6. BjorkHomogenic
After being so influenced by all those music videos I used to watch on MTV2 and thinking about the visual relationship with music, I got really into Michel Gondry. I got this DVD and he had made a documentary about his music videos and his creative practice. Watching that was one of the most useful art lessons I’ve ever had. Just to understand his process and the way he thinks about how he marries music with visuals, and what his response to it was, that was big for me. He did the video for ‘Human Behaviour’ and he did ‘Bachelorette’, which is on Homogenic. The ‘Bachelorette’ video really blew my mind. It seems to have this whole opera in one music video. That song coupled with the visuals had a huge impact. At that time I was so obsessed with making music and I’d been making acoustic stuff but watching that Michel Gondry DVD and then getting Homogenic I was like: I can now make something beyond my means. I felt so inspired by all of the textures on that record.
It was also a record that informed what ended up becoming Your Wilderness Revisited. I’d been stuck to my house and my routes to school and my familiar places for so long, it wasn’t until taking that record out on my headphones on my bike one day that something changed. I was going down roads I’ve never been down and just going completely off piste. I came back to my bedroom feeling like I was in a different world. Like it wasn’t the world that I had left when I left my house that day. It was the world I knew but it was very different.
