Gideon Yago: At the Academy Awards, you're going to perform "I've Seen It All" [RealAudio], your Best Song nominee from "Dancer in the Dark," with a 55-piece orchestra. Is that a conventional orchestra, or is there going to be some interesting instrumentation in there?

Björk: I think it's just the orchestra they have there, but I'm going to have like a recording — a recording of electronic noises. The film soundtrack was built on the ... um, how could I put this? When I was collecting the audio world from this film, it became very clear that the film was very occupied with separating as much as possible [between] the real world and fantasy. I guess the orchestra sort of stands for the fantasy element. All the other noises in the film are as real as you can get, so they recorded [the ambient sounds accompanying] each scene of each song. That particular song I am going to perform at the Oscars was shot on a train track, so all the noises there are colors from the forest around it, like a river and hitting the train with a stick. It's a collection of about 40 noises, maybe.

[LFO engineer/producer] Mark Bell [and I] put [together] a live mix, and how we did it is we cut, say, 40 tracks — we cut a twig on one, and a train on one, and maybe 10 different metal noises — and it's all real things, no bass or guitars or synthesizers. That [mix] would be the other instrument [during the performance]. They have been doing that sort of thing since 1950, like a musique concrète, I think they called it first. It's sort of from that world.

I'm really excited [to perform]. I won many awards [and] I've been to a lot of [award] shows. This is the most exciting one for me. I'm not just gonna go and grab a fancy frock. It's about singing, so it's a completely different headspace, which is sort of why I'm doing it. I'm really excited. Really, really excited.

Yago: When you recorded "I've Seen It All" for Selmasongs with Thom Yorke in the studio, was there an instant click? What was it like, being in the studio with him?

Björk: We've known about each other for a while. [We were] always just about to do something together, and we were just waiting for the right situation. I was really excited about this song; I thought that I finally had a song that deserved his voice, 'cause he's definitely my favorite male singer in the world. I asked him, and he being the kind of guy he is, full of integrity — there's not a grain of artificial, show-business behavior in him — he kind of insisted that he would turn up [in the studio] and be there for quite a while, so the communication in the song, the recording, was real and genuine. It wasn't just a turn-it-on, you know, "I recorded my bit in Las Vegas and he recorded his..." you know, [like] we never met or something. It was the opposite, and that actually came from him, 'cause I was all just kind of being in work mode, "Yeah, we have to get it done," and he was all, "No, no, no."

I guess that comes from him being in a band. At that stage, he just finished [Radiohead's Kid A], so he'd done three years of being in a room with five people, and it's all about communication. You can be playing a song, but if you're absentminded, it's not good. It's all about the actual effort you make to bond with someone. [RealVideo]

So yeah, we sung for, like, four days, a few hours a day — maybe I'm exaggerating; I'm not sure, truthfully — until we came to that place. Because I think the way I sang that song was pretty [Björk makes explosion sound], and for him, it's a very different approach. He made me sing it differently. It's kind of more sensitive and more in touch, you know. I was very flattered by his effort.