BJORK - Biophilia

The flying Icelander Bjork, after building up anticipation with minor releases to keep fans warm, like the live album "Voltaic", a direct companion to the previous "Volta", and after standalone singles like "Comet Song" and "Nattura" (with Thom Yorke), finally returns with the album-project "Biophilia". "Biophilia" is first and foremost a sensation unlike anything before in the singer's discography, meaning an album preceded by a long string of rumors, previews and hype. The first of these concerns, without doubt, its thoroughly avant-garde presentation, achieved above all through the exploitation of cutting-edge digital technology: Bjork now conceives her work – beyond the physical CD – as an "App" to download onto tablet or smartphone, "intelligent" algorithms that don't just offer up the track but build microcosms around it and its musical features. Even the arsenal of gear she's equipped herself with is projected into the multimedia era, with bizarre custom-made or self-built musical instruments and preparatory live shows of great audiovisual impact.

The first dimension worth examining, in any case, remains the strictly musical one. In "Biophilia" the distant-past Bjork quotes herself in the onomatopoeic single "Crystalline" and its tail of thundering syncopation (incidentally the only moment with a bit of life, more "bio", in the whole work). The recent-past Bjork, on the other hand, can be heard in "Cosmogony", the only track with the brass section already present on "Volta" (though here reduced to a faint backdrop), a hymn-lullaby that could be mistaken for an excerpt from Bernstein's "West Side Story" or any other Broadway musical (aside from the final moment of cosmic panic with vaguely dissonant voices). This is also where the most musical part of the album ends.

The new Bjork opens "Moon" with a tender harp loop and ends in layered vocal bands. "Sacrifice" intrigues with its techno machine-gun fire, which annoyingly and gratuitously invades an electronically reverbed riff drawn from an Eastern dirge. Bjork seems to want to ape Morton Subotnick in her ad hoc construction of instruments, and Joan LaBarbara in her contrapuntal, periphrastic use of vocal syllables. Her use of the term "avant-garde" can produce results that are, to say the least, clumsy.

Her classic obsession with odd time signatures here turns into dead time ("Virus", a melodic hit idea watered down in trills and girl-group siren choruses). When she lets the organ lead – now a solemn cathedral, now a humble street barrel organ – she reveals the weakness that comes from a lack of guests and major producers, staying in a minor key: "Thunderbolt" hints at a slow, conventional electro-dub pulse, while "Dark Matter" remains mere ambient atmosphere (slightly atonal, with a hand from her trusty Mark Bell), and "Mutual Core" alternates it neurotically with a goa-trance shoot-'em-up.

"Hollow" better integrates both the lamenting voice and choir, the abstract pulsation of the pipe organ, and the digital beat, giving a minimal sense of purpose to all the sophistication that permeates the album.

The real jewel of the project, however, lies in the album's second mode of distribution. The work, as mentioned, was also conceived as an App for iPad and iPhone, downloadable for free from the App Store, with the album's tracks available as paid sub-applications, effectively creating an App Store within the App Store. The base App is structured as a three-dimensional galaxy. Users can rotate and zoom it with their fingertips, and even view it from different angles depending on how they hold the tablet (it therefore requires a second-generation iPad, the one equipped with a camera). The "celestial bodies" of the galaxy are the songs; users can reach them with a tap of the finger (the official substitute for the mouse click on multitouch devices) or through successive zoom-ins.

This is where the sound comes in, whose function is mainly hierarchical as much as it is accompanying. The base level (the galaxy in its entirety) consists of a drone made from the singer's voice multiplied indefinitely; as the user zooms in (with the so-called pinch gesture), they can hear the volume rise in the region of the galaxy dedicated to a particular song, until they hear it in full (within the "orbit" of that celestial body, subsequent zoom-ins serve to raise the volume further). The final tap grants access to the song's page, where one can read its features and, if desired, purchase it. Every purchased song-App offers, besides the original song, a music sequencer, interactive games for inventing new configurations based on the song's features, karaoke, interactive animations inspired by the lyrics, games, and so on. But each song has features customized according to its lyrics, arrangement and feel. It's an interactive gem, one of the most innovative in recent memory.

Presented emphatically as a conceptual installation loaded with hefty doses of fascination, bolstered by the App that drives its "cosmic" engine, and recorded on the very same iPad, this could be the paradox of the decade: the packaging points straight to the future, the imagery toward the cosmos and the mystery of life; yet the songwriting pilfers from the past, the songs are rooted in depictions of everyday life, and the mood wallows in simple nostalgia for bygone times. And it's no "Tree of Life", because it lacks communication between irreconcilable dimensions, the forced dialogue never resolves into an overarching vision, and what prevails instead is a naivety that amounts to yet another act of solitary self-absorption, of "bjorkphilia". Perhaps it's the inverse of the choral, convivial spirit of "Volta", but surrounded by monstrous talents like Julianna Barwick and Joanna Newsom, the forty-five-year-old Guðmundsdóttir comes across as an amateur, however heartfelt, passionate and sincerely enthusiastic. What's missing, or no longer holds up, is her trademark alien quality. The packaging is beyond reproach, its level so high it could stir even the most bashful of fetishists, take the fateful, extremely limited "Ultimate Edition": a deluxe package complete with ten tuning forks tuned to each of the ten tracks - each with its own bio-harmonic subtitle - at a price steep enough to induce a stroke, to the point that the entire project was sponsored by Steve Jobs's Apple, God rest him (and cynics might easily see it as nothing more than a giant ad for the Cupertino company). If this is a new way of conceiving, composing and distributing music, it certainly doesn't fit the bleak mood of a global recession, sophisticated tuning forks or not. It isn't an album - it's the prototype (masterpiece) of a (mediocre) album still to come.

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10/10/2011