Visiting Björk's restless, impulsive, multicultural universe

NEW YORK: "I read on the Internet that I was doing a hip-hop album with Timbaland," Bjork said, and giggled. Timbaland, the producer whose splintered beats have propelled some of the best current hip-hop, collaborated with Bjork for three songs on "Volta" (Elektra), her first album of more-or-less pop songs since "Medulla" in 2004. But Bjork being Bjork, "Volta" is no hip-hop album.

Bjork, 41, describes "Volta" as "techno voodoo," "pagan," "tribal" and "extroverted." Those words barely sum up an album that mingles programmed beats, free-jazz drumming, somber brass ensembles, African music, a Chinese lute and Bjork's ever-volatile voice. It's a 21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the personal and the global. "This relentless restlessness liberates me," Bjork sings in "Wanderlust," which she calls the album's manifesto. "I feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me."

She was on more familiar ground a few weeks ago, giving an interview in the recording studio at her house in Rockland County, N.Y. It's an odd-angled room with fuzzy pink walls and a view of trees leading to a glimpse of the Hudson River far below. Dressed all in red, with her hair up in puffs on each side of her head, she looked like an Icelandic cartoon elf. She was adding some final mixing touches and sound-effects transitions to the album, and there was a song left to finish. The next day she would visit a New York City studio to record some French horns, seeking a sound for "Pneumonia" that would be "creamy with a blue emotion."

The music on "Volta" is earthier than "Medulla," her almost entirely vocal album, and "Vespertine," her 2001 album full of ethereal harps and string sections. It's bound together by the brass instruments she deployed in her 2005 score for "Drawing Restraint 9," a film by her husband, the multimedia artist Matthew Barney; she said she heard more possibilities than she could use in the film. "Volta" also rejoins her, in some songs, with a big beat. "It's like I've got my body back, all the muscles and all the blood and all the bones," she said. "It is definitely in your face, but I feel it overall as being quite happy."

"Volta" doesn't aim for any known format. While some songs touch down with drumbeats and synthesizer hooks, others are rhapsodic and strange. Bjork sings about travel, passion, nature, self-reliance, motherhood, religion and a suicide bomber. For this album, she said, she was determined to be "impulsive."

"I didn't start off with a musical rule," she said. "It was more emotion." She said she asked herself: "Are you playing it safe here? Are you actually being impulsive or are you totally subconsciously planning every moment? Are you really allowing enough space for accidents to happen?"

In her native Iceland, Bjork sang everything from children's songs to punk before reaching an international audience as a member of the Sugarcubes in the late 1980s. She knew early on what she wanted to do with her voice. "I was quite conscious that I wanted permission to be able to be sad and funny, and human and crazy and silly, and childish and wise," she said, "because I think everybody is like that."

Like much of Bjork's music since she started her solo career with "Debut" in 1993, "Volta" harnesses technology to sheer willfulness. No other songwriter can sound so naïve and so instinctual while building such elaborate structures. And few musicians have managed to sustain her unlikely combination of avant-gardism and pop visibility.

Even those who ignore her music can't forget her fashion statements, like the swan-shaped dress she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards. She also set down ostrich eggs along the red carpet. "People didn't find it very funny," she said. "They wrote about it like I was trying to wear a black Armani and got it wrong, like I was trying to fit in. Of course I wasn't trying to fit in!"

Bjork has three New York City shows scheduled: Wednesday at Radio City Music Hall, Saturday at the United Palace Theater and next Tuesday at the Apollo Theater. She will probably be the only headliner ever to perform at those places backed by a 10-woman Icelandic brass band along with laptop, keyboards and a rhythm section.

Bjork is suspicious of the word pop, and doesn't sell her songs to advertisers or accept sponsors for her tours. "I don't want to be the conqueror of the world or be the most famous person on earth," she said. "I've got no ambitions in that direction. Otherwise I would have done things very differently, I think."