Medúlla

The album is about voices. I want to get away from instruments and electronics, which was the world of my last album, Vespertine. I want to see what can be done with the entire emotional range of the human voice – a single voice, a chorus, trained voices, pop voices, folk voices, strange voices. Not just melodies but everything else, every noise that a throat makes.

-Björk

The New Yorker, 30 August 2004

I was going to call the album ‘Ink’, because I wanted it to be like that black, 5,000 year-old blood that’s inside us all ; an ancient spirit that’s passionate and dark, a spirit that survives. Something in me wanted to leave out civilisation, to rewind to before it all happened and work out, ‘Where is the human soul ? What if we do without civilisation and religion and patriotism, without the stuff that has gone wrong ?’ When I first moved to New York there was room for immigrants and eccentrics and whoever, then suddenly it became the most scarily patriotic place on earth.
Then I got drunk – surprise !- with my artist friend Gabriela and she came up with the title Medúlla. It basically means ‘marrow’ in medical language, in Latin. Not just you’re bone marrow, but marrow in the kidneys and marrow in your hair, too. It’s about getting to the essence of something. And with this album being all vocals, that made sense.

bjork.com Medulla special

I just got really bored with instruments. I started doing everything with my voice. Then suddenly I didn’t want to work with any musicians, which is a bit weird. I only wanted to work with vocalists.
I wanted the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh. We could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and another person would sing a beat and then the next person sing a melody, and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave. It’s quite rootsy.

source : W magazine, August 2004