"Selmasongs: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack 'Dancer in the Dark'" is Björk's first soundtrack album, released on September 18, 2000, by One Little Indian Records. It serves as the soundtrack for the film Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk stars as Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant living in the United States.
The album features a blend of classical arrangements and innovative compositions that incorporate sounds from everyday objects, such as factory machines and trains. This unique approach adds a distinctive texture to the music, reflecting the film's emotional depth and industrial themes.
Notably, some tracks on the album have different lyrics compared to their versions in the film. For instance, the song "Scatterheart" presents a version with significantly altered lyrics. The soundtrack excludes the vocals of actors David Morse, Cara Seymour, and Vladica Kostic, and makes several lyrical adjustments that may have been intended to avoid revealing plot details or to enhance the album’s coherence as a standalone piece. On "I've Seen It All," the vocals originally performed by Peter Stormare in the film are replaced by Thom Yorke, who recorded a version of the song specifically for the soundtrack. Additionally, "My Favourite Things" and the original "Next to Last Song" are not included on the album despite their presence in the film.
The track "I've Seen It All" received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. To promote the track, Björk collaborated with director Floria Sigismondi to create a "webeo," a promotional video that premiered on MTV.com on September 1, 2000. This video featured a shorter version of the song specifically recorded for this promotion.
Björk was initially offered the chance to write and produce the score for Dancer in the Dark. However, after reading the script, she was excited and inspired by the idea of deeply immersing herself in the character and imagining what her internal world would sound like. This led her to take on the starring role in the film, a decision strongly influenced by director Lars von Trier. Björk noted that she approached the role with a sense of instinctive feeling rather than traditional acting, which aligned with von Trier's own preference for less conventional approaches to film acting.
Filming for Dancer in the Dark began in early 1999. In the film, Björk plays Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant and single mother who works in a factory in rural America and is gradually losing her sight. Despite being primarily known as a musician, Björk found the experience of acting to be emotionally exhausting and later stated that she would not pursue acting in films again. Her working relationship with Trier was strained, leading to several disagreements and her later accusations of sexism and sexual harassment. Despite these issues, co-star Catherine Deneuve and others described Björk's performance as being driven by raw emotion rather than conventional acting techniques. Björk clarified that her reluctance to act was not solely due to this film but was part of a broader reluctance to act in general, with this film being an exception made for von Trier.
The album Selmasongs reflects a diverse range of influences. According to David Toop in The Wire, it combines elements of "art of noise" from the Futurists, "plastic fantastic musique concrète slapstick" reminiscent of Esquivel, Dean Elliott, and Jack Fascinato, as well as techno beats and Broadway-style musical elements. Barney Hoskyns noted that the album continues the blend of techno and orchestral strings that Björk explored on Homogenic (1997), describing it as a mix of "torch-song histrionics with skittering Warp backbeats."
Björk utilized sounds recorded on the film's set, capturing ambient noises to create a musique concrète style in the album. For example, "Cvalda" begins with industrial sounds that evolve into a rhythmic shuffle, while "I've Seen It All" features a loop of train sounds, which were created by Mark Bell and Valgeir Sigurdsson. This approach was reminiscent of the sound design in the film Stalker (1979), enhancing the film's atmospheric and immersive quality.
