FICTIVE FRIDAYS : #10

Vince Landay is best known as my and JC’s pub trivia team captain. He’s also a producer guy who makes films and music videos. Here’s what he had to say when I asked him about making one with Björk:

She is exactly what you’d hope for: a generous collaborator and a singular artist.

The first music video I produced for her was “It’s Oh So Quiet,” directed by Spike Jonze. Spike’s idea was to borrow from the tradition of classic movie musicals – bold choreography, emotional excess, clean visual storytelling – and drop it into the least glamorous setting possible: an unremarkable street in the San Fernando Valley, where the exuberance of the song collides with everyday life.

The structure of the music naturally breaks into chapters, and Spike designed distinct sequences for each one, allowing the choreography to build as the song escalates. One of the more interesting challenges was figuring out how to subtly adjust tempo within a single take, so certain moments could feel suspended, almost dreamlike, while remaining musically precise.

Then there were the small realities of production. At one point, when we suddenly needed another dancer, Spike looked at me. I said yes before fully processing what that meant, which is how most bad dancing decisions are made. If you happen to notice one person slightly out of step in the tire shop, that’s me.

What I remember most, though, is Björk’s steadiness. The 102-degree heat asked a lot of everyone involved, and she never let any of it show. She was playful, focused, and entirely present, take after take.

The video went on to receive a Grammy nomination and 6 MTV Video Music Award nominations, winning for Best Choreography. Accolades aside, it remains one of those rare projects where ambition, craft, and joy genuinely aligned.

Kolbeinn Einarsson is lead guitarist in my band, Hypermiler. I asked him to write something about making a video with Björk, since I know he and his wife have a history with her and that his cousin Fridrik was in the Sugarcubes (there are only 10,000 people in Iceland and 9,800 of them are musicians). Here’s what he had to say:

“I am going to pass on this – don’t feel comfortable sharing.”

Alrighty then. At least there’s this video by Megas in which a 16-year-old Kolbeinn appears, looking bored, in a black suit jacket. Björk and one of her sisters show up a little later to sing the chorus, which I think translates to “Reykjavik nights,” or perhaps “Reykjavik at night.” I don’t know if they were all on the same sound stage at the same time, or anything else about the video. Kolbeinn did say, before he elected to keep shtum, that Megas was kind of a big deal at the time.

Balfua is a digital artist currently living in Berlin. I’ve known him for a long time because he’s my son. Here’s what he had to say when I asked him about making a video with Björk:

I’m friendly with a talented artist called James T Merry. He asked if I wanted to work on an upcoming project and revealed that it was for Björk after I expressed interest. She then reached out to me on Instagram, and we had a few video calls discussing what she had in mind.

She’d been making field recordings of various endangered species around the world with the help of a few biologists and had written a ‘Nature Manifesto’; a poetic call to action for the future of our relationship with the environment. She was interested in the AI experiments I was working on at the time — realistic videos of magical shapeshifting creatures in natural environments that I call Slollas.

We decided to make a number of short videos using 3D and AI models where Björk transformed into Slollas for a sound installation of her ‘Nature Manifesto’ at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The videos were paired with a voiceover of Björk reading the Manifesto, her voice digitally altered and infused with the sounds of endangered birds, orcas, etc. They were used as promotional material to announce the installation, and were on display at the gallery opening. I met her in Paris for the opening and she was lovely, very open and interested.

She bought me a salad. We talked about our many shared loves—Adventure Time, Spirited away, Chinese fantasy drama, etc. It was summer, but we drunkenly sang Christmas carols in the car on the way to the opening, to the amusement of the uber driver.