Málaga studio, Icelandic strings, one climate
Homogenic did not arrive as a compromise. On 22 September 1997, One Little Indian released Björk’s third studio album, and the first track is a hunter, not a host. Hunter opens on stuttering beats and strings that move in long lines. She had asked for one flavour. What she got was a tight contrast: electronic drums against formal strings, dance floor against fjord, voice neither sweetened nor hidden.
The privacy was practical. After the glare around Post and the remix set Telegram, tour drummer Trevor Morais offered El Cortijo, his studio near Málaga, in San Pedro de Alcántara. She had meant to pass through, meet flamenco guitarist Raimundo Amador, and leave. She stayed and made the record there, with later work at her house in London. She stepped away from Nellee Hooper, who had shaped Debut and Post. Mark Bell of LFO became the electronic partner who could surprise her. Guy Sigsworth, Howie B and engineer Markus Dravs are in the credits. The brief was a single climate, not a crowd of producers.
The songs keep that climate without repeating it. Jóga, written for her friend and released as the lead single on 15 September 1997, sets a vow over swelling strings. Michel Gondry’s video walks Iceland as if the island were the lyric. Unravel is smaller: accordion and a heart described as yarn the devil collects. Bachelorette, arranged in part with Eumir Deodato conducting where she did not arrange herself, is the album’s big stage moment, still sung like a letter. The Icelandic String Octet is the other voice throughout, not decoration.
All Neon Like, 5 Years, Immature, Alarm Call, Pluto: the back half keeps the beats rude and the strings formal, which is the album’s whole argument. Nick Knight shot the cover. Alexander McQueen built the dress. The reshoot delayed the release. The image matches the music because both refuse prettiness as a goal. Homogeneous, she had said. One flavour. The flavour turned out to be contrast held so tightly it reads as unity.
Homogenic is her most emotional, highly charged and groovy record, as well as a stinging triumph for the spirit of adventure.
(Ted Kessler, NME, 1997)
All Is Full of Love, produced with Howie B, closes the album like a door left open on purpose. Chris Cunningham’s 1999 video, two robots kissing in a white nowhere, became the image most people met last and remembered first. The tour had already started in September 1997, sometimes before audiences knew the songs, with Mark Bell beside her and, later, the strings. A kidney infection cancelled the American dates that autumn. In 1998 a run with Radiohead was announced and then dropped because the stages would not change over cleanly. The record travelled anyway.
What remains is the decision. After two albums that welcomed the world in, she made one that sounded like a place. The beats do not soften to meet the violins, and the violins do not pretend to be synthesizers. Pitchfork would later call the album a landmark. The useful fact is smaller: drop the needle on Jóga or Unravel and you still hear someone choosing a climate and staying in it. Homogenic is not a phase. It is a coastline she drew and then refused to leave.
