Björk is in Paris, and her laptop camera isn’t working. The laptop is eight years old, she explains, and she doesn’t want to replace it, for environmental reasons. “But let’s just say I haven’t exactly been crying about the fact that it doesn’t work.” She is a black square on my computer screen, which feels quite un-Björk-like, somehow, and yet also very Björk-like, too. Even without the visuals, she is instantly familiar. She jokes, she teases, her answers unravel slowly as she weighs up every side of a response, pin-balling between as many angles as she can find.
She says she has always felt a bit weird about video calls anyway. “Even when they started, I would find more distance in talking to loved ones, because it’s sort of fake. You see people, but it’s not real. You’re not getting the presence. So maybe it’s just because I’m a musician, and musicians are weird creatures, because we’re so sound-driven, that if you don’t get to hang out with a person and feel what it’s like to be next to that person, or get the energy, or whatever, in the same room, you might as well just have audio. At least that’s 100% audio, you know?”
