(Siguiendo con el mes de los plagios, una entrevista con Bjork para el New York Times. Este es el link, que tiene algunos pedazos de entrevista en formato audio.)
I READ on the Internet that I was doing a hip-hop album with Timbaland,” Bjork said, and giggled. Timbaland, the producer whose splintered beats have propelled some of the best current hip-hop, collaborated with Bjork for three songs on “Volta” (Elektra), her first album of more-or-less pop songs since “Medulla” in 2004. But Bjork being Bjork, “Volta” is no hip-hop album.
Bjork, 41, describes “Volta” as “techno voodoo,” “pagan,” “tribal” and “extroverted.” Those words barely sum up an album that mingles programmed beats, free-jazz drumming, somber brass ensembles, African music, a Chinese lute and Bjork’s ever-volatile voice. It’s a 21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the personal and the global. “This relentless restlessness liberates me,” Bjork sings in “Wanderlust,” which she calls the album’s manifesto. “I feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me.”
She was on more familiar ground a few weeks ago, giving an interview in the recording studio at her house in Rockland County, N.Y. It’s an odd-angled room with fuzzy pink walls and a view of trees leading to a glimpse of the Hudson River far below. Dressed all in red, with her hair up in puffs on each side of her head, she looked like an Icelandic cartoon elf. She was adding some final mixing touches and sound-effects transitions to the album, and there was a song left to finish. The next day she would visit a New York City studio to record some French horns, seeking a sound for “Pneumonia” that would be “creamy with a blue emotion.”
The music on “Volta” is earthier than “Medulla,” her almost entirely vocal album, and “Vespertine,” her 2001 album full of ethereal harps and string sections. It’s bound together by the brass instruments she deployed in her 2005 score for “Drawing Restraint 9,” a film by her husband, the multimedia artist Matthew Barney; she said she heard more possibilities than she could use in the film. “Volta” also rejoins her, in some songs, with a big beat. “It’s like I’ve got my body back, all the muscles and all the blood and all the bones,” she said. “It is definitely in your face, but I feel it overall as being quite happy.”
"Volta” doesn’t aim for any known format. While some songs touch down with drumbeats and synthesizer hooks, others are rhapsodic and strange. Bjork sings about travel, passion, nature, self-reliance, motherhood, religion and a suicide bomber. For this album, she said, she was determined to be “impulsive.”
“I didn’t start off with a musical rule,” she said. “It was more emotion.” She said she asked herself: “Are you playing it safe here? Are you actually being impulsive or are you totally subconsciously planning every moment? Are you really allowing enough space for accidents to happen?”
In her native Iceland, Bjork sang everything from children’s songs to punk before reaching an international audience as a member of the Sugarcubes in the late 1980s. She knew early on what she wanted to do with her voice. “I was quite conscious that I wanted permission to be able to be sad and funny, and human and crazy and silly, and childish and wise,” she said, “because I think everybody is like that.”
Like much of Bjork’s music since she started her solo career with “Debut” in 1993, “Volta” harnesses technology to sheer willfulness. No other songwriter can sound so naïve and so instinctual while building such elaborate structures. And few musicians have managed to sustain her unlikely combination of avant-gardism and pop visibility.
Even those who ignore her music can’t forget her fashion statements, like the swan-shaped dress she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards. She also set down ostrich eggs along the red carpet. “People didn’t find it very funny,” she said. “They wrote about it like I was trying to wear a black Armani and got it wrong, like I was trying to fit in. Of course I wasn’t trying to fit in!”
Bjork has three New York City shows scheduled: Wednesday at Radio City Music Hall, Saturday at the United Palace Theater and next Tuesday at the Apollo Theater. She will probably be the only headliner ever to perform at those places backed by a 10-woman Icelandic brass band along with laptop, keyboards and a rhythm section.
Bjork is suspicious of the word pop, and doesn’t sell her songs to advertisers or accept sponsors for her tours. “I don’t want to be the conqueror of the world or be the most famous person on earth,” she said. “I’ve got no ambitions in that direction. Otherwise I would have done things very differently, I think.”
But she appreciates reaching a large audience. “It would be too easy to walk away and say, ‘Oh, I’m just going to do these ornate objects that only a few people, blah blah blah,’ ” she said. “That’s just pretentious and snobbish.
“I believe in that place where you plug into the zeitgeist, the collective consciousness or whatever,” she continued. “It’s very folk. Soulful. Not materialistic. I believe in being a fighter for that soulful place.”
Bjork made “Medulla” and “Vespertine” largely at home while nurturing her daughter, Isadora, now 4. “I had a baby, and I was breast-feeding and organizing my work around that,” she said. “Even though I had a lot of collaborators, they would come for one afternoon for a cup of tea and leave. They would be visiting my universe, my world. When I started doing this album, I had a bit of a cabin fever of being too much in the protection of my own world, so it was time to be brave and get out.”
Bjork recorded “Volta” at studios in the three places she lives — New York, London and Reykjavik — and traveled to San Francisco, Jamaica, Malta, Mali and Tunisia. Now she was willing to show a visitor some of the inner workings of her songs.
A computer sat open on her recording console. It showed a screen for the recording and editing program Pro Tools — a familiar sight to musicians — with the multitrack mix of “Earth Intruders,” the first song on “Volta.” “Is music getting too visual?” she asked. “We could open a bottle of wine and talk about that for five hours.”
Stripes of color, each one a sound or an instrument, crossed the screen, starting and stopping. “It’s like doing embroidery, like when I used to knit a lot as a teenager,” she said. “You just sit and noodle all day and have a cup of tea and make pretty patterns.”
She hit the play button, and the tramp of marching feet began, soon topped by percussion, swooping synthesizers and Bjork’s voice, wailing, “Turmoil! Carnage!” New blocks of color announced new instruments: in this song, the sound of Konono No. 1, a Congolese group that plays electrified thumb pianos amplified (and distorted) through car-horn speakers. (She recorded with the members of the band in Belgium, and they will be joining her on some tour dates.)
The beat came from Timbaland, a longtime fan who had sampled Bjork’s song “Joga” and finally got around to collaborating with her last year. “I walked into the studio with Timbaland with no preparations,” she said. “Usually I would have already written the song and there would just be a small little space for the visitor. But now I just wanted some challenge. We improvised for one day, and I just sang on top of whatever he did.
“You just walk in the room and it’s just” — she made an explosive sound — “pfff!, and I just went pfff!, and we did seven tracks, just p-p-p-p-p-p. You get really smitten by his energy. It’s like, why doubt? Who needs the luxury of doubt?”
Timbaland’s beats made their way into “Earth Intruders,” “Hope” and the song that sounds closest to other Timbaland tracks, “Innocence,” which has sucker-punch syncopations from, among other things, a sample of a grunting man. After their recording session, Timbaland got wrapped up in producing albums and touring with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, leaving Bjork to edit and augment the tracks.
“I was a bit confused first, because I got a lot of stuff of his and was maybe expecting him to arrange his noises,” Bjork said. “It ended up being quite a good thing for me, because apparently he never gives other people stuff and lets them complete it for him. So he actually trusted me to do that.”
For “Hope,” a song that ponders the story of a pregnant suicide bomber, Bjork went to Mali to meet Toumani Diabate, a djeli (or griot) who plays the harplike kora. They could have exchanged musical ideas electronically. But “I wanted to sing it with him at the same moment, because it’s always different when you do that,” Bjork said.
“She wanted everything to work naturally,” Mr. Diabate said backstage after a recent concert with his Symmetric Orchestra at Zankel Hall. In Mali, he played and she sang, trying lyrics she had brought until the syllables fit and they had a few songs. She chose “Hope” and handed another one to him. “She said, ‘Take this and use it any way you like,’ ” Mr. Diabate said. “I couldn’t imagine a superstar doing that.”
“Hope” ended up using a Timbaland beat and multiple, overlapping, tangled tracks of kora, traditionally a solo instrument. Mr. Diabate tweaked the results until he was satisfied. “She opened a new door for the kora,” he said.
Other new songs have their own convoluted stories. Bjork visited Jamaica with Antony Hegarty, the brooding-voiced lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons, to record a lovers’ duet with lyrics from a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, “The Dull Flame of Desire.” They sang together, improvising back and forth, for a full day; then Bjork edited their duet into a smoldering seven-minute drama, worked up a brass arrangement and decided to set the whole thing to an electronic beat.
It didn’t work. Eventually she brought in Brian Chippendale, the drummer from the rock duo Lightning Bolt. She told him: “I’ve tried so many beats on this song, but I think it should start with silence, and I think it should build up and then you should sort of take over. And it should be a beat that’s not a normal drumbeat but more like a heartbeat or something that you feel.” He improvised it in one take.
Some of the lyrics on “Volta” obliquely address topics like politics, feminism and religion. “Declare Independence” uses a stomping, distorted, ravelike ’80s beat from her longtime collaborator Mark Bell while she exhorts: “Start your own currency! Make your own stamp! Protect your language!” She was thinking, she said, about Greenland and the Faeroe Islands, which are still part of Denmark, as Iceland was until 1944. “But also I just thought it was kind of hilarious to say it to a person,” she said. “It’s just so extreme!”
Other songs, she acknowledged, are messages to herself. The elegiac “Pneumonia” uses only French horns, building up slow-motion chords behind Bjork’s voice, as she reflects on a bout of pneumonia she had in January and on whether she had made herself too isolated: “All the moments you should have embraced/All the moments you should have not locked up.”
She also sings to her two children: her daughter and her son, Sindri, who is 20. In “My Juvenile,” a ballad accompanied by sparse clusters on a clavichord, she chides herself for the way she treated Sindri — “Perhaps I set you too free too fast too young” — while Antony sings “The intentions were pure” by way of reassurance. “You sort of let go too much when they’re 14,” Bjork said. “And then suddenly when they’re 16, you behave again like they’re 8. And then when they’re 18, you think they can fly across the world on their own. And then when they’re 20, you tell them off because they’re wearing a dirty jacket. It’s clumsy.”
“I See Who You Are” speaks gently to her daughter, imagining her entire life span and beyond, “when you and I have become corpses.” It’s set to lightly plinking electronic tones, the Icelandic brass ensemble and the fluttering, surging notes of a Chinese lute called a pipa. The song is simultaneously a lullaby and an international concoction, an improbable mix and a cozy sonic fabric.
While making the album, Bjork said, she read Leonard Shlain’s book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” which propounds a theory of history shifting between dominant brain hemispheres: right and left, image and word, intuition and logic, natural and manmade. “It doesn’t have to be right; it’s just an interesting speculation,” she said. As the embroidery of her songs moved across the computer screen, and as her voice sang the lyrics of “Wanderlust” — “Peel off the layers until you get to the core” — it sounded as if the alphabet and the goddess were, for the moment, in harmony.
Las fotos son un vil plagio, pero estoy tan emocionada que no me aguanté las ganas de ponerlas. En un próximo episodio de la-que-espero-que-no-sea-la-última temporada de Gilmore Girls, Rory conoce a su ídolo, la corresponsal de CNN, Christiane Amanpour. Ya era hora que la invitaran a actuar, si toda la serie se basa en que Rory quiere ser como ella. Me alegra tanto que Amanpour haya aceptado aparecer, es muy inspiradora.
Que tenía que pasar para que me animara a escribir otro post..., pues tenía que ser victima nuevamente de la furia de MURPHY. No hubo nada fuera de lo normal el día de ayer, excepto que Herminio, Bertha, JuanK y yo decidimos ir a almorzar a San Lorenzo. Viaje que veníamos planeando hace una semana. El día empezó tranquilo, fui despertada por un mensajito de Herminio que me ordenaba me fuera a bañar en el ipso facto. Me arreglé, fui a desayunar y claro cuando me iba a tomar mi tasa de café llega Herminio. Debí tomar eso como la primera señal de que algo no andaba bien, pero no, salí de mi casa sin tomar café. Razón por la cual puedo haber estado algo bitchee, which is not like me, durante los primeros minutos de la mañana. La mañana prosiguió sin mayores eventos. JuanK nos recogió de la casa de Herminio y fuimos a comprar café y sacar dinero. Armados de Granitas empezamos nuestro viaje a San Lorenzo en busaca de curiles y camarones. A mitad del camino Herminio bromeando menciona lo gracioso que sería que se nos quedara el carro, como en un intento de enfurecer a los dioses de la carretera. Finalmente después de una hora de lo que parecía un viaje hacia el infierno por el calor que hacía. Llegamos a San Lorenzo. Hicimos una breve parada para tomar agua y saludar a los Papas de JuanK que estaban en esas lejanas tierras, quienes por supuesto no tenían idea que su hijo en lugar de estar trabajando se encontraba vagando con los amigos. Un rato más tarde nos dirigíamos al restaurante, un lugar pequeño cuyo nombre no recuerdo que, aunque no gozaba de una gran variedad de platos, ofrecía comida agradable. Llenamos nuestros estómagos y agarramos viaje rumbo a Tegucigalpa, porque claro, todos teníamos compromisos en la tarde y teníamos que llegar temprano. El viaje de regreso estaba tranquilo, nos reíamos mientras discutíamos futuros planes de dominación mundial, estábamos satisfechos y felices... muy felices. Ya estábamos cerca de Cerro de Hule, a media hora de Tegus, casi lo habíamos logrado. Pero en ese instante se abrieron los cielos y MURPHY dijo: “Están pisados” De repente se escucha un ruido extraño en el carro y este se apaga. Se sobrecalentó (o al menos eso creíamos), la temperatura del carro se elevó, esperamos a que enfriara se le puso coolant y todo lo que se hace en esos casos. Sin embargo, el carro se rehusaba a encender y tratamos todo. Lo empujamos, le hablamos bonito, TODO.... Nos dimos cuenta que afortunadamente nos habíamos quedado cerca de la casa de un mecánico, Juank fue a buscarlo. Pero MURPHY ataca de nuevo, el mecánico estaba jugando potra. Que remedio, lo único que podíamos hacer era esperar al Papa de JuanK. Cuando finalmente llegó, dos horas después, nos dimos cuenta que había una fisura en el radiador. El carro se quedó allá y los cuatro nos metimos en el asiento trasero del carro de los Papas de JuanK, vale la pena mencionar que no esta diseñado para llevar a cuatro personas en ese asiento. En fin regresamos sanos y salvos a Tegus, fue una fatídica aventura más, como ya es costumbre con nosotros, pero son estas salidas desastrosas las que más divierten.Olvidaba mencionar que la camisa de Bertha, que era blanca, fue manchada por el cinturón de seguridad del carro de JuanK. Así que A*L*E*R*O*S, nunca canten victoria MURPHY no descansa. Ya veremos que otras aventuras nos tiene preparadas.
Yahvé dijo entonces a Josué: "Tiende hacia Ay el sable que tienes en tu mano, porque en tu mano te la entrego". Josué tendió el sable que tenía en la mano hacia la ciudad. Tan pronto como extendió la mano, los emboscados surgieron rápidamente de su puesto, corrieron y entraron en la ciudad, se apoderaron de ella y a toda prisa la incediaron.
Desastre de la gente de Ay.
Los hombres de Ay volvieron la vista atrás y vieron la humareda que subía de la ciudad hacia el cielo; no tenian posibilidad de escapar ni por un lado ni por otro. El pueblo que iba huyendo hacia el desierto se volvió contra los perseguidores. Viendo Joisue y todo Israel que los emboscados habian tomado la ciudad y que subia de ella una humareda, se volvieron y atacaron a los hombres de Ay. Los otros salieron de la ciudad a su encuentro, de modo que los hombres de Ay se encontraron rodeados por los israelitas, uno por un lado y otros por otro. Estos los derrotaron hasta que no quedó superviviente ni fugitivo. Pero al rey de Ay le prendieron vivo y lo llevaron ante Josué. Cuando Israel acabó de matar a todos los habitantes de Ay en el campo y en el desierto, hasta donde habian salido en su persecución , y todos ellos cayeron a filo de espada hasta no quedar uno, todo Israél volvió a Ay y pasó a su población a filo de espada.
El total de los que cayeron aquel día, hombres y mujeres, fue doce mil: todos los habitantes de Ay.
Tori Amos forms anti-Bush posse by mutating into Greek Goddesses
(Tomado descaradamente de Mtv.com)
By Chris Harris
For the better part of her 20-year career, piano-bench-straddling singer/songwriter Tori Amos has touched upon a wide range of loaded subjects — including sexuality, patriarchy and personal tragedy — over the course of her eight studio LPs. The redhead has also strongly criticized organized religion, specifically Christianity, through her impassioned lyrics. Now, she is setting her cerebral crosshairs on the realm of politics.
Of course, when it comes to taking a stand against the state of international affairs, it seems like there's no time like the present, with artists like Björk, Nine Inch Nails and Muse — to name just a few — baring their fangs. Thanks to a certain someone — cough ... President George W. Bush ... cough — Amos couldn't help herself to do the same.
"Frankly, as a woman, and as a woman who wrote 'Silent All These Years' [a song about rape that appeared on 1992's Little Earthquakes], I needed to stand up," Amos explained. "It seemed to me that, sometimes, the material wanted to be overtly political. Sometimes the material wanted to be cheeky and seductive. Sometimes it wanted to be heartbreaking and deal with the inner world of women.
"The way to really combat the right wing is to not be subservient to them on any level, particularly when it comes to ideology," she continued. "Therefore, you better offer up another ideology that can combat theirs, and as a preacher's daughter, I understand their ideology inside and out. Frankly, they've all hijacked Jesus and his message. I'm sorry, but 'Love thy neighbor as yourself' is nowhere to be found, especially in our current regime, who, in the name of God, is sending our young men and women to die over there [in the Middle East]."
Amos' American Doll Posse is due May 1 and leads off with "Yo George." In the track, Amos wonders, "Where have we gone wrong, America?" and asks, "Is this just the madness of King George?" She then blasts the president's job performance, singing ever so gently, "You have the whole nation on all fours." The record-closing anti-war anthem "Dark Side of the Sun" asks, "How many young men have to lay down their life and their love of their woman for some sick promise of a heaven?"
"If for one minute the generation who is about old enough and eligible to vote thinks this is about one person, then we're all very foolish," Amos said. "We need to wake up and realize that just because we think we're in a democracy, there is a little bit of a seduction there. They're not overtly burning books and they're not doing this and that, but they're doing exactly what they want to do, and we're distracted. It's funny — they're not burning books, they're just throwing more information at us, and drowning us in it. You have to be able to think for yourself and not get manipulated."
But in order to make her political statement, Amos called on "Isabel," one of the four archetypes she developed for the disc. Each of these archetypes symbolizes a particular side of her musical personality, and each is based on one of the female constituents of the Greek pantheon. Isabel, Amos explained, is a photographer and a reflection of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Clyde, who was inspired by Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, embodies the singer's emotional and idealistic side. There's also Pip, the confrontational "warrior woman" based on Athena, and Santa, the sensual side of the artist, who was inspired by Aphrodite.
"Maybe they've been gestating inside of me for many years now, and it's taken till I got to a certain place in order to be able to mine them and excavate them from the recesses of my unconscious," Amos said of her multiple personas. "I don't know the why of it, but I do know that usually, I make records that have one single thread and a theme coming from one narrative. [On] most of the records, there's usually a center focus. But this was not that, and therefore, because there were so many varied styles coming in, I brought the band in early, knowing that we had to develop them from the ground up, and that some of these songs were much more guitar-biased than they were singer/songwriter-biased. I guess it was the producer in me that had to say, 'OK, the singer/songwriter's going to have to take a back seat some of the time here,' and I was really fine with that. After so many records, it's good to change it up."
When Amos heads out on the road in support of American Doll Posse, she said she'll step aside and let "all of these women" — each of whom has a specific look and fashion sense — take the stage. "So, the shows will start with one of the four women that isn't Tori, and then Tori will take the stage about a third into the concert," she explained.
More than anything, though, Amos said American Doll Posse is a psychological exploration. "It's not just, 'I'm going to wake up and play dress-up today,' " she said. "I think it's fair to say that all women are a different percentage of these archetypes, and each culture has different versions of these if you're a rich culture. And if you were around before the monotheistic authority, [when] God came and then suppressed the power of the mother gods, these women at one time were powerful and autonomous and part of the pantheon as well as the male gods. Now, of course, there's just one guy, and the women are subservient to him. I find this incredibly myopic. We have access to this rich culture as women, and we need to open ourselves up."
Siguiendo con las noticias en música, Santa Tori Amos está a punto de sacar un nuevo disco. Mi vida tiene sentido otra vez y puedo respirar tranquila. Aquí hay dos nuevas canciones:
Tori se ha inventado varios alter egos que son los que cantan diferentes canciones desde su punto de vista, y cada una de ellas tiene su blog. Una en especial, llamada Clyde, está obsesionada con la pintura, y tiene un blog con el mismo layout con el que empezó el mío, ¿coincidencia? No lo creo. Esta es la dirección:
Seguramente nadie más que yo va a tener la paciencia para leerlos, pero no importa, es mi deber ciudadano reportarlos.
Y para todos aquellos fans de niñas bonitas que tocan guitarra como si fueran señores de cuarenta años que no se han dedicado a otra cosa en su vida, les presento a la novia de Kaki King (yep, she is), que también es guitarrista y también es muy buena.
bueno... hoy me desperté y estaba muy aburrido, me puse a lavar la ropa que me faltaba y me dio por buscar esa paja messenger la de ; como pueden imaginar el aburrimiento era grande, puesto que yo casi nunca hago este tipo de cosas. Para hacerles el cuento corto por lo visto no es tanta la paja si quieren pueden ver el link que puse ahí arriba para que verifiquen...
bueno... eso es todo amigos... :P nos vemos hasta el próximo post, que fijo va a caer en un buen rato... :P
P.D.: sólo un pequeño detalle antes de terminar, y es que eso sólo es válido para la gente que vive en los Estados Unidos, pero bueno... si quieren apoyar creo que con que cambies tu dirección a una de Estados Unidos basta.
Los bebés, en uno de los momentos más tiernos jamás registrados
Bertha en solitario
El-Yanis con la Tigra de fondo
o como Yanis Soprano
Deysi en la u
Es bueno saber que a pesar de tu hip hop background, alguien te quiere tal y como eres ;)
Moises!! Tenés que aprender a tomarme mejores fotos!!
Mafer tratando de disimular que es la modelo oficial de Foto Angel Mi adorado Herminingo en un exquisito momento doméstico Don Juank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Y a petición general: Moi!!!!
Los a*l*e*r*o*s fueron a la Tigra el jueves santo, y mi maldicion de siempre hacer algo cuando me invitan a la tigra esta vez tampoco la pude vencer. Me quede en mi casa haciendo cosas tan triviales como trabajar, mientras que los a*l*e*r*o*s se ahondaron en una aventura introspectiva con la naturaleza para huir de esos dias en que nada hay que hacer, un propósito muy noble para la humanidad. Yo, aqui, en la ciudad, me quede imaginando como hubiera sido haber ido, herminio manejando como solo el lo puede hacer en esas carreteras de montaña y diciendome a cada rato, te odio maje, Moi con su sonrisa permanente contando anécdotas de viajes anteriores, Marcela y Yanis con inagotables ocurrencias que siempre me doblan de la risa y Mafer tan adorable como nadie mas, disfrutando de algun chocolate que le hubiera llevado como fuente de energía para el largo camino , diciendo siempre comentarios muy acertados y pegándome (muy fuerte, como pega de fuerte esa Mafer) al ver una cucharachita antes que Herminio y yo. Espero un buen dia romper la maldición de la Tigra y poder subir a esa montaña ( y a otras mas) con a*l*e*r*o*s.
El-Yanis con la Tigra de fondo
Deysi en la u
Mafer tratando de disimular que es la modelo oficial de Foto Angel
+022.jpg)
Hippie Moi!!
