Send "Bjork " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The most common caricatures of Björk tend to fixate on her outsized aesthetic sense. But for all the bonkers fashion choices, outré collaborators, and leftfield influences she pulls into her orbit, it's easy to forget that her worldview is also equally informed by a sympathy and awareness of the systems that guide us. From the "beats and strings" manifesto that shaped Homogenic to the "music for laptop speakers" mandate that drove Vespertine through to the vocals-only absolutism of Medúlla, her obsession with patterns and structure and conceptual boundaries has consistently been at the center of her work. Often, she has celebrated the messiness and the chaos implicit in these very things; in fact, the very first line of her very first single took a perverse delight in the lack of logic inherent in one of the biggest and most complex systems of all: human behavior.Biophilia marks Björk's eighth full-length release, and represents her definitive attempt to create an ecosystem around her work. Billed as her "most ambitious and interdisciplinary project yet" and boasting all the usual fixings of a Björk release (dazzling artwork, a Michel Gondry video, vanguard instrumentation, a bizarre list of collaborators), it also comes supported by a corresponding iPad application for each of its 10 tracks, a new website, a series of live shows and "music workshops", and a forthcoming 90-minute film documenting its creation. Beyond that, the album itself purports to engage with some pretty momentous themes, with song titles like "Thunderbolt", "Dark Matter", and "Cosmogony and imagery focusing on time, space, and the natural world. (Note that editor Brandon Stosuy wrote press materials for this release prior to being hired by Pitchfork.) The stakes feel even higher in light of Björk's mottled output over the past decade. Between 2004's well-received but thin-sounding Medúlla and 2007's unfocused and sprawling Volta, Björk has arguably been unable to produce anything definitive since 2001's Vespertine. In its worst moments, Volta painted a picture of an artist whose quality control instincts had been eroded by indulgence. One would be forgiven if news of all the scaffolding around Biophilia sounded up alarm bells: Is this her coming back strong, or piling conceptual materials on top of her music in an effort to give it extra depth?...full text |
| Guardian |
| The biggest artists in the world might look on in envy at the advance publicity for Björk's eighth album, Biophilia. It's been heralded not merely as an important new release but the future of the entire record industry. "Björk Fights to Save Music" offered the headline in Mojo, not a magazine renowned for working itself up into a state of breathless over-excitement. According to a cover feature in Wired, it represents not merely an attempt to "define humanity's relationship with sound and the universe" but also to "pioneer a music format that will smash industry conventions", neither of which are claims anyone was in a hurry to make for, say, Beady Eye's Different Gear, Still Speeding. Buy it from Buy the CD Bjork Biophilia One Little Indian 2011 Tell us what you think: Rate and review this album But then, who can blame them? Biophilia invites a degree of grandiosity. It is, by all accounts, the first album to be released as a suite of iPad and iPhone apps, intended as "a semi-educational project for children using sound, texts and visuals" covering, among other topics, plate tectonics, genetics and human biorhythm. It took three years to make, a period that involved discussions not merely with Björk's record company, but Apple and National Geographic. It required the employment of an immense supporting cast. David Attenborough provides narration. Dr Nicola Dibben, a senior lecturer in music at Sheffield University, wrote the essays that accompany every song. An American mathematician and a British scientist and film-maker, bonded by their desire to collect every element in the periodic table, developed some of the apps, and a robotics company's director of engineering was commissioned to build four "gravity harps", which, according to their creator, "make music using the oscillating transformation of gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy and back again". The fact you feel a bit of a mouldy fig for actually mentioning the music – you have Attenborough announcing you're "on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations" and you want to talk about pop songs? – means Biophilia has already succeeded as a kind of multimedia event. At least one critic is entirely prepared to believe his own intellectual deficiencies are what led him to find the apparently direct correlation between the scientific topics and the composition of the music hard to grasp. But even if you loved every minute of the extravaganza, it would be a shame if the tap of fingers on touchscreens drowned out the music, not least because the music doesn't need any support. There's a moment on Crystalline when sparse electronics and the tinkling of the gameleste – another of her specially commissioned instruments – unexpectedly give way to a fizzing, old-fashioned drum'n'bass breakbeat; it provides a visceral thrill that no academic explication or interactive game can really improve on. The lovely, gasping choral swell of Cosmonogy's chorus communicates a sense of wonder at the universe's vastness more directly than the accompanying stuff about orbital ratios and holistic imperatives can. Indeed, there's a strong argument for uncoupling the music from the apps entirely. Once you've read the essays, there's virtually no room for the listener to put their own interpretation on the songs, which at a stroke cancels out a portion of the pleasure of listening. The whole thing has clearly been designed to make music more malleable and interactive, but risks unwittingly robbing music of the malleability and interactivity it's always had....full text |
| Guardian |
| Imagine drawing symphonies with a fingertip. It's the kind of synaesthetic contrivance that is usually the preserve of science fiction. But large parts of Icelandic singer Björk's latest album were made like this – tracing hillocks of bass or curlicues of strings on touchscreens: intuitively, gleefully. Then there are the bits of tunes composed on computers and plugged into newly invented, old school-sounding instruments via revolutionary new electronic interfaces. Buy it from Buy the CD Like those ghostly automatic player-pianos in old westerns, they seem to play themselves. Meet the "gameleste", a Heath-Robinson cross between the Indonesian gamelan and the celeste. It gets a starring role on "Virus", a tender love song. "Like a virus needs a body/Soft tissue needs blood/Someday, I'll find you," croons Björk, in her sweetest lullaby mode, as the gameleste plinks naively along. By contrast, a giant Tesla coil provides a wild Frankenstein energy to standout tracks such as "Thunderbolt". To say that the end section of "Thunderbolt" sounds like evil robots passing wind should not detract from the tense wonder of Björk's spectacular swooping vocals, dogged by a flock of choristers and some malevolent bass. And that's just the naked sounds. This ground-breaking album is probably best experienced as a series of apps, in which the user part-composes the songs by waving their iPad around. Really, an album review can't do justice to the three years of interdisciplinary brain-bumping that went on between Björk, programmers, app guys, instrument-crafters, film-maker Michel Gondry, David Attenborough and National Geographic magazine to create a work that celebrates the wonder of the planet and of human ingenuity. But does it work as an album of, y'know, songs? Hell, yeah. Those of us accustomed to the nice, safe, regular shapes of music, worked out in multiples of four bars, might well have found some of Björk's endeavours a little irregular for some time now. The midsection of Biophilia is pretty forbidding, too. "Hollow", for one, is a troll-hunting soundtrack rich with horror-film organ sounds, demonic choir and an irruption of hard dancefloor digitals....full text |
Bjork lyrics Music videoclips
|
| ||||||||||
