When Björk hit the main stage at Coachella over the past two weekends, the singer surprised fans with a stripped down orchestra set, backed by conductor Bjarni Frimann and the Hollywood String Ensemble. Above her, a special drone light show also filled the night sky. The Icelandic performer tells Vogue she wanted to keep her festival experience minimal this time around. “In my experience, what usually works at festivals are either enormous things or really stripped down, naked ballad y things,” says Björk. “The middle stuff must go!”
For the past few years, Bjork has been busy on her Cornucopia and Björk Orkestral tours, and the artist says she wanted to bring the “unplugged” vibe of her latter tour to Coachella. “I decided not to change Orkestral and pile visuals on stage, rather keep the simplicity of it but add drones in the sky,” says Björk. To do so, she worked with James Merry, the creative director of her concerts, to produce a special light show that riffed off the idea of sound and movement. “From the start, Björk was keen for the drone shapes to be quite architectural and organic, moving more like sound and waveforms,” says Merry. The singer adds, “Usually drone imagery has been very figurative, animals and so on, but I wanted more architectural and physics shapes curves based on biology, like cells and microorganisms.”
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