Album review: Björk, Biophilia

ALTHOUGH the strapline says CD of the Week, this feels like an inadequate description for Björk’s latest outpouring of creativity and invention, which has been billed as the world’s first app album (technically a bunch of unknowns beat her to it, but if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no-one there to hear it…)

Composed in part on an iPad, Biophilia has been conceived as a multi-media experience. In addition to the music itself, there are accompanying applications (reviewed below right) with interactive content relating to each track, including games, essays and an introduction by Sir David Attenborough.

If Attenborough is the voice of authority on matters concerning the natural world, Björk is the most illustrious exponent of that peculiarly Icelandic connection to landscape. Biophilia sets out to explore the relationship between music, nature and technology, the album title referring to the hypothesis that human beings have an instinctive bond with other living organisms, with individual songs pondering the relationship between a virus and a cell, between gravity and the planets, between you and your ancestors.

Remember that old public information film which zoomed in from the outer reaches of the cosmos down to Earth and into the blood vessels of an insect, then back? That’s roughly the scope of inspiration here – just life, the universe and everything.

How does one convey that in sound? With bespoke instruments, it seems. Biophilia makes use of a pipe organ which can process digital information, a Tesla coil, the Sharpsichord, which looks like the result of a three-way involving a barrel organ, pianola and gramophone, a gameleste, which one can at least guess is a holy union of gamelan and celeste, and pendulum harps which extrapolate musical patterns from gravitational pull. Which kind of puts Seasick Steve’s homemade guitars in the shade.

Anyone who witnessed Björk’s residency at the Manchester International Festival in July could appreciate the physicality of these arcane musical beasts, not to mention the mesmeric power of her Icelandic choir of sirens. But just as these live art shows were one version of the material and the apps provide another, the recordings on the CD have undergone further “sonic sculpting” to give them “more blood and muscles… more warmth and flesh”. For all her visionary ambition, Björk still wants her music to hit you where it counts. But want doesn’t always get.

Taken as a purely listening experience, Biophilia sounds quintessentially Björk. Her voice and mode of expression is so unique that even when the furniture behind her is rearranged, there is still no mistaking it for the work of any other artist.

But the guileless joy of her pop records is long past, replaced with an ever more experimental impulse. The results can be intriguing, such as the baroque sound of Solstice, or of chin-stroking interest as on Moon, where the cyclical structure is intended to illustrate the lunar cycle which in turn stands for the opportunity to make a fresh start in life.

Biophilia consists of many such clever connections between content and execution. But I found I was less interested in how the synth arpeggios on Thunderbolt represented the time between a lightning strike and a clap of thunder and more moved by the haunting polyphony of the choir.

Such moments of loveliness are scattered throughout the album – the music box prettiness of the gameleste on Crystalline or the comforting swell of brass and truly celestial choral sound on Cosmogony – but these constitute satisfying snippets rather than an immersive whole.

Many tracks are simply more interesting conceptually than they are musically. While the pipe organ chuffs like an oncoming steam train on Hollow, Björk intones about tracing her genetic blueprint back through the generations, or what she describes more poetically as “the everlasting necklace” which defines one’s sense of self. But it’s not one you’ll be holding out to hear next time she’s on tour.

Likewise, Virus, which invites sympathy for the parasite. “As gunpowder needs a war, I feast inside you, my host is you,” she declares, which is probably not something you should tell a partner until at least the fifth date.

Her unusual perspective on relationships, unhealthy or otherwise, continues with Sacrifice, which looks at the debilitating long-term effects of negligence, and Mutual Core which compares the search for harmony to shifting tectonic plates – something she would know about, hailing from a country of geological wonders which is expanding over time.

Björk is also pushing outwards into unexplored territory – what is Biophilia if not her own artistic expansionism? But as with recent albums from the equally progressive Radiohead, sometimes you just hanker after the simple pleasure of a beautiful melody over all the embellishing bells and whistles, however audacious the concept.