begin to feel. Beneath two tombstone-shaped slabs of hair, she appraises us coldly, her expression unreadable. She might as well be made of wax—or marble.

After the dewy naturalism of Debut’s sepia-toned portrait and the bullet-train rush of Post’s blurry postcard from the edge, McQueen and Nick Knight’s Homogenic cover showed Björk in a way viewers had never seen her before: at once ancient and futuristic, elegant and severe, part warrior queen and part cyborg—a picture of near-perfect symmetry rendered in colors of ice and obsidian and blood. The album followed suit. Trading the playful eclecticism of Debut and Post for distorted, hardscrabble electronic drums and warm, melancholy strings, it showcased a newly focused side of the musician while embracing all of her most provocative contradictions.

By 1997, when she released Homogenic, Björk had been a familiar face to pop fans for a decade. The Icelandic singer and composer had first appeared on many listeners’ radars in 1987, when the Sugarcubes’ surprise hit “Birthday” made actual stars out of a quintet whose entire raison d'être had been to lampoon pop. (Her countrymen, meanwhile, had been listening to her since 1977, when she recorded her debut album—a collection of covers translated into Icelandic along with a few original songs, including an instrumental written by Björk herself— at the tender age of 11.)

After a few whirlwind years with the band, she struck out on her own with 1993’s Debut, enlisting Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul and Massive Attack to co-produce the album. It was a clean break, trading the Sugarcubes’ jangly alt-rock for the electronic sounds then coming out of the UK: house beats and basslines, trip-hop atmospheres, and the rippling textures of experimental techno, which she fleshed out with orchestral strings, big-band jazz, and a smattering of world music. Surprising even her record label, which scrambled to manufacture enough records to keep up with demand, it went all the way to No. 3 on the UK albums chart. On this side of the pond, some listeners were less thrilled with her new, electronic direction: Rolling Stone carped that Hooper had “sabotaged a
 ferociously iconoclastic talent with a phalanx of cheap electronic gimmickry,” adding, “Björk’s singular skills cry out for genuine band chemistry, and instead she gets Hooper’s Euro art-school schlock.”

Björk paid no heed to critics (including fellow Sugarcube Þór Eldon, now also her ex-husband) who were dismissive of her burgeoning interest in electronic music. Moving from Iceland to London, she threw herself into UK dance music, soaking up its club culture and collaborating with 808 State’s Graham Massey, Tricky, Howie B, and Talvin Singh, among others. She may have come to electronic music as an outsider, but she had good instincts: For remixes, she avoided the usual suspects in favor of some of the most adventurous artists on the scene: the Black Dog, Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise, the junglist Dillinja, even Mika Vainio, aka Ø, of Finland’s scorched-earth analog noiseniks Pan Sonic. Today, the material gathered on her early remix collections—1996’s Telegram and also the lesser-known, cleverly (if not at all succinctly) titled The Best Mixes From the Album Debut for All the People Who Don't Buy White-Labels—holds up far better than the vast majority of remixes from that era, keenly balancing the songs’ essences with a restless experimental spirit.

Part of that is because Björk never saw remixes as a simple marketing gimmick: Her youthful study of classical music had taught her to think of remixes as a contemporary iteration of the longstanding concept of theme-and-variations. “When I think of that word remix, it’s recycled, like trash,” she told Rolling Stone. “But for me, the word remix means ‘alternative version.’ It is just another word… for a variation. It’s like Bach—his symphonies were not completely written out so every time he played them, they would be different.”

Björk’s unconventional instincts and her keen understanding of the hidden links between classical and experimental electronic music—she had interviewed Stockhausen the year before, in fact—guided her on Homogenic, as strange and uncompromising an album as pop music has produced. From the album’s opening bars, it’s clear that she’s on to something new. Björk’s approach to electronic music had never been conventional, but it had generally been tuneful, and her beats tended to keep one foot tapping in time to house music’s reassuring thump. Not so “Hunter,” which bobs atop fluttering, fibrillating kicks and snares, its reversed accordion glistening like an oil slick. Aphex Twin had toured as Björk’s opener after Post, and you can hear his rhythmic influence across the album: in the filtered breakbeats of “Jóga,” “Bachelorette,” and “5 Years”; the resonant zaps of “All Neon Like”; and the buzzing, headlong stomp of “Pluto.” (The engineer Markus Dravs assisted in the beat-making, as did LFO’s Mark Bell, who co-produced much of the album.) Throughout, drums crunch and sizzle, throwing up little clouds of dust with every impact. And with the exception of the relatively frictionless skip of “Alarm Call,” her beats are far more kinetic than most programmed rhythms, twitching and flexing like fistfuls of cellophane curling open.

After the stylistic zigzags of her first two albums, Björk was determined to create something more focused. “This is more like one flavor,” she told SPIN of the album. “Me in one state of mind. One period of obsessions. That’s why I called it Homogenic.” The working title, in fact, was Homogenous. The Icelandic String Octet, performing Eumir Deodato’s arrangements along with string parts she had written herself, was the glue that held it all together. The result is a strange, captivating mix of impulses, with seesawing drones exploding into lush, neo-classical passages. You can hear the influence of the Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt, whom Björk had interviewed for the BBC the year before, on the slow, elegiac string harmonies of “Unravel”; conversely, the cut-up harp and strings of “All Is Full of Love” faintly mimic the burbling pulses of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. “Even though my arrangements are quite experimental, I’m very conservative when it comes to song structure,” she told SPIN. “So it’s this beautiful relationship between complete discipline and complete freedom."

Many artists have attempted to fuse dance music’s rhythms with classical instrumentation; recently, between events like Haçienda Classical (a pops take on the hallowed Manchester dance-music institution) and Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra’s Ibiza Classics, the concept seems resurgent. But endeavors like those, and even Jeff Mills’ more highbrow attempts at orchestral techno, nearly always fail; it turns out that DIY electronic dance music and classical orchestras, a format that has barely evolved in over 100 years, are largely incompatible. Björk succeeded where so many others have failed by weaving the two inextricably together into an undulating fabric as flexible and as durable as Kevlar, processing the strings until it’s impossible to tell where the silicon ends and the catgut begins. You can hear the influence she exerted upon a young Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, who would go on to collaborate with her on 2015’s Vulnicura; his own music’s viscous textures and mutating forms would be unthinkable without the example set by Homogenic.

Blanketing the album’s electronic elements like a heavy layer of snow, Homogenic’s strings give the album a somewhat monochrome palette; it’s a dense listen, and in songs like “Jóga” and “Bachelorette” there’s not a lot of breathing room. But those rolling, subtly shaded contours periodically give way to jagged crags and extreme contrasts. This was not accidental: The album was meant as a kind of sound-portrait of her native Iceland. Björk envisioned beats “like rough volcanoes with soft moss growing all over it,” recalls Markus Dravs, whose percussive sketches formed the rhythmic foundation for her songwriting. “I wanted Homogenic to reflect where I’m from, what I’m about,” Björk told MTV. “Imagine if there was Icelandic techno! Iceland is one of the youngest countries geographically—it’s still in the making, so the sounds would be still in the making.”

Many of Björk’s collaborators over the years have discussed her tendency to describe music in unusually synaesthetic terms: Despite her intensive formal schooling in music—she began studying music at five, and was introduced to the work of modernist composers like Messiaen and Cage while still very young—her studio vocabulary, when she’s trying to get a point across, leans toward terms like “more angular” or “pink and fluffy.” So it’s hardly surprising that she would take formal inspiration from Iceland’s steaming geysers, igneous formations, and other geological features that lend themselves especially well to the visceral textures and rhythms of late-’90s electronica.

But there were also more personal reasons for her shift of focus. After years in London, she had become homesick for the land of her birth. She had traded a country with a population of fewer than 265,000 people for a city of some six million; not only that, she had been through hell and back in the years leading up to the album’s creation. A string of relationships with high-profile artists—the photographer Stephane Sednaoui, Tricky, jungle producer Goldie—had all fizzled. A physical altercation with a journalist outside Bangkok’s international airport had landed her in tabloids all around the world. And in September, 1996, a 21-year-old Miami pest control worker named Ricardo Lopez, furious about her relationship with Goldie—unbeknownst to him, they had actually broken up just days before—assembled a sulfuric acid bomb in a hollowed-out book and mailed it to Björk’s management before locking himself in his apartment, putting a loaded revolver in his mouth, and pulling the trigger, all in front of a video camera while Björk’s “I Remember You” played in the background. Police managed to intercept the device with no further casualties, but Björk was left shaken—concerned for her ability to protect those closest to her, including her son, and conflicted about her own openness with her fans. Returning to Iceland for the Christmas holidays, as she did every year, she fell under the island’s sway. Inspired by the country’s landscape, she became determined to make music that expressed a geological essence that was as raw as her own nerves.

You don’t need to know any of these details to connect with Homogenic, however; its emotional impact far transcends the biographical footnotes of its making. Lyrically, the record picks up themes she had already explored on her previous two albums—loneliness; sexual desire; desperate, even defiant love; the feeling of being a fish out of water—but her writing is more vivid than ever before. “I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl,” she bellows in “Bachelorette,” and later, “I’m a path of cinders/Burning under your feet.” The song is a kind of epic saga, and Björk has explained that it forms the third part of a loose trilogy with “Human Behaviour” and “Isobel”—a sort of Bildungsroman about Björk’s own adventures in the wider world.

Many lyrics take place as internal monologues grappling with her own contradictions. “How Scandinavian of me!” she yelps on “Hunter,” a desperate ode to self-empowerment, chiding herself for having believed she could “organize freedom.” (To Icelandic people, she later explained, Swedes and Danes are hopelessly regimented.) The distorted, minor-key “5 Years” is lovelorn and angry—for anyone who has ever been stuck in a dysfunctional relationship, is there a more relatable lyric than “You can’t handle love”?—while “Immature” channels broken-heartedness into a kind of empowering self-reprimand (“How could I be so immature/To think he could replace/The missing elements in me?/How extremely lazy of me!”). Despite the self-flagellation, it’s a quiet, tender song, with a beat carved out of a sigh; its twinkling arpeggios sound like a dry run for Vespertine.

When love turns up on this album, it is almost always something that is over or absent—a missed signal, a sailed ship. But she makes real poetry out of these small, bitter tragedies, and she occasionally even finds hope in them. In the soft, delicate “Unravel,” she sings of her heart unraveling like a ball of yarn while her lover is away. The Devil promptly steals it: “He’ll never return it/So when you come back/We’ll have to make new love,” she sings, in a strangely affecting conceit about the fickleness and resilience of love.

But the main theme running through the album is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime. “State of emergency/Is where I want to be” she sings on “Jóga,” a song dedicated to her close friend and tour masseuse, in which churning breakbeats and slowly bowed strings mediate between lava flows and Björk’s own musculature—a kind of Rosetta Stone linking geology and the heart. “Alarm Call,” the closest thing on the album to a club hit (the Alan Braxe and Ben Diamond remix, in fact, is a storming breakbeat house anthem) shouts down doubt with the indomitable line, “You can’t say no to hope/Can’t say no to happiness,” as Björk professes her desire to climb a mountain “with a radio and good batteries” and “Free the human race/ From suffering.”

If you’re looking for catharsis, you won’t find better than the album’s final, three-song stretch: Following “Alarm Call” comes the incensed “Pluto”: “Excuse me/But I just have to/Explode/Explode this body off me,” she sings, launching into an ascending procession of wordless howls as buzzing synthesizers flash like emergency beacons. Finally, the quiet after the storm: The soft, beatless “All Is Full of Love,” a downy bed of harp and processed strings. The title is self-explanatory, the lyrics wide-eyed, nearly liturgical. It is a song about ecstasy, about oneness, about infinite possibility—and about letting go.

Björk’s voice is, without question, the life force of this music. You can hear her finding a new confidence on “Unravel”: The edge of her voice is as jagged as the lid of a tin can, her held tones as slick as black ice. A diligent student could try to transcribe her vocals the way jazz obsessives used to notate Charlie Parker’s solos, and you’d still come up short; the physical heft and malleability of her voice outstrips language.

Videos had long been an important part of Björk’s work, but they became especially crucial in building out the world of Homogenic. Compared to the sprawling list of collaborators on her first two records, she had pared down to a skeleton crew for this album; working with an array of different directors, though, allowed her to amplify her creative vision.

Chris Cunningham used “All Is Full of Love” as the springboard for a tender, and erotic, look at robot love. Michel Gondry turned “Bachelorette” into a meta-narrative about Björk’s own conflicted relationship with fame—an epic saga turned into a set of Russian nesting dolls. Another Gondry video, for “Jóga,” used CGI to force apart tectonic plates and reveal the earth’s glowing mantle below. At the end of the video, Björk stands on a rock promontory, prying open a hole in her chest—a pre-echo of the vulvic opening she will wear on the cover of Vulnicura—to reveal the Icelandic landscape dwelling inside her. In Paul White’s video for “Hunter,” a shaven-headed Björk sprouts strange, digital appendages, eventually turning into an armored polar bear, as she flutters her lids and wildly contorts her expression—a vision of human emotion as liquid mercury. Her use of different versions of her songs for several of these videos also contributed to the idea that the work was larger than any one recording—that these songs were boundless.

Björk’s initial idea for Homogenic was to be an unusual experiment in stereo panning. She imagined using just strings and beats and voice—strings in the left channel, beats in the right channel, and the voice in the middle.

It’s kind of a genius idea: an interactive, self-remixable album, a sort of one-disc Zaireeka, that goes to the heart of the dichotomies that have always made Björk—theorist and dreamer, daughter of a hippie activist and a union electrician—such a dynamic character. And while it’s easy to see why the concept never came to fruition—there’s no way such a gimmick could have yielded an album as richly layered as Homogenic turned out to be—it turns out to have been a prescient idea: the direct antecedent to Vulnicura Strings, which excised the drums and electronic elements of Vulnicura and focused on voice and strings alone.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see the way that Homogenic paves the way for later career triumphs like Vespertine and Vulnicura: In its formal audacity and sustained emotional intensity, it represents a phase shift from Debut and Post, fine though they were. Björk’s personality has seen her seesaw between extremes throughout her catalog, and after the shadowy intensity of Homogenic, Vespertine would end up a softer, gentler record. (Björk has said that she envisions “All Is Full of Love” as “the first song on Vespertine.”) Created in the glow of her nascent relationship with Matthew Barney, it is the domestic album, the comfort album, the beach-house-weekend album. But Homogenic is the one that complicated the picture of Björk, that threw aside big-time sensuality in favor of more volatile forces, revealed a glimpse of her deepest self for the first time.