Björk - A Retrospective

As the Museum of Modern Art in New York prepares to open a mid-career retrospective of Bjork's work, 6 Music celebrates her enduring legacy in Miranda Sawyer's documentary, Army of Me.

The exhibition is the product of a close collaboration between Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large at MoMA, and Björk. However, if you don’t have a trip to New York booked, then the lovely team at BBC Research and Development have adapted an excerpt from the augmented audio guide from the exhibition. Put on your headphones and unravel into Björk’s bizarre and beautiful world...

Yet if you can pull yourself away from the absorbing audio narratives of each of Björk's individual records, you'll spot a larger story at play within her album artwork… Look closely and you’ll see how the selves on the sleeves reflect the roles attributed to the characters of Tarot cards.

The overarching journey of creating a record – from its conception, through recording, to its release in both a visual and audio form – has always been an exhaustively experimental process for Björk. Be it delving into a dark cave in the Bahamas to record the vocals for ‘Cover Me’ or ‘Noodling and noodling’ with EDM beats over cocoa whilst creating ‘Vespertine’, the way in which she fully commits herself into the production of whatever art form she is pursuing is ultimately what makes her as exciting and relevant today as she was twenty years ago.

A force of nature as dramatic and inspiring as the landscape of her Icelandic homeland, Björk first blew into the BBC in 1987 when she and The Sugarcubes performed a session for the late John Peel. Fresh off the back of a live TV performance that had woken her home nation to the raucous world of the Icelandic punk music scene, Peel is rumoured to have written ‘Band is okay, singer shows promise’ in his session notes.