This album is part of an unfolding constellation of linked projects, including a suite of 10 interactive audio-visual apps for the iPad, each based on a song from the disc. These hand-held playgrounds will include (we are told) games, animations, essays and utilities for making your own music and texts from kits of materials used in the songs. Only two of the apps have appeared so far – the rest will be released gradually over the coming weeks. But even with much of her new work still unseen and unheard, Bjork has burst the frame that held the concept of the “album” together through all the upheavals of recent years. In their app forms, the “finished” tracks will become starting points for collaborations with the user.
Biophilia, the album, reflects its new-media extensions through an overall theme: the links between cells in the body, movements of the planets, and components of whatever new gadget we’ve found to complicate our culture (by the way, if you don’t have an iPad, there are video samples of what the apps look like). Bjork looks at these parallel systems from a magical, mythic perspective. She’s “craving miracles” in Thunderbolt, a song created with a crackling bass line generated by a huge sparking Tesla coil. She finds them in Dark Matter, a song about the universe’s invisible plenitudes, in which murky keyboards and stark, two-part vocal harmonies sound almost like a mediaeval take on contemporary classical music.
There are a lot of custom-built sonorities on this disc, from the shallow harp sounds of Moon, to the Balinese simulations of the “gameleste” (a bulked-up variation on the celeste) in Crystalline and Virus. The counterweight to these bright novelties is the ageless sound of the voice: Bjork’s wondering girl-woman sound, and the women’s chorus that often feels like the embodiment of an archaic village sisterhood.
Bjork’s interest in new science and cosmology is matched by her hunger for ancestral wisdom. Cosmonogy, the album’s strongest track, describes a different creation myth in each verse. In the first, the universe is made from the singing of a pair of silver foxes. In the second, it comes from a cold black egg, which hatches out a god who makes the stars and planets from the shell.
Bjork’s incantatory style of delivery gives almost every tune a feeling of ritual discovery, as if some cosmic requirement were being satisfied by these words and this singing. The dark brasses in Cosmology and the church organ in Thunderbolt aren’t just instrumental colours: They trigger strong associations with ritual observances.
Like so many songwriters before her, Bjork isn’t above finding mirrors for the heart’s adventures in the movements of moon and stars. She’s a master at finding exotic camouflage for conventional or well-tried manoeuvres. Few of these songs diverge from standard pop structures. Most move along at Bjork’s default speed – a walking andante – and almost all present the same kind of meandering modal tunesmithing she has been practising for years.
For these reasons, I find Biophilia more convincing in pieces than as a whole. This may be the perfect album to be exploded into individual audio-visual worlds you can get lost in. Context is a big thing in any art, for making the strange seem approachable and the old seem new. Nobody in pop music understands that better than Bjork.
Biophilia
- Bjork
- One Little Indian/Nonesuch
OTHER NEW RELEASES
ROCK
Only in Dreams
- Dum Dum Girls
- Sub Pop
***1/2
