Like a moth, a noctuid, she descends on a light night July Arvika stage, a crowd of 14 thousand, all ages from about thirteen upwards - the oldest at least in their sixties - focusing its collected attention – a massive surge of intensity – on the fairy-like women in her little body, materializing with a string octet, Zeena Parkins on harp and her faithful servants Matmos with their Macintosh computers and their cinema displays.

The immediate comparison, in reference to that brilliant energy in that frail anatomy, encompasses Edith Piaf, and in the sense of intellectual sharpness and intuitive creativity my thoughts stray towards Bob Dylan.

As she starts moving unto the edge of the stage, her shiny eyes covering the audience in a long sweep, she appears like a magically charged female being out of a Stockhausen opera; out of the opera cycle Licht – and when it comes to experimentation and ingenuity, to new thoughts and… integrity, she can only be compared to Karlheinz Stockhausen… and coincidence has it, that she has made an official interview with Stockhausen; one of the best Stockhausen interviews I’ve read, completely without the blindfolds of scholars or musicologists, with just her seeing eyes, hearing ears and crystal clear mind.

She has brought art music and the avant-garde onto the pop scene, and she has revitalized this scene with a sense of magic, of possibilities, of the hope of new worlds ahead. No one else has managed that. Her significance is immense, her influence on contemporary art substantial and genuine… and perhaps only a Stockhausen addict like myself can feel and understand the real scope of this amazing feat.

She seems only half real as she moves through the first pieces of the Arvika concert in the open air theater, in this typical Swedish installment called People’s Park, where several stages are erected around a large, hilly and wooded area; some stages permanent, others put up just for the Arvika festival; a three day music festival in a small, rural Swedish town not far from the Norwegian border.

Björk looks like a mix of a cartoon figure and a frail woman, the way she is dressed and the way she has applied her make-up. Her intense liveliness, her point-blank life force, rages almost eerily out of her soaring fairytaleness… I feel my hair rising all along my arms, and I feel a storm rising through my chest. Magic has descended on Arvika, on the late light summer night, on the bewitched crowd; a sea of eyes shining, a forest of arms waving, an oceanic wave of pure love rushing towards Björk, who receives the emotions with a raised head, outstretched arms and an open mouth. Magic has descended on Arvika, on the late light summer night, on the bewitched crowd…

Björk’s presence, part moth, part cartoon and 100% spirit, is a flashing light through an age of darkness – a brief window on wonderful possibilities of existence – an inspiration for all who haven’t given up, for all who yearn to seriously take their lives in their hands and enter the adventure…

With all her albums of music in the back – most recently the indispensable Vespertine – she enters the hearts of the audience in Arvika with light dance steps, her tongue licking her lips, her black hair in a new cut storming around her head, making me think of an Icelandic horse, mane flying, the horse floating across the plains in a peculiar tölt gait.

It is not to be overlooked that this treacherous and sparkling artist does originate in Iceland; a country of glaciers, geysers and volcanoes. She blows hot and cold, just like her country, and just like her country brought us the Icelandic Tales, she also brings tales of ageless – or timeless – significance to us in her songs, and in the way she brings us these songs.

Her stubbornness and complete integrity, which she probably has had to fight fiercely for, is a hallmark of female Icelandic tradition. The Icelandic women have by tradition been stubborn, restive, independent and creative, and very strong in love, in compassion, in solidarity; solidarity with next of kin, with the land of sustenance, with the animals and with the spirits of the shaman regions.
In this way, Björk comes out of the ages like a messenger; she is not only of this age, of the contemporary world. She is much more than that.

Her art is much more than mere music too. Venture into her video art. It is sensational. The video for All Is Full Of Love is the most breathtaking piece of video art I've laid my eyes on! It's so curiously compassionate beyond the human touch, beyond the machinery of emotions, beyond the framework of mind.

Yes, all is full of love!

She is not one that easily goes on tour and hits stages all over the world. For a public figure of her stature she is still a rather shy and introvert person. This makes me feel even more compassion towards her, since I understand the pain and agony she most likely has to come to terms with to tour. I thought of this while watching her in Arvika, in her magnificence and artistic brilliance. I could feel the vulnerability of that one person up there, on whose shoulders so much expectation was weighing, from this large mass of people who had gathered, some traveling long distances, even from other countries. Yes, I could feel this strain on Björk, and yet she danced through her act like this magic Stockhausen goddess, visiting from the beyond… I am impressed at this conduct, this discipline, this fight with the demons that Björk for sure has to fight, like all vulnerable and sensitive persons who find themselves in an extreme, public situation. I can only say that I am full of love for this person, who manages to give all this magic in a light summer night in rural Sweden, regardless of the strains of fame, regardless of all the hard work of rehearsals and this curse of creative necessity, regardless of the sometimes outrageously untalented and almost morbid reviews from some reviewers, like for example the filth delivered by the constipated and musically illiterate reviewer of the Swedish newspaper Expressen after the concert at the Arvika Festival. Hopefully, that verbal garbage is no more than the buzz of flies in her ears, if she indeed ever gets to hear about this insignificant thunder-fart of a reviewer.

I saw a young girl of perhaps 16 close to the stage with tears in her eyes beside a dancing little pony tail woman of about 60 when Björk broke into Joga: “…this state of emergency, how beautiful to be, state of emergency is where I want to be…”

This is probably how Jenny Lind was met once upon a time in another century. I feel desolate when I think about this, because Jenny Lind is gone, long gone; an artifact of the past, a wondrous legend, and likewise, Björk will be gone, as everything is passing. Björk to me feels like a Nordic summer, so intense but also so devastatingly momentary that you feel melancholic for its end already when it begins… and only my belief in the Tibetan tales of the innumerable lives that we have to travel before we eventually reach full enlightenment and leave the wheel of deaths and rebirths can grant me some consolation in regard to the brevity of Nordic summers and of vulnerable wonders of beauty and artistic bliss like Björk.

She comes out of the flow of Time with gravel in her hair, gravel of instants; “instants that become moments, which become life patterns, which in turn shape the web of the spirit of the age”, to quote poet Sune Karlsson from one of his 1980s’ poems.
As the night deepened into its darkest hour – still just a deep twilight in these northern parts - Björk’s show expanded into a fierce techno catharsis with huge fireworks shooting towards the stars in synchronousity with rumbling, thumping crescendos in the music, and fire aggregates along the front of the stage suddenly ejected meter high jets of fire. It was a remarkable display of pure energy, Björk style!

After two encores – Generous Palmstroke and Human Behaviour – Björk smilingly and waving left not to reappear (on her way to Russia, I think), and as stage hands began to dismantle the equipment the people sank back into the summer dusk, while I and my friend Hans-Åke Runell – the photographer who took all the pictures of Björk shown on this page – retrieved our car from the V.I.P. parking that the Sonoloco Record Reviews’ credentials has rendered us, and put the camera with all the pictures in the back; the camera that we nearly did not get onto the grounds because the more than flimsy girls in the press tent thought it might be “too big” (!) with its 300 mm lens…

We were two deeply moved old-timers (both 50+, having entered the festival at no charge) driving through the night, the 350 kilometers home, across lonely and empty rural roads, through forests and fields.
The sun rose over Lake Hjälmaren as Rosalyn Tureck played Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variationen on the car radio in her slow, elastic style into the broad daylight of 11th July 2003, and I fell asleep at home in Skitköping (Shitville) on the Baltic Sea in the morning with an air of Björk still in my hair, the spirit of her art in my heart and soul.