The Journey Itself Is Home

On the day of a show, most of the time consists of waiting. Our excellent musical director, Damian Taylor, sent me this photo, which he took on the day of our Apollo Theatre show. Thanks, Damian!

We did our concert in Chicago Auditorium last night. We started with Cover Me, which led directly to Earth Intruders.

Something about the fire display didn’t work out quite as it should. Right afterwards ashes rained over us. I don’t think anybody in the audience noticed, but it was very disconcerting to have once hands - and the keyboard - covered in ashes. I can only imagine how it must have been for Björk.

Our supporting group was Ghostigital. I like their music - admittedly it is very barbaric, but at the same time strangely refined. It is chaotic, but also organized. Cannibals in tuxedos?

This morning I woke up in Omaha, Nebraska, which is more or less in the centre of the US. It has been very hot today and I took a nap in the afternoon. In the evening some of us walked downtown, which is very charming in a cowboyish sort of way. So it was a bit surreal to have a dinner at Persian restaurant. Which was very good, by the way!

The past few days have been interesting. The day after the show at the Apollo Theatre a few of us went sailing on the East River. It was a glorius day, very hot and we had a sumptous (and very inventive) meal on the boat, cooked by Númi Tómasson, the wonder chef.

Yesterday I went for a helicopter ride for the first time in my life. It was kind of scary. I nearly panicked when it took off - just rising up from the ground like that is so very unnatural - but then I was OK.

Same applies to my first night in a sleeping coach, which was tonight. The bunk I will spend considerable time in for the next couple of weeks is quite small, smaller than I had imagined. When I went to sleep I got really claustrophobic, I felt I was in a coffin and I couldn’t breathe. I thought: “I can’t do this… I want to go back Iceland. NOW!!!” But then I got over it and began to find the rocking motion of the bus strangely soothing. I soon fell asleep, and though I did wake up a few times during the night I managed to sleep eight hours nonetheless.

We are now in Cleveland, but tonight we go back on the bus and will continue our journey to Chicago.

I just got home from our concert at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. It was really interesting to visit Harlem - in my mind it has always been a dangerous place, and so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is in fact quite charming. Apparently, it has been cleaned up in the last couple of decades.

There is a Volta launch party starting any minute now, but I have a slight cold and generally feel under the weather. So I’ll just take it easy!

Inspite of feeling ill, I had a really good time at the concert. From my point of view, it was our best, so far. And the audience seemed enthusiastic.

I was extremely nervous at the beginning… as always. But I guess it will wear off after a while. Hopefully I won’t get TOO relaxed; a certain amount of nervousness is necessary to keep you on your toes.

The days of a show consist mostly of waiting as I believe I have already said. This time I remembered to bring a book!

We will be back on the road soon. We will spend most nights for the next two weeks on “sleeping coaches”, travelling by night and staying in various hotels during the day. I wonder how well I’ll manage to sleep on a bus… Hmmm. Never done it before!

I’m kind of glad that we are moving again. As a group we have been quite scattered here in New York, but starting to travel again will bring us back together.

It is now twenty past one and I have just had breakfast! I woke up late, we had a couple of parties after the show last night at United Palace Theatre. And boy, did we have a good time! The crowd seemed unusually enthusiastic, and I also think all of us are relaxing more and more into the performance. At least, that applies to me.

The show was webcast to some four millions I understand. I wasn´t that nervous though. Maybe at the beginning, because Björk had the wild idea of starting with Cover Me, with the curtains drawn and only me being visible on stage.

A few words about Cover Me in the version we performed last night:

Soon after Björk called me in October to propose the tour to me, she sent me a few songs she thought just the two of us might perform at the shows. One of them was Cover Me, and she sent three different versions of it to me. One of them is on the album Post, another one is the Brodsky Quartet version, and the third one is for a dulcimer decorated with electronic sounds. At the end there is a bit from La Nativité Du Seigneur by Messiaen, a composer Björk adores.

I wanted to create the fourth version of Cover Me, but keep the excerpt from the Messiaen piece at the end, because we both thought it would be highly effective in a concert. I therefore composed an accompaniment to Björk’s singing in a kind of a Messiaen style, so that the organ solo at the close of the song would sound more plausible than in the earlier version. The trick was to not go too far in that direction, because the actual melody is so simple, just in a minor/E major.

Anyway, in the final chord of Cover Me, the curtains fell away and Earth Intruders started. The audience seemed to love it.

We had the same guests as at the last show. They performed admirably.

And now I’m going to take a walk around New York. The sun is shining and it looks like a great day ahead!

Someone told me that pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy once had a nightmare in which he had to play Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in public on a vertical keyboard.

Such anxiety dreams are common, I have had several of them. Usually I dream that I’m about to give a concert, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to play, or that I haven’t started practising it yet.

Our first concert in New York last night, in Radio City Music Hall, was almost such a nightmare. The second song on the track list, Venus As a Boy, was accompanied by only me on the harpsichord, and on the day of the concert we had never rehearsed it. Björk likes to perform one introverted song in each concert, and Venus As a Boy in the present version is very different from the one on the Debut album. It is a recitativo-like duet between the voice and the harpsichord, a kind of dialogue. And we just hadn’t had the time to go through it! Our first rehearsal was only thirty minutes before walking on stage! Fortunately it went very well.

In fact, we had practically no rehearsal for the rest of the songs on the list that day, as it took far longer than expected to set all the gear up on stage.

And yet I think the concert was quite good. We had some spectacular guests, Anthony, Konono no. 1 and Min Xiao-Fen on the pipa, a Chinese lute. They were all brilliant.

Some guy jumped on stage in one of the songs and started dancing. The guards took him away in seconds. It was kind of funny.

We had our first public performance of Where Is the Line last night. It is one of the most difficult songs and it will get better as we go along. Of all the Björk videos I have seen, Where Is the Line, which is based on one of the Venice Biennial videos (2005) of Gabrí­ela Friðriksdóttir (who happens to be a close friend of mine) is my favorite. It really captures the atmosphere in the song. And in the version we did last night, with a pipe organ instead of a choir, the madness got even worse!