Björk

As a teenager in Reykjavík, Björk found Joni Mitchell almost by accident — 'the wrong albums arrive to shore' in Iceland, she told Pitchfork in 2015, and the ones that reached her were Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Hejira. Of the first Mitchell record she owned, she has said she knew it 'by heart, every instrument, every noise, every word.' Three decades later, when Nonesuch Records gathered artists to cover Mitchell's songs for a 2007 tribute album, Björk picked a deep cut from The Hissing of Summer Lawns and sang it herself.

listen: upstream & heresource: Pitchfork — The Invisible Woman ↗share

1975

The Boho DanceJoni Mitchell

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2007

The Boho DanceBjörk

listen forMitchell's 1975 original moves in loose, conversational phrases, her voice sliding around the beat instead of locking to it, more spoken confidence than melody. Björk's 2007 cover keeps that same wandering phrasing intact but drops it into an arrangement Mitchell never touched — icy synth pulses and a skittering, semi-mechanical percussion track underneath, so the identical vocal line ends up sounding like it was recorded decades apart, which it was.

In 1996, Björk did the interviewing herself, sitting down with Karlheinz Stockhausen for Dazed & Confused. Worried aloud that she'd never have time to make everything she wanted to make, she got a blunt answer back: 'No, you can only do a very small portion of what you want to do. That is natural.' Eleven years later, writing his Guardian obituary, she called his lectures 'the most hopeful of figures: the twenty-first century was going to be great' — the same faith in electronics as a genuinely new language that pushed her, by 2004, toward an album built from voices alone.

listen: upstream & heresource: The Guardian — Björk's essay on Karlheinz Stockhausen (his death; 'most hopeful of figures'; the Cologne studio memory, 2008) ↗share

1968

StimmungKarlheinz Stockhausen

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2004

Pleasure Is All MineBjörk

listen forStimmung asks six singers to hold single vowels and let the overtones inside each note slowly separate and shimmer — the piece barely counts as 'sung,' just breath and pitch stretched into pure texture. 'Pleasure Is All Mine,' built from Björk's own layered voice, beatboxers, and Tanya Tagaq's throat singing, does the same thing from a different angle: no instrument anywhere on the track, just the human voice pulled apart into rhythm, drone, and overtone until it stops sounding like singing at all.

In September 2022, with Bush's 'Running Up That Hill' newly inescapable on the radio again, Björk gave NME a blunt piece of overdue history. 'I was always quite offended by how often Kate Bush was written about like she was insane or a crazy witch — or me being a crazy elf,' she said, naming Bush as one of the pioneering producers critics preferred to file as 'just a singer.' It's the shared insult that explains the debt: two women who built and ran their own studios, treated as novelty acts instead of engineers.

listen: upstream & heresource: NME — Björk hits back at the sexism levelled against her and Kate Bush (Kate Bush influence; shared 'insane'/'crazy elf' reception, 2022) ↗share

1978

Wuthering HeightsKate Bush

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1993

Human BehaviourBjörk

listen forBush's voice on 'Wuthering Heights' does what no other 1978 radio hit dared: it leaps a full octave mid-phrase, swooping and cracking exactly where a more polished singer would smooth the line out. That same untidy, register-jumping swoop drives the opening minute of 'Human Behaviour' — Björk's voice arcs and catches instead of gliding, treated as a wild instrument rather than a clean carrier for melody, the nerve Bush pioneered still audible fifteen years later.