Bjork - Biophilia

It's out now. A lot of it is too quiet/placid for my tastes and parts of it have been criticized for being dated callbacks to dance sounds long out of vogue, but "Mutual Core" seems to strike the right balance of contemplatively melting your face off.

Anyone else listening to this?

http://open.spotify.com/album/3gzmutBDhUmW3YmmiOXRC4

lol at the title mutual core

excited to hear this

surprised it took so long for an ILX thread to appear about this. i thought you guys loved bjork

a lot of talk about this happened on the Volta thread

I'd really like to like a new Bjork record, but this sounds like snoozy new age Earth Store music to me, with the lyrics ("you are a light bearer / receiving radiance from others") to match.

the only songs that really appeal to me on first listen are "Crystalline" (which I already knew) and "Mutual Core"

i like some of the songs, Moon is fantastic and Dark Matter is a nicely spooky Medulla-esque cut, but she sounds so vocally detached on most of it. The grandiosity of some of the (quite irritating) lyrical content strikes me as a bit.. forced. And then when she breaks out the dance rhythms it does sound massively dated. No artist in 2011 should be utilising drill-n-bass as a musical form.

Also, the whole app backstory to it is toecurling

file under: worse than Volta

"worse than Volta" seems about right to me

eek. yeah her poetry has become tiresome as of late.

who are the cool names pulled in to work with her this time?

all produced by Bjork except "Crystalline", which was produced by Bjork and 16bit

a couple of ppl show up as cowriters (Mark Bell, Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir, Damien Taylor, Sjón) but it's mostly the Bjork show

Would it be too harsh to declare that Bjork not only works best with top-of-the-line outside collaborators, but actually requires them?

no that's definitely true

i have the iphone app for this and it is dumb as shit

yes, yes it is

Also, just relistened to the two songs each that DJP and merked liked and will agree that "Crystalline," at least, is interesting enough in isolation. Funny, since I didn't think it was much as a single, but it is certainly the most striking thing on the record.

There was a rejig Ep of 3 of the tracks done with Omar Souleyjman (sp?) which was more engaging than the album, on the whole

I agree that the Souleman remix EP contains more exciting/engaging versions than the album.

of all the artists i've fomrerly loved bjork is the one (still working) that i have the least interest in hearing again, which is kind of surprising to me. i was agog at the drill and bass section of crystalline although the Omar Souleyjman (sp?) version was interesting.

Such a bummer she's gone so stale. Ironic that for all the hype regarding its "experimental" means of production (all vocally sourced,) 'Medulla' had by far the best actual songs she'd done in years. Everything since then seems completely autopilot. The melodies seem like just a series of ad-hoc Bjork-y patterns, and the lyrics (almost always non-metrical and non-rhyming) are laid down haphazardly.

i find it lovely.

"worse than Volta" seems about right to me

:(

i really wanted this to be awesome

I like parts of this, but more than ever now, I think it's pretty clear that Björk w/o Mark Bell is just not very interesting to me anymore.

too many of the songs have no melody and instead use histrionics and a million notes to signify nothing. she's working well at being the mariah carey of indie world. truthfully, i cannot understand why i ever liked her.

tbf bjork's latter-day histrionics are v (v) different from mc's histrionics

lol what would you like her to signfy. good album, i'm fine with it, bjork hate is ehh.

Wow. I actually quite enjoyed this the couple times I streamed it from the NPR site. I guess nothing stuck with me quite like it did from Volta or Medulla but I don't necessarily see that as a problem after a couple of listens.

who are the cool names pulled in to work with her this time?

Damian Taylor: http://cycling74.com/2011/10/06/an-interview-with-damian-taylor/

No artist in 2011 should be utilising drill-n-bass as a musical form.

I'll bite: why not? (I have no problem with e.g. artists utilizing garage rock or Gypsy swing as a musical form in 2011.)

Drill & Bass is still in pre-revival no man's land. Once it's been revived the first time it'll join the hallowed ranks of all other sub-genres that never go completely out of fashion ever again.

Amazingly it's been 16 years since the first drill & bass records so I don't think its first revival is necessarily that far off. The new High Places album (among other things) seems to be presaging the return of mid-90s album dance somewhat.

yeah whatevs Crystalline is dope

the modern form of drill-n-bass can be found in the off kilter, hyperactive drum programming of someone like Machinedrum, but that's done with a lightness of touch and a modernism that's far removed from the dated splatter of Crystalline

I tend to think all of that hyperrhythmic post-dubstep is more post-The Black Dog than post-drill & bass, in respect of which "splatter" is kind of constitutive.

xpost

No artist in 2011 should be utilising drill-n-bass as a musical form.

lol so machinedrum is garbage then

I don't understand the aversion to the D&B bits. She's choosing what works for the songs - no reason why she should have to jump on the dubstep wagon. And "no melody"? gtfo

i still need to give this album more of a chance - the lyrics haven't sunk in at all yet - but on a couple of listens i definitely think it's her worst yet, and confirms my post-volta suspicions that björk may have lost it.

Such a bummer she's gone so stale. Ironic that for all the hype regarding its "experimental" means of production (all vocally sourced,) 'Medulla' had by far the best actual songs she'd done in years. Everything since then seems completely autopilot. The melodies seem like just a series of ad-hoc Bjork-y patterns, and the lyrics (almost always non-metrical and non-rhyming) are laid down haphazardly.

i think i'd agree with this - hadn't been able to put my finger on exactly how she'd lost it but this rings true. i overrated volta initially - it does have a few good songs on it but not very many interesting ideas. agree that medúlla, which on its release i assumed would end up as the admirable-but-not-lovable album that you'd never actually listen to, holds up surprisingly well.

the omar souleyman remix of "crystalline" is pretty awesome though.

the whole multimedia corporate apps thing was a major turn-off for me - partly cuz i don't give a shit about ipads or apps in the first place, partly cuz it's just the latest iteration of what's now been a decade-long björk project of rinsing her fans for massive amounts of £££ in the name of technology, partly cuz it's the tori amos warning sign of having thought way too much about an album's concept to cover for being out of ideas/thinking way too little when it comes to the actual music.

I actually think she might have overthought the music, to the extent that she couldn't get enough distance from it to see whether it was particularly good, or original, or anything - apparently spending ages working on electronic equipment that turned out to sound like a medieval organ etc etc.

By and large though this sounds like she's just run out of ideas despite the perspiration. The whole album sounds a bit like Vespertine as occasionally produced by Squarepusher, very 2001 (in fact it would have been slightly old hat even in 2001).

'Cosmology' is beautiful though and it's worth listening to for that alone.

I don't understand the aversion to the D&B bits. She's choosing what works for the songs - no reason why she should have to jump on the dubstep wagon. And "no melody"? gtfo

THANK GOD she didn't jump on the dubstep bandwagon. I do miss the days when Bjork albums would wander through several completely different moods though. Homogenic and Vespertine are great but some variety wouldn't go amiss.

The reason the drill and bass bits feel dud isn't because of the timeliness of the revival or whatever, it's because of the nagging sense that Bjork threw them in because she couldn't think of anything else to do. The Mark Bell-backed live version of Hyperballad for the last couple of years has mutated into LFO's 'Freak' and Bjork might have been vaguely aiming for that effect here, except for LFO read Squarepusher.

I agree the drill and bass revival is probably only a couple of years off now. The influence of pre-1994 Warp/IDM is now so prevalent across British dance music in particular that it's long been seeping into music by artists who have probably never even heard the original stuff. For example Lex gets very irritated when you point out an IDM influence in some of the producers he's been repping for, even when it's obviously there it's not necessarily even intentional on the producer's part. Black Dog synths in particular are everywhere right now.

What I love about it is how closely the music compliments the lyrics. If you're going to do what is essentially a concept album then you might as well tie it all together so tightly rather than just vaguely draping the concept over the top.

("you are a light bearer / receiving radiance from others")

lyrics like this...her career really is kinda running in parallel to tori's :/

i mean that could easily be one of the more awful lines from night of hunters there

The only time I particularly noticed the lyrics was when there was a solid clunker and there seemed to be a fair few of them.

Nothing as bad as the suicide bomber lyric from Volta though.

The new High Places album (among other things) seems to be presaging the return of mid-90s album dance somewhat.

Yeah, that one reminded me a lot of Lamb. Wasn't that keen on the whole thing, but the first track is great.

This record is bloody amazing and I like it more than anything she's done since Homogenic. Most of all: I love her new choice of vocal microphone + mixing decisions. I've always thought B's voice was mixed Very High and Very Sibilant on Selmasongs onward. The vocal treatment + phrasing on "Dark Matter" are just the most beautiful thing I've heard.

Also: I'm getting serious Dagmar Krause vibes on some of these new songs!

"You are a light bearer / receiving radiance from others" seems to be a Sjon lyric, for those who care; same guy who brought us "if you forget my name / you will go astray / like a killer whale / trapped in a bay"

I am literally flipping out over this record.

ftr I am more ambivalent about this rather than actively disliking it

I swear to God it stills sounds like an advertisement for Crystal Light.

I have to agree with Owen on this one, I love the new album. Volta was the first album of hers I didn't completely fall for but this one is really doing it for me.

While there is an element of it being Björk, doing Björk-y things... rather than massively memorable songs out of the box. I'm also very pleasantly surprised by it. The concept, largely actually works, which is quite something to pull off and it's a whole other world on headphones.

I also think she's managed to drop quite a few of her usual over-repeated vocal tics myself. It's brought me back from the cynicism I was feeling about her. There are ways in which it feels a minor work, but it's a satisfying one (compare with say.. the last, truly pointless, Radiohead album).

sure, Volta had strong sounding songs, but they were (minus a handful) uniformly FUCK-AWFUL. And I'm a big fan. It's not everything.

If it's not her best album ever per-se, I'm still glad that she's at least managed to recover some heart & soul and head-expanding qualities at last. All the more impressively human considering the potentially abstracting factor of the simple and up-front conceptual girdings she's stubbornly built through it.

Depressingly disappointing. It makes Vespertine sound deep, full-bodied and lush when previously I would have called that album insubstantial and floaty. It also makes Volta sound inspired. Seems to me like with every new album she strips away another layer of what used to make her great. (Re: Radiohead's TKOL - that was actually great pop, imo. The lead single was a lively, elegant pop song that had this unexpected Prince/Michael Jackson thing going on underneath. Biophilia's attempts at pop are embarrassingly cheesy and its avant garde trappings are tacked on, adorning flimsy songs. Glissando choirs don't make 'Cosmogony' a less cloying song.)

There's two varieties of song here:

1) Cheesy and flimsy (e.g., "Crystalline," "Virus")
2) "Dark" and sparse (e.g., "Hollow," "Dark Matter")

Both manage to be equally embarrassing, and lyrics such as "as the protein transmutates" don't help their case at all.

ugggggggh those lyrics

tbh I don't think I've spent any real amount of time paying attention to any of Bjork's lyrics since Homogenic; to me they are just a voice delivery medium

There's a difference between backgroundy evocative and blatantly offensive re: her lyrics, imo. Lyrics that stick out awkwardly vs. lyrics that wash over you or just sound pretty even if they wouldn't be pleasant to read. That particular lyric demands attention because it is so... unlyrical.

I don't know, the first and only times I've noticed the terrible lyrics on this album are when people post them to this thread.

Again, "as the protein transmutates" is a lyric by Sjon.

I'm not saying "THIS IS GOOD LYRIC WRITING GUYS". Sjon has been dropping clunkers since "Bachelorette". If you continue to say that you're a big Bjork fan, great, but suddenly you're vilifying her most significant and longtime collaborator aside from Mark Bell?

i don't really care who wrote it. the point is that it's her output and at this stage in her career it comes off as really stale and trivial.

but i haven't even listened to the album yet. djp might be right about it not mattering. or transmutating.

irl I had four long-time Bjork fans in their 30s say this was already their favourite or second favourite record of hers

I do that every time Erykah Badu releases a new album, regardless. I would have to presume some Björk fans do too.

ha, tru.

Man, I don't know how sincere she can be with any of this anymore

I remember Bjork from her Post/Homogenic period (I was like 12 at the time) and always remembered loving the videos she did, particularly the video for "I Miss You" (done by the creator of Ren & Stimpy!) which was so damn good and showed that she could not take herself so seriously for a minute and played like a demented version of the "Groove is in the Heart" video (which is like the greatest thing ever), only to find out that from Vespertine on she never really let loose again. Now it seems like she knows that everyone's expecting her to do weird things so she tries to blast everything into outer space without realizing that she's not really much of a songwriter. I mean she really seems like the kind of person who would go on and on in interviews or maybe her song lyrics about the importance of having fun and embracing your inner child and then put out music that no child could ever enjoy.

have you seen the "Triumph of a Heart" video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQB9d-MMIx0

Anyone watch her on the Colbert Report? I have to laugh at the anachronistic troubadour-yielding-iPad image and wish the interview was denser. Colbert's demonstration of the app was enough to convince me to finally download it though.

http://soundcloud.com/purplepr/bjork-crystalline-current

There is some nifty electro-"Closer" stuff going on here!

"Crystalline" is still the only song off of this album that I really get into. ;_;

this remix is fiyah tho! ^_^

Local independent record store owner's Facebook post today:
"Anyone else have a copy of Biophilia on LP that just LOVES to collect dust? No matter what I do I can't get rid of the static charge this record has. Maybe Bjork is playing some crafty Icelandic science trick on me"

well saw her last night performing a good portion of this and it was amazing. still not that keen on the album but as a live thing it was rad.

I still really like this!

was also there akm! Yes, inspiring show, and I haven't actually heard this album

Still really surprised at the muted response this album got on here. I much prefer it to her last two albums.

On a recent Bjork binge I decided to catch up and buy the Biophilia app. Despite all the Attenborough-narrated pomp and circumstance, I found it to be very disappointing, at least on my Galaxy S4 phone. Text was way too small to read and a lot of the apps were clunky and unresponsive. I wasn't sure how 'educational' it really was - the links between science, art and nature seemed tenuous to say the least, and the message seemed rather clouded. I didn't feel like I was learning anything new, about arpeggios, crystals or the cosmos.

The whole thing seemed very 'beta' (although I realise it came out a while ago now) and often it's hard to know what's supposed to be happening. The whole thing reminds me of those Virtuality machines from 1993 which is a shame because conceptually it could have been a really inventive and interesting app. As such it's an opportunity missed.

That said, I don't think the music/songs deserve the drubbing they received upthread. It's clear they've been designed specifically with the app in mind, so they had to be extremely minimal-sounding in order to work and the lyrics had to fit the educational objective. There are still some quite pretty and moving parts to it, and it's interesting to hear Bjork work with such barebones material.

She certainly hasn't 'lost it' - this is a noble but failed experiment.

Apps are the new multimedia CD-ROMs, along with all the attendant issues of archiving and upkeep. Just think about how many updates you have for apps on your devices over the past couple of months, along with operating system updates, no single artist run software app is going be realistically keep up with that. Shame as well, since these kinds of projects will be completely inaccessible in just a few years, perhaps only a couple of screenshots will likely exist.

This is true. It reminds me of early Flash-driven sites that were so clunky and complicated to negotiate you'd just give up. Jesus, I think it was the Skam site which was the worst of the lot. Literally impossible to use.

So, we know the producer of the new album:

In the new issue of The Fader, Arca reveals that he’s “the sole producer” of Bjork‘s new album.

Arca has released a brace of acclaimed solo records, but is best known for working on Kanye West’s Yeezus and FKA Twigs’ LP1. Earlier this month he announced his debut album Xen, which is due on Mute.

You can read the piece here. Arca has also released a new video, produced by regular collaborator Jesse Kanda for Xen‘s lead track ‘Thievery’. You can watch it below – it’s fairly NSFW.

Bjork, it’s worth noting, went to watch PC Music artists GFOTY and Danny L. Harle in London last week – she’s clearly keeping her eyes open for new producers.

(http://www.factmag.com/2014/09/30/arca-has-produced-the-next-bjork-album/)

Also, you can watch a teaser of the Biophilia Live movie here ("Moon").

ooooooh

Intrigued.

Totally. Arca is great, clearly a son of Bjork's own aesthetic and this is an inspired choice

Finding it difficult to get excited about any choice of producer here given the quality of her songwriting over the last ten years or so.

The Haxan Cloak and Total Freedom are among collaborators as well. This is going to be dark.

guess arca isn't the "sole producer", then?

but yeah, very excited to hear the haxan cloak is involved as well. i don't know total freedom.

funny, just came across these comments on Bjork by Aphex Twin in an old interview:

Why did you turn down Björk?

Björk was also on Tom’s (Jenkinson) case. She’s been on everyone’s case. She also did some stuff with Bogdan (Raczynski). He was going to do a track on her album and they didn’t use it. They were quite sort of crafty and business. They just wanted to give him ten percent but I think if you work with someone you should always get fifty percent. It doesn’t seem very respectful. But she doesn’t get involved with that stuff she has people doing it for her in case it goes wrong. It’s a bid sad in some ways. I mean she wants to work with the people she likes but at the same time she’s really obsessed with „this is the newest thing“, you know „goldfish memory“. For some reason people always think that the best things are the most recent things.

I’m actually quite surprised that Björk wanted to work with you. I would have thought that you are too established for her.

(laughing) Yeah, that’s what I thought. I mean she’s also worked with other old people like that string quartett and stuff like that. And they are not famous. If I really wanted to work with her I could make it happen but I’m not really that bothered. If I’d work with singers I’d rather work with someone no one has ever heard of. Like opera singers or things like that.

Wouldn’t you be interested in doing something with Björk the musician rather then with only Björk the vocalist?

Oh yeah. I always tell her that anyway. I always say to her: „I don’t understand why you get all these people you should just do it by yourself.“ And she’s been trying. She got her laptop and everything. Maybe she will do that when she’s really old and everyone thinks that she’s not pretty anymore. I think then she’ll have to do it. Because then she won’t be able to get all the little techno boys to work with her because they will be like „Björk? Oh yeah, you mean that old woman. I’m not going to work for her!“ At the moment she can just phone them up, talk some Icelandic and they will be willing to do everything. … With Björk she’s really business when it come to things like that. When you deal with Björk she‘s like: „Ok, I’m going to fax you the details and you are going to send me that…“ If I‘m going to do a track with someone I’d have to be their friend. I’d have to spend some time with them and you’d have to come around my house and drink fifty cups of tea and smoke some spliffs and get pissed. You can’t just send me the track. That’s really cold and I think she didn’t really understand because she has done it that way all her life. I think she has forgotten how to relate to people.

jeez rdj chill out

Maybe she will do that when she’s really old and everyone thinks that she’s not pretty anymore. I think then she’ll have to do it. Because then she won’t be able to get all the little techno boys to work with her because they will be like „Björk? Oh yeah, you mean that old woman. I’m not going to work for her!

jeez rdj

pretty certain that until the day she dies bjork will have a line around the block of people who would love to work with her

Let's go through the list of Aphex Twin remixes and imagine each of them trekking to his house, drinking 50 cups of tea, smoking spliffs and getting pissed. Surely he held everyone to the same standard.

26 mixes for hash

Collaboration =/ remix

Total Freedom is on track to eclipse Ornette as my favourite-ever American musician tbh, Karl you should check him out

tbf he did address the remix difference right after:

But you have worked with musicians as well in the past that you didn’t really know.

Yeah, but only with remixes and that was just to get some money. And that’s not really like working with someone either.

http://www.groove.de/2014/08/21/aphex-twin-groove-interview-2001-english/

Ah, that adds the necessary context. Now i'm going to have to find something else to be indignant about. Shouldn't take long.

RDJ sounds like a fucking tool in that interview. I love his music but he should steer clear from interviews, he always sounds like an agoraphobic downer.

Also he believes he is much smarter than he actually is.

Ironic that he is the one pointing that Bjork has forgotten how to relate to people.

sadly otm

operative word there may be "forgotten"; I assume RDJ never actually knew how to relate to people based on those comments

I don't remember giving this record proper listening time when it came out, but it sounds incredible now. Listening to the podcast series helped.

Maybe in 10 years I'll be spiritually prepared for Fossora, lol.

I always adored this album!!