Review Summary: One of the most ambitious albums ever, and one of the most accomplished: Biophilia moves to tears, teaches to listen and researches an essential hypothesis.
Biophilia (2011) - A Close Reading
In 1998, Björk had a conversation with Karlheinz Stockhausen. There was a minor clash in opinions although Björk was clearly looking up to this hero of contemporary classical music. The opinion clash was about meter. Stockhausen’s opinion being that regular meter is nothing but construction and that irregular meter is superior. Björk felt people needed ‘something to dance to’. Stockhausen pointed out that every natural rhythm, natural music, is essentially irregular: from our heartbeat to the sounds we hear when walking out in the forest.
On
Biophilia, the first record of Björk’s since Stockhausen’s demise in 2007, it sounds like she has had second thoughts about Stockhausen’s remarks in the interview. She wrote an eulogy in The Guardian reminiscing the interview she had had with him and put out the irregularly metered Drum-‘n-Bass single ‘Náttúra’ in 2009. Nature being the main subject of this new project she went for it and freed herself from everything pop music is prone to.
Taking natural concepts – lunar cycles, the working of retroviruses, tectonics and the eclipse of the sun – she realized those things, like our personalities, have irregularities. Her hypothesis: the human being rhymes perfectly with nature which rhymes perfectly with music. Her medium: an album, a series of apps, an educational residency programme. Her most ambitious project to date? Certainly. Her most successful? I’m going to research that in three steps. First the music on itself, then the concept, then its significance.
1. MUSIC
Björk has created special instruments for the project, electronically controllable. The first is the MIDI-controlled pipe organ, a bass tesla coil for electricity, a celeste with the overtone series of an Indonesian gamelan, two gravity-controlled pendulum harps and she uses the sharpsichord, an enormous pin-barrel harp which works like a music box. It’s easily the most eccentric instrumentation ever, and the least natural.
She starts of her album, though, with the track ‘Moon’, about lunar cycles presented in irregular sequences played by four harpists, appearing in their full size, being reduced and reborn. Her lyric on top of this is about fear of losing everything. It’s spacey yet filled with wisdom: “best way to start a new is to fail miserably”. You may disappear but reappear as strong as you ever were. The subtle song contains a marvellous choral arrangement which introduces us to the world of the album. Arrangements laid bare in front of us, otherworldly poetry, Björk cooing over it and a choir floating around her concentrated voice.
The second number, ‘Thunderbolt’ starts with an ominous Gregorian organ part with Björk introducing the song. It contains everything you could wish from the subject matter: electricity is added by the giant tesla coil arpeggio chords in the bass, a grammatical strife (“may I, can I or have I too often craving miracles?”), a jazzy beat and electronic burps in the background. The grammar in the lyric seems the key to the electricity in the storm she describes: once it matches the song really takes off into the thunderstorm. The choral arrangement is impeccable and adds the fullness of cumuli to the song, once confirming the tonality and the counterpoint and at other times making it ambiguous.
The third song, the catchy ‘Crystalline’ is dominated by glassy gameleste patterns with a very melodic and concentrated performance by Björk. The lyric is the first one here to find the perfect comparison between humans love and the natural concept of crystal structure: it grows irregularly and once it completes, it’s an explosion of joy and exuberance. It finds the balance between mundane love and intellectualism (“with our hearts we chisel quartz to reach love”). The dubstep-like beat (co-programmed by 16-Bit) adds more and more to the composition until it finally explodes into a breakcore finale which is weird, but once you think about it makes sense as a conclusion to the song.
‘Cosmogony’ – harmony of the spheres. It opens with a choral clustre * la Xenakis which adds up to a rich brass arrangement which finds a toned-down balance, deep and dark and regular. The Pythagorean concept of all layers of the cosmos being in harmony with one another and creating a sort of universal music is explored here by deconstructing four creation myths (including the Big Bang) by juxtaposing them. The music is hymnal, balanced, recognizable and, in its own way, harmonious. Filled with wonder about the things surrounding us, after which the choral clustre starts descending again pulling us into things surrounding us we can’t conceive, which is the subject of the next track.
The weirdest track on the album is probably ‘Dark Matter’. Suitable, as we still have no explanation for this phenomenon. It’s a track filled with an ominous, deep and dissonant organ part based on different scales, from Indonesian music to Messiaen with a one-to-four part surreal Björk choir singing over it. The number has no text, just gibberish floating around. It does, however, have real melody, ascending from the darkness of the chromatic organ part and descending back into the drone.
‘Hollow’ has been criticized as being an unconcentrated, messy track. It uses a whole-tone scale hollow organ sound and irregular rhythms and it’s quite brainy. The accompanying video shows a brain scan into the proteins of DNA that generate our hereditary material. These proteins move, they shake, they generate rhythm. And here comes Stockhausen: they generate irregular, changing rhythms and so does this song. Björk’s melody is lingering, but very controlled as it piles up allegories about our genes. The choral part is trippy and – yes – plain weird. It floats around the voice, sometimes finding harmony but mostly not. Once the beat, a dubstep in 17/8 time signature (!) enters, we begin to feel that what we hear is something happening inside all of us. It feels natural, restless yet has an astounding beauty to it. Björk’s final plea: “I yearn to belong, let me belong!” is as heartbreaking as anything on the album.
The loveliest yet most maleficent song on the album may be ‘Virus’. Take the concept of virus RNA intruding host cell DNA, manipulating it to create new viruses and eventually eliminating all the healthy cells. This is called a retrovirus and develops, guess… irregularly. Björk lays down a basis for the song using a hang drum with clean overtones representing the host cell with a fluffy, beautiful pattern. Representing the virus is a complex layer of gameleste. The two are played against each other in randomly generated numbers of notes, determined by algorithmic patterns. It eventually leads to elimination of the hang drum and a soliloquy of the virus. Björk sings a song most reminiscent of a lullaby from the point of view from the virus, describing a destructive love relationship: “the perfect match/you and I/you fail to resist my crystalline charm”. Unnerving beauty that may happen to all of us - also inside our bodies.
‘Sacrifice’ is a difficult song, as it doesn’t as clearly describe a natural, but a psychosocial phenomenon: the relationship between a man and a woman in which the woman gets ‘compressed’. The sharpsichord-backed Phrygian song uses a simple, modal melody with a straightforward accompaniment pattern. The choral arrangement is full and contrapuntal, passionate as hell and varies wildly on the simple melody. A tonal turn comes and with it a beat that feels like an electrocution, adding a lot of flesh and blood to the song. It calms down, but ends on a positive note, both musically and lyrically: “your generosity will show in volume of her love”. Whereas ‘Virus’ was a description of unhealthy relationships, this is a plea for balance in human relationships.
Block organ chords in minor keys, deep electronic flowing masses, the verse of ‘Mutual Core’ is reminiscent of Nico’s 1970 album ‘Desertshore’. The irregular time signature of the beginning attracts regular time signatures, the minor key attracts a major chord and we feel that this might have something to do with magnetism. She describes relationships from the point of view that opposites attract and you need a strife to obtain balance. The comparison she draws is with tectonic plates – one of her native country’s most distinct features. Volcanism enters the picture in the chorus, where the tectonic plates crash and a fight abounds. A cathartic fight between physically geographic principles and human beings alike. A heavy, complex beat complements the emphasis on chord structure and are reminiscent of
Homogenic’s ‘Pluto’. “what you resist, persists/nuance makes heat” she continues after the first chorus, once again in an easier atmosphere. We feel the chorus and the verse, opposites, attract each other perfectly, the verse being reflective, the chorus explosive. And so are human relationships. More pointedly than ever she describes the human behaviour that has always been the core of her work here.
The last song on here, ‘Solstice’, with a poetic lyric by Sjón, is a drifting, hopeful and simple number accompanied by gravity harps. Elliptic counterpoint drives around the harp part ostinato with Björk singing a hopeful lyric about light and darkness, day and night in perfect counterpoint with the harp melody. “you remember why it is dark and why it gets light again” she sings passionately, and this song stays lingering in the dark with an open ending. It’s filled with the worldly hope and certainty of the sun rising again, yet it doesn’t yet. It stays in the poetic, romantic dark here.
Biophilia is a grower. It takes some time, interest and multiple listens to unravel all its beautiful fascinating secrets. It unfolds in front of you like watching a universe through a telescope. It explores multiple facets of musical theory in a way they haven’t been explored before, the music in itself is filled with sincere beauty and has an intrinsic atmosphere to it.
2. CONCEPT
Biophilia consists of an album, a suite of ten apps, an educational programme, a remix series, a tour with residencies all over the world and some music videos. It has been criticized of being blown out of proportion, but the proportion of the project is suitable and, more importantly, all the elements work.
For instance the apps, with great design and quite some educational value. As I’ve been to quite some musical theory in my life, I can see that it’s a cloying complement to music but also something that might well improve our understanding of certain aspects of music. To put her songs into apps, make them vulnerable in a way that you can mess with them and understand the logic behind them. Incorporating it as such in an educational programme for elementary and secondary school children makes music tangible and fun to learn. She does here what Béla Bartók did with his ‘Mikrokosmos’ – incorporating contemporary influences in music teaching so that beginners immediately know it’s around and, to speak with Björk, not “only the Bach and Beethoven ***”.
The assimilation of man with nature and nature with music is a very interesting concept which Björk has always been an example of. She has been called ‘a force of nature’, ‘embarrassingly human’ and ‘alien’. This was the album she had to make and get to her own philosophical essence. On this album, in all its analogies, she connects the macrocosm of the universe with the abstractness of music and the microcosm of the human being which is a concept which deserves an award on itself.
3. SIGNIFICANCE
Where should I start?
Biophilia is probably Björk’s most significant album to date, and it goes beyond an album. It’s an educational programme, an exploration of nature and a piece of research.
The album is an accessible set of songs, that’s what comes first. An avant-garde piece that is accessible and fun and filled with wonder. It’s one of the only pop albums I’ve heard that, to its full advantage, makes use of the great privilege of pop: everything that’s come before, everything that’s been developed in the early 20th century is there to explore and to adapt. From polyrhythms and extended tonality to atonality, electronics, microtonality and historically informed composition: everything is on the palette. And Björk uses this advantage to its fullest by not only making music with it, but also creating a cohesive universe around it.
Furthermore, the things that have been developed in the avant-garde now have the possibility of gaining accessibility to a larger public. Björk already started doing this from
Post (‘Cover Me’), continuing it on
Homogenic and especially
Medúlla. On
Biophilia it’s all there: the astronomic beats, the extensive use of choral parts and the extended tonality blended in a totally cohesive language.
It has a lot in common with works like Nico’s
Desertshore, Kate Bush’s
The Dreaming and Tim Hecker’s
Ravedeath, 1972. The funny thing is that, while these albums used the elements they took from the avant-garde mostly to create gloom, angst and Weltschmerz (in whichever beautiful way), Björk uses them in a more positive manner, to create wonder and simultaneously some estrangement, though never straying from her research. There are very few composers who have tried this, let alone accomplish it. As a project, this might be one of the most ambitious, but also one of the most well-executed albums in pop music today and it proves its hypothesis right.
Stockhausen, Björk may have thought, was right. But she managed to use his legacy, and that of Messiaen, Berio and Xenakis at once, in an accessible idiom free from heavy-handed intellectualism, but nevertheless having enough of it to continue on fascinating a whole generation and generations to come. To set the stakes this high is risky, unless you are able to raise the bar. And my, is she still able to. This will stand as one of Björk’s best albums and, at 48 and with her track record, that’s an accomplishment of sorts.
