Bjork has been waxing lyrical about German composer Karl Stockhausen on The Guardian website today.
Amid mixed metaphors about trees and burning suns the avant-warbling Icelander praised the electronic and classical composer for his inspirational lectures and positive prophesising about music in the 21st century.
"For me, Stockhausen was one of the pioneers who started a new root in music," Bjork writes. "The electronic root, whose aesthetic is very specific, has its own organic interior, a structure that has DNA independent from other music trees (for example, the classical Beethoven/Wagner/Mahler tree or the blues/rock/Philip Glass branch).
"When Karlheinz harnessed electricity into sound and showed the rest of us, he sparked off a sun that is still burning and will glow for a long time."
Bjork also leaves us with this rather wonderful mad scientist image of the great man drawn from her own personal reminisces: "I remember sitting in his studio in Cologne, surrounded by 12 speakers, him creating a current traveling up and down, swirling around us like the force of nature that electricity is, my insides pulsating to his noise – primordial, modern and futuristic. He celebrated the sound of sound, in both his electronic music and his acoustic music."
Stockhausen died of a sudden heart failure in December last year.
