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Intersections of music and millennialism. Deep dives, asides, and exasperations by Alex (+ his friends): a lifelong musician, audiophile, and editorializer turned fitness instructor, DJ, producer, and sound curator.
Maybe he will come out of this loving me.
Maybe he will.
What's up y'all?
How we doing?
Some
of y'all really looking at
me like, if this man talks
about Bjork anymore, yo, what?
We've covered Three different
chapters, three different big eras.
I've saved, could be seen as kind
of her consummate album, the kind
of pinnacle of her career for last.
This is an album that was released in
2015, so it's not her most recent album.
Um, she's made a couple of albums since.
And this record still,
though, stands alone.
The name of this record is Volnicura.
This is a nine song record.
And even though it is short by song
length, it's pretty long by run time.
We have 58 minutes of music
across just nine songs.
So what are the elements that go into
what critics would call an artist's peak?
Do those elements always align with what?
The artist or what the artist
fans would call the artist's peak.
The reason that I have picked this
album as one of the many peaks,
but maybe one of the highest, if
not the highest of Bjork's peaks.
First, I think it gathers inspiration,
compositional structure and strategy,
and aesthetic ground from all three
of the chapters that we've laid out.
Two, I think it is a
package that is consumable.
by a broad audience.
For the first time in many years
in Bjork's discography, felt like
it could actually be consumed
by and delivered to the masses.
So with its breadth and its scope and
its range, as well as its precision
and conciseness, kind of tight
conceptual build, this record really
represents kind of the heart of the
stone, the final kind of chip away
at the marble of Bjork's career.
The topic of Volnicura is really central
to why I think it is so conceptually
accessible to a broad amount of people.
Um, we've seen Björk write about
cities, we've seen Björk write about
intimacy, we've seen Björk write
about climate change, we've seen
Björk write about organic matter.
We haven't yet seen Bjork
write about a breakup.
This album is a really incisive
and intense microscopic look of the
falling apart of Bjork's relationship
with American artist Matthew Barney.
So in a sense, even Bjork, even one of
the most conceptual artists on the planet,
Um, is not outside of or above the human
experience and the artistic experience
of a breakup and writing about it.
A breakup album.
Let's talk first about the Sonics.
Bjork is really drawing from
some familiar territory.
in this record.
It really shares Sonics with
the album Homogenic from 1997.
It is this beautiful composite
of emotional emotive vocals,
orchestral warm emotional strings,
and hard electronic beats.
That fabric was gold when
she hit it the first time.
Feels like something Bjork was meant to
do, meant to find, and meant to produce.
And in this case, More than once almost
20 years have elapsed and to see her
come back to it after so much exploration
so much venturing Kind of confirms
that she feels at home here, too.
Now thematically This is where I
see the record is connected with
the second chapter of her career,
which was in the early 2000s.
In 2001, Vespertine, we
heard Bjork describe the
inception of this relationship.
Now, 14 years later, a record
painting the picture of of that
very relationship falling apart.
Now, what does this draw
from chapter three of Bjork's
career, the nature chapter?
That's where we get to start
talking about both the visuals.
and the technology.
Björk returns home,
metaphorically and literally.
She films across various vistas and
landscapes in Iceland, where she grew up.
Five songs on this album received video
treatments, and each one of these videos
explores really deeply and interestingly
a different technological format.
This was released in the mid 2010s,
when both photography and videography
were kind of going through Like
another wave of renaissance.
The technology was
developing really quickly.
We had VR, we had 360 degree.
We had all kinds of ways to composite
multiple video shots and Bjork really
takes deep dives into all of them.
We'll sample the five songs that also
have counterpart videos, and I'll do
them in order that they were released.
Um, so we're going to start with
the first song, Lion Song, which
is track number two on the record.
So some vocoder effects,
some vocal layering.
So the lyric there being, maybe
he'll come out of this loving me.
Maybe he won't.
So right out the gate,
we have that beautiful.
Simple, minimal, but highly
impactful combination.
We have a single beautiful
vocal from Bjork, strong voice.
We have the bed of warm,
emotional, orchestral strings,
and we have the electronic beat.
This may sound familiar.
I really hear a song that we
did talk about in chapter one,
um, from 1997's Homogenic.
This is the song, Joga.
Now the video for this song was shot
actually I believe on the photo shoot
that birthed the cover art for this
album So Bjork is wearing this headdress
that's kind of dripping down to her
shoulders That seems like it's made
out of some sort of plastic clear.
It's a lot of yellows like neon
highlighter yellows She's also
wearing a black latex suit.
There's distortion on the camera.
That's making her legs look longer
And then over the center of her
chest is depicted a large wound.
And that's kind of like the centerpiece
emotional wound that this album explores.
They also zoom in on a different build
of the heart where you can actually
see the heart pulsing in this kind of
three dimensional, almost like inflated
capacity, pressing through, um, kind of
like what's left of her broken chest.
Bjork, I believe chose the color
yellow because yellow, um, is
meant to represent healing.
Um, and so even though there's
so much darkness and a lot of the
centerpiece colors are really dark,
like a dark neutral, Um, on top of
that dark black canvas are these
sprinkles of like neon yellow.
Okay, the second song released from
this record is called Stone Milker,
which is the first song in order.
This is about, um, Björk comparing,
trying to pull emotions out of the man
that she was breaking from, um, and
analogizing it to trying to milk a stone.
So, Björk goes to, uh, the edge of,
um, the Icelandic environment where a
bunch of broken, um, black stones, some
of them might have been, uh, pieces
of lava, um, are meeting the ocean.
And she actually in 360 degrees.
Um, this was very much when
like VR headsets came out and we
have two different kinds of VR
videos for this album from Björk.
This one is just a video capture of her.
Um, now she's in kind of a full
neon yellow dress dancing along
this shoreline of, of Iceland.
YouTube, she actually slips out of
the picture for significant amounts
of time because were you to have a VR
headset you could turn and she would
be either around you or behind you.
Also really reminiscent of that
sound of homogenic but much more
somber, much less for the club
or about the bustling city life.
What's so interesting here is that
Bjork also simplifies the meter.
She's been pushing into these strange
time signatures especially in biophilia.
We're back to a 4 4.
We're back to something that you
can sway to, and I think that really
helps create the package where you can
feel The emotional heft of the song.
I think because the concept of Heartbreak
takes up so much room, takes the
shape of any container that it's put
in, that a simpler, more pared down,
minimal, sonic bed, um, will really help
deliver it in the most impactful way,
and Bjork seems to be exploring that.
Okay.
Third song released from this record
is a song called Black Lake, which is,
I believe, almost a 10 minute song.
I think Bjork has said something to
the effect of this being the darkest
or saddest song she's ever written.
Um, effectively, the analogy in this
song is that she feels like she is
just at the mercy of a black lake or
she cannot even see the end of it.
It's just this pool of dark emotions.
And so to explore this concept
visually, she goes to a lava field.
She's kind of dancing against
these really hard edge.
Dark black surfaces.
She's wearing black in this video.
She's expressing herself kind
of violently in, in places.
Some, um, depictions of lava.
I think in the video it's actually like
blue lava breaking through the surface.
So really using the concept of lava
to depict kind of like the burn
of both creation and destruction.
One of the simplest openings to a
Björk song that I've ever heard.
So the first half of the song, the
electronic elements stay kind of
tucked and the strings and the voice
are really the lead characters.
As the song goes, they
kind of switch places.
Fourth song is kind of the singular
departure thematically from the album.
Um, this is a song called Mouth Mantra.
It's not a song that
focuses on the heartbreaks.
Instead, a song that focuses on
a chapter where she, uh, had to
undergo some reparative vocal
surgery and as part of her recovery.
Could not speak, could not make sound.
This is one of the Bjork
stranger videos that, you know,
um, may not be for everyone.
It's shot with a camera inside her mouth.
So in this song, we do have some kind
of affectations and some distortion and
vocoder layering of the voice in a way
mirroring the fact that she couldn't use
her voice or kind of antagonizing the fact
that she couldn't use her voice at all.
This one sonically feels like
it could exist in many places
throughout Bjork's career.
The final of the five songs that we're
going to explore today is called Not Get.
Um, Not Get kind of returning
to the core theme here.
Not Get actually has two music videos.
Um, these are virtual reality videos.
One of them using video footage
of Bjork with this neon green, um,
headpiece, which has kind of these like
long tentacles that are coming off.
And then the secondary video is a
Fully, I guess animated or CGI take
on those visuals both I believe
meant to be consumed with some
sort of virtual reality piece.
Um, but you can't watch these on
youtube I think the experience is
kind of like a little limited there
Um, but this is a song called not get
so kind of like some east
asian instrumentation here
I'll just quickly also mention and
play a moment of History of Touches,
which is a sixth song on the album.
Just because Sonically takes me
back to Biophilia a little bit.
It reminds me of how she used
sound to create the feeling of
crystals, or the cosmos, or of
electricity and lightning bolts.
So those are some pieces, uh, from Bjork's
highly acclaimed album in 2015, Volnicura.
I really think it serves as a perfect
capstone, um, in that it's again, drawing
from all three chapters really equally.
I do think that the package
is some of the best work.
Bjork has ever done.
She doesn't need 15 songs to do it.
She just needs nine.
The story is very clear to her.
She's using instrumentation and
electronica as well as collaborators
that she is familiar with.
She knows exactly how to
put this picture together.
This is a really, really.
Cool moment where Bjork is doing
Bjork that takes us to the end, y'all.
I hope you enjoyed the way that I
kind of talk about Bjork or artists
or their artistry in general.
I try to spend, you know, equal time on
how things sound, what the artists are
saying, what they're intending to say, and
then also what the sound of their voices
and how that whole package comes across.
She's the perfect artist to hear many
people's takes on because no two people
have the same experience with Bjork.
And of course, at the end of the day,
How it hits you is how it hits you.
I would love to hear from y'all.
What are the next artists you
would like to hear me do this for?
Are there folks that have either
large kind of cannons of work or
folks that are a little bit newer?
Please let me know.
Send me some messages,
leave them in the comments.
I'm excited to do this more.
I hope y'all enjoyed this.
I hope this winter also
finds you listening to some
Bjork wherever you may be.
And until next time, see y'all.
Thanks for joining me on the vocal.