Where Homogenic used the textures of techno and intense strings to evoke raw but beautiful landscapes, Vespertine favours the clean and often gentle. Björk enlisted an Icelandic woman’s choir for the first time, and used the explicitly natural for percussion, famously sampling the sound of feet pressing into snowy terrain. The continued absence of bass not only raises structural challenges for Björk – who pieced the album together on a laptop over three years before bringing in collaborators – but also keeps things from falling into mawkishness or lazy laptop-music minimalism. Without bass to ground them, the choirs and snow sound celestial.

I wrote about Björk’s evolution as a producer for RBMA.

Do you consider Blackheart a feminist album?
Yeah. But listen, before you write that down, let me go back. People throw that term around so strongly these days that I want to be careful in the way I state this: I am just a woman. I’m a woman that has stood by her brand and this independent push for a very long time. A lot of my other records have taken a feminist approach because I feel like there are not enough of us out there having the voice that we should have, and when we speak, we’re ridiculed. A lot. I’m not here to call myself a feminist, but what I love about our brand is that as a woman, I’m able to put out an album that never antagonises the woman, only lifts her. And what we’re trying to do is beyond than just being a woman or the colour of your skin – there is no gender, no colour and no genre to this music. It is universal. Blackheart is not a feminist album – the movement that we’re doing is a feminist act.

For the folk at FACT, I got to speak to the brilliant Dawn Richard about her vocal evolution, what it means to fall, DJ Carisma and the Greek myth of Calypso. I also got to say some spirited shit about her sophomore album Blackheart! Seriously, buy Blackheart already.

“If you look at pro wrestling pre-kayfabe, there’s something ugly and gritty about it and sometimes it looks like a real fight, which is really exciting. The audience believed it when the Four Horsemen came into the cage to beat up Dusty Rhodes. People were freaking out and climbing the cage so they could help save Dusty Rhodes. We’ll never be at that point again. Too many of us know it’s all just a show. So with black metal I’m torn, because part of me thinks it’s interesting to drop the mask, but there’s also a level of believing that these dudes are this fucking extreme.”

For RBMA and just in time for Royal Rumble weekend, I spoke to Daniel Krow, the Portland gentleman behind Lives of the Kemet and the album Willow and Fall. The album is a surreal, frightening and discombobulating take on the life of wrestler Jeff Hardy and the history of 90s black metal. The conversation is a fascinating one about two sub-cultures and the interesting way that they correlate. Also, Amanda Bynes and Euronymous!

“There’s a term that is overused here - naco. It’s used nowadays for everything that doesn’t fit into a Western way of life, are considered naco, as shorthand for bad taste. Not in all of Mexico, of course, but the country’s trying to cleanse their background to move into a fully Western world. That shouldn’t happen. In this case, tribal is something autonomous, and when it’s trying to be that, a lot of people say “eugch, it’s for nacos” because it doesn’t fit the correct Western way. So tribal became a novelty, when the reality is that it’s everywhere, so we have to go ahead and give it the proper respect that it definitely has in our hearts.”

For Red Bull Music Academy, I spoke to Tomás Davo of Mexico’s NAAFI label about why Latin America is a myth, being pigeonholed as a spokesperson for all Mexican music, and his new role as a musicologist.