‘Big Time Sensuality’

1993 was a good year for innovative and influential popular music. The relatively new innovation of CDs was just starting to do wonders for the music business as a whole. Not only did the new digital sound quality attract new listeners, it also persuaded music fans with vinyl records to buy their favourite albums all over again. This influx of cash meant that record companies could afford to take more risks, and albums started appearing that almost certainly wouldn’t have got record company backing a decade earlier: Pablo Honey by Radiohead and Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins, Doggystyle by Snoop Dogg and Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) by the Wu-Tang Clan, Rid of Me by PJ Harvey and Modern Life Is Rubbish by Blur, to name but a handful. And on the indie label front, the previous year had seen the release of Artificial Intelligence, a compilation of artists on Sheffield’s WARP Records who would define the cutting edge of Rave-influenced electronic music for the next decade.

Even so, when Björk’s album Debut appeared, it sounded like it came from another planet. Debut, and its ‘sequel’ Post (as in ‘before’ and ‘after’) changed the cultural landscape in terms of how experimental you could be whilst still being mainstream-successful. Every single released from both albums made the Top 40 of the UK singles chart (several made the top 10) and yet the melodies and arrangements were arguably more sophisticated and left-field than anything the cutting edge artists were producing. Before long, remixes of her tracks were circulating from the most respected electronic artists: Black Dog, Underworld, Sabres of Paradise, Graham Massey, RZA, Mark Bell, Talvin Singh, Plaid, μ-Ziq. Even Thom York has cited Björk as a major influence on the Radiohead’s ‘greatest album of all time’. (more…)