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This file was generated by Descript 

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Maybe he will come out of this loving me.

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Maybe he will.

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What's up y'all?

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How we doing?

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Some

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of y'all really looking at
me like, if this man talks

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about Bjork anymore, yo, what?

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We've covered Three different
chapters, three different big eras.

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I've saved, could be seen as kind
of her consummate album, the kind

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of pinnacle of her career for last.

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This is an album that was released in
2015, so it's not her most recent album.

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Um, she's made a couple of albums since.

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And this record still,
though, stands alone.

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The name of this record is Volnicura.

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This is a nine song record.

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And even though it is short by song
length, it's pretty long by run time.

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We have 58 minutes of music
across just nine songs.

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So what are the elements that go into
what critics would call an artist's peak?

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Do those elements always align with what?

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The artist or what the artist
fans would call the artist's peak.

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The reason that I have picked this
album as one of the many peaks,

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but maybe one of the highest, if
not the highest of Bjork's peaks.

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First, I think it gathers inspiration,
compositional structure and strategy,

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and aesthetic ground from all three
of the chapters that we've laid out.

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Two, I think it is a
package that is consumable.

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by a broad audience.

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For the first time in many years
in Bjork's discography, felt like

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it could actually be consumed
by and delivered to the masses.

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So with its breadth and its scope and
its range, as well as its precision

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and conciseness, kind of tight
conceptual build, this record really

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represents kind of the heart of the
stone, the final kind of chip away

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at the marble of Bjork's career.

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The topic of Volnicura is really central
to why I think it is so conceptually

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accessible to a broad amount of people.

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Um, we've seen Björk write about
cities, we've seen Björk write about

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intimacy, we've seen Björk write
about climate change, we've seen

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Björk write about organic matter.

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We haven't yet seen Bjork
write about a breakup.

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This album is a really incisive
and intense microscopic look of the

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falling apart of Bjork's relationship
with American artist Matthew Barney.

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So in a sense, even Bjork, even one of
the most conceptual artists on the planet,

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Um, is not outside of or above the human
experience and the artistic experience

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of a breakup and writing about it.

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A breakup album.

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Let's talk first about the Sonics.

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Bjork is really drawing from
some familiar territory.

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in this record.

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It really shares Sonics with
the album Homogenic from 1997.

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It is this beautiful composite
of emotional emotive vocals,

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orchestral warm emotional strings,
and hard electronic beats.

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That fabric was gold when
she hit it the first time.

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Feels like something Bjork was meant to
do, meant to find, and meant to produce.

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And in this case, More than once almost
20 years have elapsed and to see her

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come back to it after so much exploration
so much venturing Kind of confirms

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that she feels at home here, too.

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Now thematically This is where I
see the record is connected with

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the second chapter of her career,
which was in the early 2000s.

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In 2001, Vespertine, we
heard Bjork describe the

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inception of this relationship.

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Now, 14 years later, a record
painting the picture of of that

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very relationship falling apart.

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Now, what does this draw
from chapter three of Bjork's

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career, the nature chapter?

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That's where we get to start
talking about both the visuals.

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and the technology.

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Björk returns home,
metaphorically and literally.

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She films across various vistas and
landscapes in Iceland, where she grew up.

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Five songs on this album received video
treatments, and each one of these videos

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explores really deeply and interestingly
a different technological format.

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This was released in the mid 2010s,
when both photography and videography

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were kind of going through Like
another wave of renaissance.

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The technology was
developing really quickly.

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We had VR, we had 360 degree.

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We had all kinds of ways to composite
multiple video shots and Bjork really

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takes deep dives into all of them.

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We'll sample the five songs that also
have counterpart videos, and I'll do

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them in order that they were released.

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Um, so we're going to start with
the first song, Lion Song, which

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is track number two on the record.

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So some vocoder effects,
some vocal layering.

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So the lyric there being, maybe
he'll come out of this loving me.

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Maybe he won't.

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So right out the gate,
we have that beautiful.

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Simple, minimal, but highly
impactful combination.

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We have a single beautiful
vocal from Bjork, strong voice.

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We have the bed of warm,
emotional, orchestral strings,

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and we have the electronic beat.

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This may sound familiar.

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I really hear a song that we
did talk about in chapter one,

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um, from 1997's Homogenic.

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This is the song, Joga.

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Now the video for this song was shot
actually I believe on the photo shoot

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that birthed the cover art for this
album So Bjork is wearing this headdress

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that's kind of dripping down to her
shoulders That seems like it's made

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out of some sort of plastic clear.

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It's a lot of yellows like neon
highlighter yellows She's also

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wearing a black latex suit.

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There's distortion on the camera.

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That's making her legs look longer
And then over the center of her

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chest is depicted a large wound.

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And that's kind of like the centerpiece
emotional wound that this album explores.

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They also zoom in on a different build
of the heart where you can actually

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see the heart pulsing in this kind of
three dimensional, almost like inflated

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capacity, pressing through, um, kind of
like what's left of her broken chest.

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Bjork, I believe chose the color
yellow because yellow, um, is

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meant to represent healing.

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Um, and so even though there's
so much darkness and a lot of the

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centerpiece colors are really dark,
like a dark neutral, Um, on top of

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that dark black canvas are these
sprinkles of like neon yellow.

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Okay, the second song released from
this record is called Stone Milker,

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which is the first song in order.

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This is about, um, Björk comparing,
trying to pull emotions out of the man

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that she was breaking from, um, and
analogizing it to trying to milk a stone.

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So, Björk goes to, uh, the edge of,
um, the Icelandic environment where a

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bunch of broken, um, black stones, some
of them might have been, uh, pieces

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of lava, um, are meeting the ocean.

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And she actually in 360 degrees.

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Um, this was very much when
like VR headsets came out and we

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have two different kinds of VR
videos for this album from Björk.

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This one is just a video capture of her.

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Um, now she's in kind of a full
neon yellow dress dancing along

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this shoreline of, of Iceland.

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YouTube, she actually slips out of
the picture for significant amounts

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of time because were you to have a VR
headset you could turn and she would

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be either around you or behind you.

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Also really reminiscent of that
sound of homogenic but much more

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somber, much less for the club
or about the bustling city life.

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What's so interesting here is that
Bjork also simplifies the meter.

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She's been pushing into these strange
time signatures especially in biophilia.

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We're back to a 4 4.

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We're back to something that you
can sway to, and I think that really

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helps create the package where you can
feel The emotional heft of the song.

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I think because the concept of Heartbreak
takes up so much room, takes the

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shape of any container that it's put
in, that a simpler, more pared down,

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minimal, sonic bed, um, will really help
deliver it in the most impactful way,

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and Bjork seems to be exploring that.

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Okay.

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Third song released from this record
is a song called Black Lake, which is,

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I believe, almost a 10 minute song.

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I think Bjork has said something to
the effect of this being the darkest

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or saddest song she's ever written.

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Um, effectively, the analogy in this
song is that she feels like she is

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just at the mercy of a black lake or
she cannot even see the end of it.

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It's just this pool of dark emotions.

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And so to explore this concept
visually, she goes to a lava field.

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She's kind of dancing against
these really hard edge.

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Dark black surfaces.

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She's wearing black in this video.

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She's expressing herself kind
of violently in, in places.

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Some, um, depictions of lava.

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I think in the video it's actually like
blue lava breaking through the surface.

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So really using the concept of lava
to depict kind of like the burn

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of both creation and destruction.

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One of the simplest openings to a
Björk song that I've ever heard.

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So the first half of the song, the
electronic elements stay kind of

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tucked and the strings and the voice
are really the lead characters.

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As the song goes, they
kind of switch places.

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Fourth song is kind of the singular
departure thematically from the album.

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Um, this is a song called Mouth Mantra.

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It's not a song that
focuses on the heartbreaks.

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Instead, a song that focuses on
a chapter where she, uh, had to

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undergo some reparative vocal
surgery and as part of her recovery.

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Could not speak, could not make sound.

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This is one of the Bjork
stranger videos that, you know,

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um, may not be for everyone.

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It's shot with a camera inside her mouth.

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So in this song, we do have some kind
of affectations and some distortion and

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vocoder layering of the voice in a way
mirroring the fact that she couldn't use

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her voice or kind of antagonizing the fact
that she couldn't use her voice at all.

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This one sonically feels like
it could exist in many places

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throughout Bjork's career.

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The final of the five songs that we're
going to explore today is called Not Get.

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Um, Not Get kind of returning
to the core theme here.

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Not Get actually has two music videos.

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Um, these are virtual reality videos.

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One of them using video footage
of Bjork with this neon green, um,

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headpiece, which has kind of these like
long tentacles that are coming off.

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And then the secondary video is a
Fully, I guess animated or CGI take

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on those visuals both I believe
meant to be consumed with some

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sort of virtual reality piece.

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Um, but you can't watch these on
youtube I think the experience is

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kind of like a little limited there
Um, but this is a song called not get

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so kind of like some east
asian instrumentation here

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I'll just quickly also mention and
play a moment of History of Touches,

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which is a sixth song on the album.

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Just because Sonically takes me
back to Biophilia a little bit.

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It reminds me of how she used
sound to create the feeling of

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crystals, or the cosmos, or of
electricity and lightning bolts.

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So those are some pieces, uh, from Bjork's
highly acclaimed album in 2015, Volnicura.

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I really think it serves as a perfect
capstone, um, in that it's again, drawing

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from all three chapters really equally.

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I do think that the package
is some of the best work.

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Bjork has ever done.

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She doesn't need 15 songs to do it.

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She just needs nine.

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The story is very clear to her.

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She's using instrumentation and
electronica as well as collaborators

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that she is familiar with.

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She knows exactly how to
put this picture together.

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This is a really, really.

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Cool moment where Bjork is doing
Bjork that takes us to the end, y'all.

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I hope you enjoyed the way that I
kind of talk about Bjork or artists

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or their artistry in general.

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I try to spend, you know, equal time on
how things sound, what the artists are

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saying, what they're intending to say, and
then also what the sound of their voices

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and how that whole package comes across.

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She's the perfect artist to hear many
people's takes on because no two people

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have the same experience with Bjork.

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And of course, at the end of the day,
How it hits you is how it hits you.

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I would love to hear from y'all.

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What are the next artists you
would like to hear me do this for?

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Are there folks that have either
large kind of cannons of work or

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folks that are a little bit newer?

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Please let me know.

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Send me some messages,
leave them in the comments.

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I'm excited to do this more.

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I hope y'all enjoyed this.

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I hope this winter also
finds you listening to some

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Bjork wherever you may be.

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And until next time, see y'all.

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Thanks for joining me on the vocal.