11. BjörkHomogenic

Björk gave me and so many others such a huge range of possibilities for what we can do with our time on this earth as musicians. What I got wrong about Björk when I was a teenager and really reverential of her was that the lesson of her work wasn’t that the escape comes from repeating what she was doing or getting lost into her world, it was ‘here are the possibilities for creating your own world, here is the key’. When that finally clicked it set me off on a path of work and life, and how I treat my artwork and all the different elements that that you can utilise to tell your story in this age of content.

Homogenic specifically came into my life at 14. Stereolab had introduced me to synthesizers, and I’d been getting into my sister’s music – Reflex and Warp and Aphex Twin and all that stuff coming from her room. Björk came along and put it all together. My sister’s room, my room, the orchestra I was playing in – it was all on Homogenic. At that point it seemed to tie all the elements of my life together, and not only sonically. I basically went into trauma as a teenager, I had shingles, I had pretty much stopped talking. At the same time, Björk had the stalker who sent her a bomb, and Homogenic was an album of survival and resilience. Emotionally, it was the textbook that I needed for that year to get me through school and the events of my life, because it felt like a testament of survival into hope. It was just one of the most important albums of my life. It just came at that really intense point where your bones are still meshing together, and then you get these albums stuck inside you.