Björk says that the human voice is "natural and free." She says: "looking back on Vespertine ... I was aiming for how you can express yourself when you ... exploded 5,000 times and and there is nothing left, and you're just lying there, the ruins of you, but you still want to make something, but you have no muscle, you have no blood, and you still want to create beauty. So you end up ... creating music with no physical-ness, no body."
John Cage tried to break down the barriers between music and sound. Björk actually broke down this barrier. In Cage, for instance in Water Walk, what is not supposed to be music still sounds like non-music. In Björk, what is not supposed to sound like music sounds like music and becomes music. It is no longer a representation of sound, but is directly and immediately sound-music.
Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded the sound of melting ice in the Arctic for his song Glacier. Takeshi Kitano used the sounds of farming and carpentry in his Zatoichi to create a complex beat. In Kitano's case, the sounds eventually form a beat, and the two do not fuse; that is, there is something unnaturally unnatural about the way the farming and carpentry work sounds. By comparison, in Sakamoto's case, the melting sound directly is music, it is naturally unnatural.
Björk also makes non-musical sounds directly into music in Sakamoto's sense. Glacier comes after Vespertine, and perhaps Sakamoto was in part inspired by the song Joga to use the sounds found at the geological level directly as music.
Björk also says that Vespertine expresses the experience of reading a book. Perhaps All is Full of Love expresses the aftertaste or aftereffect of the experience of a musical piece or a book. (Björk calls All is Full of Love the "first track of Vespertine" although it is actually the last track of Homogenic.) The music video of All is Full of Love portrays two robots making love as they are being built. The relation between the two robots can be the relation between the musician and the listener, or between the writer and the reader. Or maybe the machine-hands building the two robots are the text or the tune, and the two robots, as musician/listener or writer/reader, are connected and mediated by the hands/work.
In Björk's music videos and tunes, nature is disconnected entirely from the image of a harmonious whole or of a passive mother. Nature is rather an extension of art and machinery. It exists only insofar as it is represented by music.
In another documentary, Björk says that making one of her works more selfish or individual than others might have made it more universal as well.
She also says that in the music video of Isobel, the moths are supposed to stop or suspend the rational, calculating side of her listeners' mind and to activate and revive its emotional side. This resonates with what Kenzaburo Oe said in his Nobel Prize Speech. Oe said that the task of science is to transform the unknown into the known, while the task of literature and art is to transform the known into the unknown. This is exactly what Björk has been doing, right up to her latest Biophilia project. Ancient Greek thinkers, as well as modern Romantics led by Schelling, thought that music makes the structure of nature intuitively graspable. Against this position, Björk's Biophilia as well as her use of "natural" sounds suggest that music is not explanatory but rather expressive; it expresses nature, shapes the nature of nature. Björk remains at the edge of art, and does not make the mistake of taking music as a philosophy. This mistake is what Collingwood cautions against when he writes:
Aesthetic philosophy is the abstract assertion of immediacy, the denial of thought. 'Don't think, feel,' is its maxim. ... A person who has to remind himself to act on impulse has ceased to act on impulse; and one who advises others to follow their impulses is really advising them to follow his advice. Thus aesthetic philosophy is the formal denial of its own existence (Speculum Mentis, 262-3)Expressing nature through music without trying in any way to substitute art for knowledge, Björk preserves music, not nature. The airplanes had to morph into moths, so that nature may become artificial as music and expand in a pure and free way. Instead of representing something in nature, Björk's music extends nature, and it is the task of thinking to reflect upon this expansion and represent it. Moths eat everything, both natural and artificial; they are attracted to light; some moth species do not need to eat anything at all; and their babies produce the finest silk.
