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Album: Björk - 'Biophilia'
Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by BlackJesus
Whatever happened to freedom of speech? >
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You spoke what was on your mind and I spoke what was on mine.
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Member Since: 12/1/2009
Posts: 735
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So, gerls, I love this album. Its simplicity is everything. But then it gets all frenetic on your ass seemingly out of nowhere.
I love the Oriental touches on Sacrifice and Solstice. It's very alive, the album. Just as nature is itself. Can't wait to get my copy in the post.
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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The leaked version was the final version, It's streaming on NPR
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Member Since: 11/17/2010
Posts: 12,926
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Quote:
Originally posted by Owl
The leaked version was the final version, It's streaming on NPR
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*goes to download leak*
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by Navin
*goes to download leak*
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The digipack leaked.
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Member Since: 11/17/2010
Posts: 12,926
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Quote:
Originally posted by Owl
The digipack leaked.
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I downloaded the 13 track one
Im pretty sure its the Digi Pack.
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by Navin
I downloaded the 13 track one
Im pretty sure its the Digi Pack.
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Yep, that's the digipack.
If you want the info/analysis/lyrics of the songs, here's a link:
http://www.bjork.fr/Moon
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Btw, the album is definitely a grower; I've fallen in love with Thunderbolt.
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Member Since: 5/11/2010
Posts: 19,489
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I'm confused. There's two different versions of the album?
Send me the final version, please?
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by Devil
I'm confused. There's two different versions of the album?
Send me the final version, please?
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There's the app version and the album version. We'll notice the differences when we get the apps next week.
I'll post it on your wall now.
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Member Since: 5/11/2010
Posts: 19,489
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Quote:
Originally posted by Owl
There's the app version and the album version. We'll notice the differences when we get the apps next week. I'll post it on your wall now.
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Member Since: 6/1/2011
Posts: 4,435
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could somebody send me a DL ?
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by The Mirror
This, we are told, is Björk’s most “interdisciplinary” work. There are apps for every song complete with musical annotation, animation and an essay.
There’s a documentary film, specially constructed instruments for the live show and, somewhere at its centre, the album itself. Overwhelmed already?
Don’t be. Biophilia is a thrilling record, an artist not just at the peak of her vocal power and knowledge, but rapturously and soulfully engaged with life and the still beautiful possibilities music offers in a benighted age.
It’s one of the pleasures of Biophilia that Björk’s lyrics – concerning the relationship between the moon, the tide, tiny little atoms, the big mysterious cosmos and everything in between – will take time to discern and dicipher. The album certainly invites repeated listenings. Taking a cue from such musical experimenters as Philip Glass, Harry Partch and Tom Waits, the stunningly original music Björk has created here and the many sounds of her voice tell a story bigger than lyrics alone ever could.
Even in Björk’s catalogue there’s nothing that’s been as spectacularly unconventional and wholly successful as Biophilia. Highlights abound. Cosmogony is one – with a faint, wheezing, ghostbound brass band in the background, freaky synthesised musical clouds wherein a heavenly choir rises, with Björk soaring above.
Every so often an album comes along that not only justifies its hype but outweighs it.
Mutual Core adds angry rebuke and glitchy distorted power chordings to the shimmering, ringing percussion and natural awe that feature on the astonishing tracks Virus and aptly named Crystalline.
Biophilia captures the human body, the human race and Mother Earth, in repose and in turmoil. The revolution starts here.
4/6
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Quote:
Originally posted by The Flopdependent/Independent
Björk is undoubtedly one of the more questing spirits working in music today; but with Biophilia, that quest seems to have led her too far away from her core specialism of music.
It's a classic case of multi-media overreach, with the actual album just one tiny fragment of a project involving various apps, websites, interactive games, animations, live strategies, custom-built instruments and, lord help us, educational workshops. Nor is the album simply an album: it's available in a range of five formats, including a Manual Edition housed in a 48-page cloth-bound hardback book, and the Ultimate Edition, which houses the Manual Edition in a silkscreened, lacquered oak case, along with 10 chrome-plated tuning forks, each representing the "tone" of an individual album track. (I'm not making this up.)
But so concerned as she and her co-creators doubtless were with the artistic and educational aspects, and the project's intended "exploration of the universe and its physical forces" (with particular regard to the "relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena"), and with inventing the instruments on which to realise these explorations, they appear to have overlooked one small matter: enjoyment. For while there are some beautiful moments on Biophilia, they seem like accidents the more one listens. The key here is that Björk, one of the most dynamic and inspirational singers of our time, is barely singing at all, just vocally negotiating a series of uneasy rapprochements between words and music. At times, it's hard not to conclude that the music and lyrics were devised totally separately, and then forced together in forms it's difficult to acknowledge as songs.
Which makes the album – the music, on its own – hard to love. It may come to life more in the context of an iPad app, but as a stand-alone element it's several decent tunes short of a singalong. The invented instruments, such as the gameleste, a celeste re-fitted with the metal bars of a gamelan, and the Sharpsichord, a 10-foot pin barrel harp (whatever that is), make intermittently delightful sounds, in a sort of Harry Partch- lite manner of twinkly percussive tinklings; but there seems little relation between them and the skittering dubstep and drum'n'bass beats that gatecrash some tracks partway through.
The only reliably engaging elements of the compositions are the wonderful choral arrangements that provide most of the mortar connecting Björk's voice to the instrumental parts. Complex and microtonally acute, they're a constant delight as she reflects upon her desire for the "dangerous gifts" of elemental nature, the lightning-flash of creative inspiration ("Thunderbolt"); muses about being a bead threaded upon a DNA chain ("Hollow"); explores the ethically neutral, natural attraction of parasite to host ("Virus"); admires the creative force of volcanic energy ("Mutual Core"); and, in the album's most engaging song, ponders the cosmological mythos ("Cosmogony"). The secret of its success is simple: it's by some distance the most appealing – and ironically, in the context of the album, the most natural – melody here.
2/5
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Quote:
Originally posted by The 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.
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.
Perhaps it's better to just listen. Though it's exquisitely controlled and filled with space where its predecessor Volta was packed to bursting with sound, Biophilia still teems with invention. There's something audacious and impressive about the way Hollow attempts to strike a weird balance between menace and calm, the vocals as lulling as the staccato backing is unsettling. Or Mutual Core's repeated shifts from a wheezing keyboard – it was doubtless built in a laboratory by the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and professor Brian Cox, but it sounds like a 13th-century portative organ – to electronic bombardment. For an album that presents itself as an academic exercise, it's big on moments of pure, indulgent pleasure: though you're some considerable distance from the comforts of standard verse-chorus structure, the melodies of Virus and the closing Solstice are so beautiful they carry you along regardless. It's certainly restless and innovative, but Biophilia never feels like hard work, however much the accompanying bumf tries to convince you it is.
Whether the app album becomes the industry standard or whether it's even a good idea for it to become an industry standard is up for debate: it's hard not to feel your buttocks involuntarily clench a little at the thought of, say, Kings of Leon having a go. Far less questionable is the quality of the music on Biophilia, which would underline how far apart from the rest of rock and pop Björk is, regardless of how it was delivered.
4/5
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Quote:
Originally posted by Telegraph
Tiny, elusive and prone to strange bursts of intense energy, Björk is pop’s own subatomic particle. She’s capable of creating the kind of pure, uncomplicatedly emotional beauty that bypasses the brain and fizzes straight into the central nervous system.
But her music can also be counterintuitive, abstract, atonal: difficult to get your head around. What has remained consistent about this Icelandic oddball is that she’s not happy unless she’s challenging herself and her listeners.
So after the wild, tribal beach party of her last album, Volta (2005) she’s made a profoundly controlled, private and theory-driven record.
The science-themed Biophilia is a multimedia project pairing 10 songs with corresponding iPad applications on which Björk has collaborated with developers, scientists, writers, inventors, musicians and instrument makers. There will be a website, live shows and educational workshops.
But let’s just focus on the music here, which Björk has based on algorithms found in nature and fed through a combination of electronic and organic instruments.
It sounds, as she admits, like a recipe for disaster. But – shot through with Björk’s tangible sense of wonder – it’s surprisingly accessible, hypnotic and beautiful if you give it time and concentration: the audio equivalent of looking through a microscope at crystals growing.
The opener, Moon, is a melancholic stargazers’ meditation, which layers Björk’s idiosyncratic vocals over a brittle, icy harp. As she sings of cycles of rebirth, her voice is prayer-full of human yearning. Yet its peculiar, glottal angularity puts you in mind of astronomical charts.
The first single, Crystalline, starts out all twinkling, chinking prettiness then hardens into a burst of frantic drum’n’bass. Björk’s ever-eccentric lyrics are energised by the poetry of science, giving us lines like “sonic branches, murmuring drown/ crystallising galaxies spread out like my fingers”. Ever playful, on the seductively melodic Virus she has fun with the idea of a fatal love affair between an organic host and it’s inorganic invader: “Like a mushroom on a tree trunk as the protein transmutates/ I knock on your skin and I am in… ohh ooh”.
Best is the climactic Mutual Core, on which, against a pipe organ, Björk sings: “I shuffle around the tectonic plates/ You know I gave it all trying to match our continents”.
So OK, Biophilia is wilfully weird. If you heard some of its most outlandish moments on drive-time, you’d think aliens were trying to contact you through your satnav.
But if you pulled over and closed your eyes, you might begin to feel a marvellous connection to all kinds of universal forces.
5/5
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Quote:
Originally posted by The Irish Times
Björk’s thesis for Biophilia (“a unique synthesis of music, nature and science”) has many facets. Technology, specially commissioned instruments, film and education workshops, and an intriguing nature stem from its protean quality. This is evident through the fact that the release date was pushed back to accommodate ideas born out of her recent epic live performances and residency at the Manchester International Festival.
Biophilia rests somewhere between the serious-minded and the playful, the medieval and the modern. The twinkling, frail strings on Moon transport us back to a time of clear-eyed innocence before the clutter of the 21st century. Björk’s voice soars, warm and strident, perfectly framed by the minimal arrangements, before melting into the majestic Thunderbolt, with its fizzing Tesla coils, deliberate pauses, choral beauty and swerving beats, which signal that her “romantic gene is dominant”.
Björk’s romantic gene dominates the entire record, from the way she splits her voice like a peachy atom on Crystalline for harmonies, before breaking everything down into a sea of drum and bass, or how she suggests the beginning of the universe through mournful brass on the gothic Cosmonogy . Dark Matter is eerily prayerful, with Hollow expanding on that prayer, “looking for some answers”. It is a companion piece to Crystalline , through wrestling with dubby beats and the struggle between past and future.
In exploring these seemingly irreconcilable musical and philosophical differences, Björk has created a universe of unfettered, joyous creativity; present on the gravitational pendulum harps of Solstice , the watery wails on Virus , the chiming “sharpsichord” that elevates her voice amid fuzzing electronics on Sacrifice , and the way she stretches the 4/4 time signature to breaking point.
The lovely synthesisers on Mutual Core provide a soft place for a distressed Björk (“I shuffle around the tectonic plates in my chest”) to fall back on. But then she takes you somewhere else, to what sounds like a mixture of avant-garde R&B and the inside of Terrence Malick’s head, before reaching back into her chest again.
This is a renewing, regenerating and metaphorical record that will keep dragging you back for its complexity, ambition and beauty. On Thunderbolt , Björk wonders “have I too often been craving miracles?” This record is an enthralling response.
5/5
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More to come!
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Member Since: 11/17/2010
Posts: 12,926
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I didnt like it... I was bored during almost all of it
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by theppy
could somebody send me a DL ?
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I'll post it on your wall.
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by Navin
I didnt like it... I was bored during almost all of it
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You should keep listening to the album, since it's a bit of a grower.
Which tracks bore you the most?
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Member Since: 6/1/2011
Posts: 4,435
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hollow its by far my favorite song so far i've been slayed hard
cosmogony is next is so perfect
i liked as well moon nattura nas mutual core, i think those are the ones im gonna keep to my music library
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 4/24/2011
Posts: 8,547
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All but Dark Matter
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Member Since: 1/6/2011
Posts: 14,156
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Quote:
Originally posted by Entertainment Weekly
Björk has spent six albums twisting organic sounds and galactic transmissions into parallel-universe pop, with results both classic (1997s Homogenic) and confusing (2007's murky Volta). Biophilia is rife with drum-and-bass breakdowns and Casio blurps — an ingenious marriage of faerie and machine (including the accompanying iPad apps). But the singer's greatest strength remains the glistening natural resource flowing from her throat.
A-
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Quote:
Originally posted by Music OMH
There is a sense now that Björk may have done just about everything. All her solo albums have had a distinctive character, a particular intellectual quality and sense of musical purpose, from Vespertine’s almost paradoxical icy intimacy to the political and personal defiance of Volta. Perhaps the shock of the new has now diminished for Björk’s long-term admirers. Where else could she possibly go?
Biophilia is a great deal more than just an album, however. It is a wide ranging multimedia project incorporating a series of apps (one for each song), a dedicated live show and an educational programme. Believe it or not, Björk has not quite succeeded in getting there first with this. The recent debut solo single from Gwilym Gold came in the form of a downloadable piece of software that ensured the song would never quite play in the same way twice.
Björk’s applications share a similar ambition to make music unpredictable and interactive. In one, listeners attempt to fuse two hemispheres together in order to create chords and another aims to communicate key information about musical scales. Other apps are more concerned with the album’s themes - Hollow features Björk’s face made from a series of DNA strands. Perhaps the most successful aspect of the apps concept is that each song on Biophilia is intended to emphasise a particular musical feature (counterpoint, arpeggios, tempo etc) and that the apps serve to explain this, and to further experiment with the ideas. Biophilia is most interesting in its careful fusion of musical and conceptual ideas.
The recent singles (Nattura and The Comet Song, neither duplicated on the album) have already provided an indication of Björk’s preoccupation with nature, the environment and science. Biophilia takes these notions to frequently ecstatic levels. Throughout, Björk attempts to marry her specific scientific and technological ideas with her musical ones. Crystalline, for example, explores complexity both in musical and physical structures. What could easily have ended up as a sterile academic exercise has, this being Björk, turned out to be an affecting and moving work. In spite of her use of electronic devices, Björk’s music always sounds so vivid, alive and wonderfully human, something emphasised by the recurring heartbeat pulse drum sound heard throughout Biophilia.
It should be stated clearly at the outset that Biophilia does not traverse any radically new musical territory for Björk. There is a sense of individuality in its thematic concerns and in its use of specially constructed instruments, but in essence it feels like a synthesis of Björk’s work thus far (albeit a brilliant one). It is an album that would be very easy to take for granted. For the most part, this is once again Björk at her most intimate, closer to Vespertine or Medulla than the slightly overcooked Volta. At times, particularly in its closing stages, it is actually more reminiscent of her soundtrack work, Drawing Restraint 9 especially. This makes the occasional abrasive interjections seem even more violent.
Moon reunites Björk with the unnervingly beautiful harp of Zeena Parkins and with the all-female Icelandic choir with which she toured Vespertine. With Björk and the choir accompanied with disarming minimalism, the focus is placed squarely on her unusual, brave melodies. So much of Biophilia is understated and elegant. The sublime Cosmogny feels like Björk at her most thoughtful, but also at her most brave. For the most part, she avoids resorting to her familiar vocal tropes in favour of a very stark, honest delivery.
Crystalline is Björk at her most familiar and approachable, at least until an imposing stew of off-kilter beats rudely disrupts the song’s flow. It’s an unexpected and disruptive gesture, but not perhaps a particularly novel one. Artists such as Aphex Twin or Kid 606 experimented with this sound many years ago. Indeed, it is arguable that more surprises have emerged from the inevitable glut of remixes that have accompanied Crystalline’s release as a single, not least the contribution from Omar Souleyman.
This is not to say that Biophilia is without its moments of total bravery. Dark Matter, little more than Björk’s vocals, the choir and the customised modern pipe organ, is extraordinary and more than a little unsettling, its melody traversing through a range of unusual and sometimes uncomfortable intervals. The closing Solstice is similarly at once pure and bracing.
There also remains something uniquely rapturous about Björk’s use of language, even including her occasional mangling of English. She seems entirely at liberty to say whatever she feels - there are no inhibitions or restrictions. English - a language so often associated with reserve or diplomacy, always sounds so enticing and odd when delivered in her syntax. On the wonderful Thunderbolt, she proclaims "my romantic gene is dominant and it hungers for union", another hint back to the candid, sensual reveries of Vespertine. Even the Virus somehow becomes a form of metaphor for sexual congress ("I knock on your skin and I am in") or desire ("Like a virus, patient hunter, I’m waiting for you, starving for you, my sweet adversary"). It is all gracefully matched by the song’s shifting, insidious tension.
With Biophilia, Björk has deftly avoided many of the dangers inherent in grand conceptual projects. The paraphernalia that surrounds Biophilia does not undermine or diminish the impact of the music, and the ideas, approaches and sounds are all successfully integrated. Whilst the musical content here is unlikely to shock or surprise Björk’s loyal admirers, it sees her continue to pursue her own radical and individual path with unshakeable conviction.
4/5
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