#daniel-bjarnason

#daniel-bjarnason

A teenage Björk, in defiance of her stuffy music schooling, had studied not only Cage but also the radical turn-of-the-century composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose early operas developed a voice that flickered, glissando-style, between boisterous singing and speech. Schoenberg called the technique sprechstimme, but when you hear it performed now-even if not in Björk's own, meagerly bootlegged rendition of his Pierrot Lunaire-the style has arrived in the timeless preserve of the Björkian.

Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.