Almost a decade ago, the Icelandic producer and musician Bjarki released “I Wanna Go Bang,” a vocoded techno bass banger that is as silly as it is undeniable. Though the track catapulted the artist to a certain degree of business techno visibility—it was, after all, released on Nina Kraviz’s Trip imprint—Bjarki’s career since has been anything but linear. There have been dalliances with IDM and ambient; there has been a joint EP with Aphex Twin; there have been alter egos and intentional confusion tactics. In a world that is often defined by a certain kind of formulaic career maneuvering, Bjarki has charted his own path. 

The artist’s forthcoming album uses AI-generated vocals as a vehicle to explore and satirize contemporary online wellness culture. It’s called A Guide To Healthier Lifestyle. The record is just one of many projects Bjarki has been working on. He has recently been working with the Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken, and A Guide To Healthier Lifestyle was released by Differance, a new “creative platform” he runs with the artist Thomas Harrington Rawle. We talked about all of this and more. Read our interview and listen to the new record below.

So, are you in Iceland at the moment?

Bjarki: I’m in Riga, Latvia. My wife is Latvian so I spend a lot of time here.

And how are you liking it?

It’s good. There’s a calmness here that I really appreciate. They’re just existing in a way that doesn’t feel performative. It’s full of trees, which is underrated. I never realised how much I needed trees until I lived in places that barely had any.

I assume it might be nice, if you're spending time traveling and making music, to come back to a place that's kind of low-key?

Yeah. Iceland is also low-key, but in a different way. There you have space, and space does something to your brain. It makes you feel smaller. Latvia has that too, but with a different weight to it. It’s more Eastern European in its energy, a little tougher and more grounded. After years of moving around it’s nice to be somewhere that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be something more than it already is all the time.

I assume the culture there is very different from the kind of wellness culture in California that is sort of the basis of this new record.

Completely different. There’s no performance of wellness here. People are just living, surviving. You don’t see them waking up at 5 a.m. to ice bathe and document their journey to enlightenment. They’re not trying to sell their existence back to themselves.

So there's not that much new age stuff happening in this city?

Not in the way you would expect. There’s underground theater, beautiful music, and old folk traditions that are more real than anything the wellness industry could package. Traditional Latvian music with insane octave changes and strange melody progressions that feel like they shouldn’t work but somehow do. It’s closer to something raw and human which is inspiring.

Is this a kind of religious music?

No, no, it's not. They are very pagan. I feel more connected to my paganism than in Iceland. Pagan traditions, in the sense that it’s tied to the sun, the earth, and the way seasons shift. Latvia still celebrates the winter and summer solstices like other northern countries used to do, and it feels more real than the forced spiritual branding you see in wellness culture. Iceland lost a lot of that connection because we weren’t allowed to keep it through history because of the church. But let's not talk about religion.

Well, I was going to ask you about the title of your new record. And in a way, you could argue that this sort of wellness culture has turned into some kind of new spiritual form.

It has, definitely. In the past year or so, I've seen—maybe it's because I'm constantly talking about it and my phone is just picking it up and I'm seeing it more and more—but I'm also noticing people that I know very well are starting to want a different kind of connection and they want to live a healthy lifestyle, which is all good and blessed. We all want some changes. But then capitalism steps in and turns it into another product, another distraction. It’s like a fire extinguisher filled with gasoline promising to save you after setting you on fire first.

That connection with commerce, you're trying to explore that on the record.

Yeah. It’s impossible not to. Wellness culture has turned into a billion-dollar industry that sells the illusion of control while keeping you in a loop. It preys on people’s anxieties and profits from offering temporary relief. I wanted to explore that contradiction, how we chase health and happiness while the system making us unhappy is the same one selling the cure. No matter what we do or the changes we make to feel better, we are still stuck in a system with millions of others.

What led you to feeling like you wanted this to be the throughline arc for an entire record?

Yeah, I mean, exploring the paradox of it, just poking a little bit of fun at how perfectly people intend to show their lives online. We're all kind of selling, not that we all are, but what you see on social media, people are mainly becoming the product. They are the ones who are showing or giving advice or their expertise on how to live your life. And I find that very interesting because like most of these people, most haven't even lived through the whole day without their phones.

You worked with AI voice elements on this record, right? What was that process like?

I use it more like a speech synthesizer, so there’s no intelligence there. It’s just me typing down things that pop in my head or some topic that I'm deeply invested in—some kind of idea or a theme. So it's not really AI. I get a lot of excitement from that—that it's coming from me, but it's not. And it's like some kind of paradox as well, maybe, but, it's definitely my own theater where I can just create characters and stories and themes however I feel and give it a life. It's still so fascinating to listen to someone else. Something that can get into your skin, but it's not a person. But if I would do it with a microphone myself, I wouldn't enjoy it as much. The voices in my head would be echoing back at me in the studio in real time.

Have you ever used your own vocals on a track?

Yeah. I’ve put microphones in my throat, screamed into them, processed my voice into things that don’t sound human anymore. It’s satisfying.

There’s something satisfying about that.

It's very satisfying just to put a microphone up your mouth and scream, it's great. Put a limiter on it and then see what comes out. Sometimes it sounds like a trumpet—I've done that many times.

I feel like there’s such an element of humor to your music. I saw that you've guessed on comedy shows before?

Everything funny is also tragic. Comedy and horror are two sides of the same thing—it’s just timing and delivery.

So, what's your relationship with humor and music? Because it's such a contested intersection.

Yeah, for sure, because it's so easy to not be understood. I have a lot of stupid jokes, and I say a lot of stupid shit and when I'm in the studio, but should it be shared with everyone is another thing. So when you want to share something, you want it to resonate with the people who are listening to it. I believe that everything that is funny is also tragic. Right? The theater logo.

The tragedy and the comedy.

Yeah, yeah. So I enjoy, also, to look at it in that way because I'm a funny guy but also very serious. I'm constantly doing something that I find funny and sad. Humor in music is tricky because it’s easy to be misunderstood or lame. I like using it as a trojan horse. You make something absurd or playful, but underneath, there’s something serious, something real.

You've made music under all these different aliases over the years. There's an element of comedy or play to their names, right?

Yeah, of course. If I released everything under my own name, it would really look like an AI was mass-producing tracks. The aliases help separate different ideas and sounds or genres, and they also make the label feel bigger than it actually is.

Yeah.

And different styles and different sounds. But the funny thing is, I think that is a little bit like the trick. People let their guard down when they’re laughing, and that’s when you can slip in something deeper.

When you work under these aliases, are you almost thinking about these things like you're playing a character?

It’s funny that you ask that. When I release under my own name, there’s more pressure I create and more expectations. But if I tell myself, Okay, now I’m going to be Refrigirator54, suddenly there’s more freedom. No rules, no restrictions. I intend to make a lot more music if I don't think about names or I don't think about releasing it. So I love to sometimes, just, I'm going to make a trance track. I want to make some melodies. Or, you know, like, oh, yeah, now I'm going to be Ricardo Villalobos.

It’s a psychological trick.

Absolutely. It’s like tricking yourself into making something without overthinking it. But the more calm and safe environment I create for myself, and not living in constant travel, I get better head space for me to immerse myself in myself.

So do you have any secret projects you're working on now? Do you have a secret happy hardcore project or something?

Yeah, I still have a bunch of music out there that I don't tell anyone—it's still a secret. I make so much music that some of it just needs to exist without me being attached to it. There’s something liberating about that, knowing that people might hear it and experience it and never trace it back to me and me never know about it.

Oh, wow. So there's tracks of yours that only a few people know you made.

Yeah, I kind of like that. I mean, I have so much fun making music, and there’s so many ways of creating music. There's these intimate moments that you can have with yourself at home, in your underwear, playing something over and over. It's just something that you make in that moment. And that's OK. It's not for anyone, you’re not going to release it. It's not techno. It's not ambient. It's just you in your underwear. Those moments don't always happen but I’m making more time for that. And I think those are the moments now that I'm looking for the most to kind of live. When you're always playing or in the club or you're traveling or in different places, there’s a lot of noise coming all over, it just gets a little bit more difficult to get in that zen with yourself.

You go into a studio like OK, let's turn on all the machines, or you're with people, you have to be somewhere, you go into clubs. There's not always this window to channel something deeper and more universal as well. Because if you make something that is really coming from your heart or something that you really resonate with, there is a big chance that it's going to be resonating with other people, but it's more fragile, but we're all fragile. We all have this hue around us that we don't let shine everywhere we go. Only a few of our closest friends can see that. Or not even close friends sometimes. So it's quite interesting to have these opportunities to make music about that. And that's, I think, what the guide is definitely about.

You are talking about taking out all of the sort of trappings and expectations of the industry out. When did you start making music? And in some ways is this process a way to get back to that era of your life when you first started making tracks?

I started actually making music with voices, really. It was more with the speech synthesizer in FruityLoops, but it was more making fun of my friends, so it's kind of been a joke all the time, you know? Or the bully at school—I was punched in the face by the bully because I was making a song about the bully. Yeah, so it is tapping a little bit into that. But I think the whole idea that I'm doing now is definitely not that—it's on another level. It's not even trying to be funny, it’s more sophisticated, or it's more gentle. That's maybe better. It's more gentle. It’s a little bit more real. A bit thought through, maybe.

You've been working with Doug Aitken. I'm curious how that process is different from you making tracks on your own, or making tracks for the dancefloor. I don't know if you've done work with an installation artist like that before, but I assume that's sort of a different process?

Yeah, for sure. He wanted music for his film project. First he wanted something he found and was quite old. He sent me a scene or an idea of what he was doing, and he wanted the music to be around that. And that was also the first time I was stepping into this scoring-like world. I’ve done some smaller things for friends. This was really interesting because I was sending him stuff that I didn't show anyone before. I was kind of like, Yeah, scrap that stuff that you found on Spotify or whatever. Check out the new shit. I think he was the first to actually listen to the demos from the Hellthier Lifestyle album.

And he was down?

Yeah, he was very much down. Much more interested in the new unreleased stuff. Now we're going to work more together. Doug is a really interesting guy. He's just so nice and so sweet and so interested in life. He's an observer. He is just interested in all kinds of art and what people are doing, how they're doing it. And yeah, it's very good energy.

It’s been almost ten years since “I Wanna Go Bang” came out, which must feel crazy, right?

Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

I mean, this is a big question, maybe too big to answer. But how have you seen the electronic music landscape shift in those ten years? I'm sure it's shifted like five times in that time. But how have you seen your own music shift? Maybe it's time for a little reflection.

Yeah, it's the reflection time. No, it's always good to reflect, that's the only thing that I've been doing lately. But I haven't really been reflecting that much on that track. I mean, you know—I understand. It was a crazy time in my life and I appreciate what it did for me. I think I see also the changes in the scene, everything has changed, not only because of COVID, but also just the system that we live in, the economy and the wars and all the horrors in the world that we see every day are affecting all of it.

So it’s very tense, hypernormalization you know, everything's just like, we're in the end of the toothpaste, just like squeezing the last [drop] out of capitalism before the apocalypse. It feels a little bit like that. People have less interest in stuff, the techno scene is mostly escapism, so to speak. I want to get more connection with people who want something more.

My work can be seen as self expression. It is not intended to be such. I am personally very against setting myself up as a popstar. Even if it's an anti-popstar status. You have to play the game to certain extent to reach the public. So the public knows you exist and that you are doing something of interest. My music is not self expression. I believe music is something between us, even if we can’t fully explain it. It’s for us to connect with our minds, feel it, interpret it in your own way. That’s where our real communication happens.

I never really tried to express myself with techno. I like techno and I want to make techno the way I envision the club or the dancefloor to be in my fantasy.

Yeah. Some of these tracks, I assume that after a point, they just kind of belong to the dancefloor in a way.

Yeah. The older I get, the less music I want to release, but things just keep piling up. If I'm not constantly releasing it and being in that flow, then I get stuck to that format of releasing music. And that takes a lot of energy and it also takes something away from me. So I really like to dial a little bit back, think more about the home experience. I think that kind of sparked a lot in Covid, because all I did was listen to music. Even with the music that I released for my friends, it's not like I always have the best time to enjoy it in a club—I sit in the living room with speakers and really enjoy it.

Is that some of the reasoning behind doing Differance?

For sure. That's definitely something that me and Thomas have been trying to get at—have music and works that have this kind of storyline and these kind of shared human experiences. That's really where I am today. I'm very interested in all these flaws and vulnerabilities and the human condition and these hidden desires—taboo topics or something like that.