With lyrics in 13 languages across 18 tracks and nods to musical traditions spanning everything from flamenco to opera, Spanish pop star Rosalía’s new album, ‘Lux,’ is an aural feast. Since its early November release, critics and reviewers have debated: is it a pop album? A contemporary classical album? Both? Neither?
But what everyone can agree on is that its blend of global influences and reference points is unique, and arguably a major element of the album’s appeal, with ‘Lux’ currently sitting at the top of Spotify’s streaming charts. The team behind the project is notably international as well: Icelandic Björk and American Yves Tumor joined the album’s first single “Berghain” while Yahritza Y Su Esencia, known for making regional Mexican music out of Washington state, and fado singer Carminho, appear on “La Perla” and “Mémoria” respectively. The renowned London Symphony Orchestra creates the backbone of it all, with none other than Icelandic conductor and composer Daníel Bjarnason at their helm.
“It was a happy coincidence that I ended up working on this project,” says Bjarnason, whose classical background and past work with artists like Sigur Rós make him well-positioned to straddle the many genres of ‘Lux.’ “I come from classical music, but I’ve worked in pop and electronic music and even jazz, so it’s easy for me to move from one world to the next. I understood the vocabulary that she was drawing on, but also the way she was incorporating it into her own language.”
Nearly one year ago, Bjarnason flew out to London and recorded “this whole thing in about a week” with Rosalía and her collaborators in the studio every day. She was “very hands-on,” he adds, “which is the most fun way to work with an artist.”
Below, we chat with Bjarnason about the global sounds that are referenced throughout the album, how this coterie of contributors guided its worldly result, and how to identify the Icelandic fingerprint he personally left on ‘Lux.’
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There’s a lot of chatter about the 13 languages on this album – Ukrainian, Sicilian, Arabic, Mandarin – but your work as the conductor relies on a very different type of communication. How do you “speak” to the orchestra?
What people see of composing – the hand gestures – is like a sign language. Certain movements have certain meanings, like when you beat down, that’s the downbeat. Depending on if the music is in two or three or four, there are different patterns that the conductor does. The first job of the conductor is to keep time in that way. But then there’s a whole interpretive aspect of it where you work with musicians, you talk about what you’re doing. You talk about the sound, how you want to shape it, how you want to phrase it. There is a sort of interpretive dance going on as well, because the conductor is interpreting what they want in the music through their movement. That is the goal. Conducting an orchestra is a complicated and interesting thing to do, because there is a lot happening at once.
