BJORK - Drawing Restraint 9

“Drawing Restraint 9” is Matthew Barney's new more-or-less filmic work, the first since the hugely successful Cremaster cycle. Everyone already knows this, but I'll remind you anyway that he is also the current partner of Björk, who appears alongside him as an actress in the film. After its Venice premiere, explanations and interpretations of the work came pouring in, but the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that “Drawing Restraint 9” is one enormous declaration of love addressed precisely to Björk.

The soundtrack to “Drawing Restraint 9”, then, could only be an extreme response in kind. Another declaration of love that, as with every good Lars Von Trier heroine (and our heroine knows a thing or two about that), passes through self-annihilation. And that annihilation can be found in so many small yet significant aspects of this work, as well as in the film itself.

There are, in fact, many elements suggesting that this record doesn't belong to the Icelandic artist's ordinary output. First of all, the cover, which for the first time on an album under her own name doesn't depict her. Even the booklet images (gorgeous, especially the enchanting photograph of the couple), including the ones where she does appear, come straight out of Barney's own imagery rather than Björk's, including the little whale symbol, the film's emblem, shaped just like the sigils associated with each of the five chapters of the Cremaster cycle. Even on the spine things are made perfectly clear: this is music for Matthew Barney's film “Drawing Restraint 9”.

The title itself should have been a warning sign: for the first time, it isn't made up of a single word. Only once had this golden rule been slightly bent, merging the name “Selma” and the noun “songs” into a single compound. And that's indeed how the title of Björk's least personal album came about, itself also a soundtrack.

And never before had an album under her name featured a track that our artist neither wrote, nor sang, nor played. It's "Holographic Entrypoint", "composed" by Barney himself, which we'll come back to later.

It's immediately clear, however, that the themes evoked by the film and its titles connect well with one of the directions explored on "Medúlla", the oceanic, underwater one, but also with the "arctic" atmospheres of some tracks on "Vespertine". And with that, let's move on to the listen.

It starts off well, with a captivating letter of thanks entrusted to Will Oldham's gentle voice and Zeena Parkins' harp. It's the musical setting of a letter actually written in 1946 by a Japanese citizen to General MacArthur, to express his gratitude for suspending the moratorium on whale hunting. The climax comes at the end, with a children's choir, untrained and utterly sweet.

From "Pearl" onward, though, we're sailing through waters already charted elsewhere, and more successfully. Here it sounds like a "Medúlla" outtake. Tagaq's voice, already featured on last year's album, traces the sobbing, guttural curls that accompany the sho of Mayumi Miyata, a true virtuoso of this traditional Japanese instrument. You can see both her and the sho as soon as you take the CD out of its case.

Then there's a set of instrumental accompaniment tracks that are decidedly à la Björk. The bells and harpsichord of "Ambergris March", the bare overlapping voices and whispered piano of "Bath", the most typical björkisms of "Cetacea" (another track steeped in the moods of "Medúlla"), and the finale left to Mayumi Miyata's sho.

Standing out instead are the misty, spectral fanfare of "Hunter Vessel", probably the most "soundtrack-like" piece of the whole album, and its reprise "Vessel Shimenawa", separated by a sho solo. "Storm", the best track here, had already been heard live a few times before. And it seems no coincidence that it's the one closest to "classic" Björk. She, a powerful sea goddess, sings over a nocturnal structure that's remarkably Kraftwerk-like ("Hall Of Mirrors": is nature's hostility a mirror of the soul?). It's not man singing his loneliness in the storm, but the storm itself singing it to man. Mother, siren, murderess.

After the best, though, comes the worst. We mentioned "Holographic Entrypoint" earlier. It's a text written by Matthew Barney, translated into Japanese and recited in the style of Noh theatre for a full ten minutes. Seeing the part of the film this track corresponds to is probably a fascinating experience, just as the oldest of Japanese theatrical traditions is fascinating, but on record, ten minutes of pure recitation verges on the unbearable. Nor is it something never heard on record before, since in the end it sounds rather like Keiji Haino's "Tenshi No Gijinka" — yes, but over ten years late, with fewer screams and less music. Not exactly what you'd call a rewarding experience.

Even on this track, where Björk limits herself to an honest, extremely discreet production job, it becomes clear just how different, how much less personal "Drawing Restraint 9" ultimately is. An album that clearly reveals its nature as a soundtrack, as musical accompaniment, rather than as a work with a life of its own, unlike, say, "Selmasongs".

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10/06/2012