ONE of the wildest vocalists in all of popular music, Bjork Gudmundsdottir (known popularly simply as Bjork) has spent most of her life creating artful, experimental music that defies classification. Those who know her only by her solo career may be surprised to learn that she released albums with three separate bands prior to going it alone in 1993, and in fact this eccentric and original talent has had some measure of fame since she was sixteen. When Bjork was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, it was not immediately apparent that she would someday become the world's best-known Icelandic musician, if not the country's most identifiable citizen. As a child, she studied flute, piano, and voice, and by 1979, she had joined her first band. At fifteen, she formed the group Tappi Tikarass, a post-punk outfit influenced strongly by Siouxsie and the Banshees. In 1982, two of the band's songs were included in a documentary on the Icelandic New Wave called Rock in Reykjavik, and as a result, Bjork...