Bjork Grabs the World by the Throat

August 29, 2004
By JON PARELES





NEVER underestimate the inspired perversity of artists.
Consider a central paradox of 21st-century pop: at a time
when musicians can instantly summon an infinitude of
sounds, easily tune them into any melodic contour and
digitally layer as many tracks as they want, austerity
rules instead.

Maybe it's a premonition of making do with less in some
coming era of scarcity; maybe it's an instinctive
withdrawal, or a vacation, from too much information. But
from Top 10 hits built on little more than a buzz, a thump
and a hook, to the arty recesses of the most minimal
techno, musicians have been vying to strip music down
beyond the skeletal. What once were considered basics can
now sound lush as producers become reducers, trading sounds
for spaces. They know that nothing is final, because if
necessary, a remix can fill in the blanks.

Bjork, whose seventh album, "Medulla" (Elektra), will be
released this week, has made a career of subtraction. She
recorded boisterous rock with the Icelandic new wave band
the Sugarcubes, started a solo career with eccentric
dance-floor hits and then followed through with a series of
albums that have been unpredictably sumptuous or sparse. As
early as her 1993 album "Debut" (Elektra), Bjork was poking
holes in her music, and since then those holes have been
widening into chasms. With "Medulla," she pushes to a new
extreme: most of the music is made with voices alone. While
the album might seem to be a conceptual stunt, it finds
gorgeous and startling new ways to extend Bjork's longtime
mission: merging the earthy and the ethereal.

Those aren't her only dualities. Bjork presents herself as
child and woman, naïf and sophisticate, lone individual and
elemental force. As on earlier albums, she encompasses
multitudes; her persona can be as large as a planet or a
galaxy. "Oceania," a song she wrote for the opening
ceremony of the Olympics, imagines the perspective of the
sea: "You show me continents - I see islands." And in
"Desired Constellation," she imagines herself throwing
stars like dice "repeatedly until the desired constellation
appears."

Bjork's voice sounds perpetually guileless, an illusion
that is helped along by her accented English. It allows her
to get away with ideas that might seem absurdly pretentious
coming from anyone more overbearing. She can be breathy and
girlish, clear and sultry as she seizes a phrase, then
almost shattering as her voice crests with a rasp. Her
singing sounds impulsive and immediate, yet her voice is
deployed as carefully as her backup, which deliberately
juxtaposes more polarities: simple and elaborate, organic
and synthetic, whimsical and profound.

On her solo albums, Bjork has frequently abandoned a
straightforward beat, replacing it with sustained harmonies
or electronic stutters and flickers (though thumping
remixes have kept her songs in clubs). She has sung with
string quartet, sitar, big band, shimmering keyboards or
rough, blotchy distortion. Bjork and her producers often
build a track from just two disparate elements that are
somehow bridged by her voice, a method that comes across
not as idle eclecticism but as improbable alchemy. Her
previous album, "Vespertine" (Elektra) in 2001, cocooned
her voice amid quiet, staticky electronics in some songs,
full orchestra in others.

"Medulla" (Latin for marrow) finds nearly all of its
contrasts in the spectrum of vocal sounds: percussive,
sustained, crystalline, raw. It's not obsessively purist;
Bjork does allow herself an occasional synthesizer line or
piano chord, and often the voices are sampled and
programmed like dance tracks. "Medulla" sidesteps rock's
longstanding a cappella style, doo-wop, to reach a sonic
realm only Bjork would concoct. She's gone globe-hopping to
find very particular extensions of herself.

When there's a beat, it comes from a human beatbox (or one
whose sounds have been rearranged by programmers).
Classical choirs provide airborne harmonies that suggest
composers like Penderecki or Arvo Pärt. Meanwhile, Bjork
and guests like Mike Patton (from Faith No More), Robert
Wyatt (the British art-rock songwriter) and Tanya Tagaq (an
Inuit throat-singer) add mews, moans, counterpoint and
guttural grunts.

The album includes vocal fantasias that lean toward chamber
music, with many Bjorks looped and echoing, alongside songs
that are obviously but distantly connected to hip-hop.
There are also glimpses of Bulgarian women's choirs, the
hooting polyphony of central African pgymies and the primal
vocalisms of Meredith Monk. Throughout the album, the music
is transparent, with each component distinctly audible,
even when Bjork's melody is strung between a dissonant
choir and a growled beat.

Bjork, who has lately been living in New York City, has
said that "Medulla" is in part her response to the events
of Sept. 11, an attempt to reach back to something shared
by humanity before civilizations and cultures clashed: the
directness of the human voice. The album brings her as
close as she has ever come to political statements. In
"Mouths Cradle," Bjork concludes, "I need a shelter to
build an altar away from Osamas and Bushes," and she fronts
a choir in a somber Icelandic song called "Vokuro," which
means "Vigil."

There's also a hint of political consciousness in
"Submarine," which features the reedy voice of Robert Wyatt
multiplied into a moody chorus to share lines like "Shake
us out of the heavy deep sleep, do it now." But most of the
songs on "Medulla" look inward and find benevolence. Bjork
celebrates the workings of anatomy in "Triumph of a Heart"
- which, true to the idea of a heartbeat, is the album's
closest thing to a dance track, even if its hooks come from
a "human trombone," the singer Gregory Purnhagen. She bids
a kindly farewell to a lover (with lyrics from E.E.
Cummings) in "Sonnets/Unrealities XI," and counsels
generosity in "Pleasure Is All Mine," which insists, "when
in doubt, give." Only in "Where Is the Line" does Bjork
display some irritation: "I'm elastic for you, but enough
is enough."

Listeners will have to be flexible themselves to accept
"Medulla." It leaves gaping holes where bass lines are
expected; it has dissonant clusters of voices instead of a
band. It's music for a very private space, not a public
arena. Yet along with its more abstract pieces, "Medulla"
has half a dozen songs with verse-and-chorus pop forms:
songs that Bjork chose to orchestrate for castles in the
air rather than more utilitarian locales like clubs or
radio formats. Songs like "Where Is the Line" and "Who Is
It" are wide open with complex superstructures, catchy but
ghostly, and they probably haven't seen their final
incarnation. Their spaces are not just a matter of serene
artistic restraint. They are also invitations, offering
both places where listeners can take refuge and openings
for musical transformation that could carry the songs from
Bjork's inner landscape to less subtle, more communal
spheres, like dance floors. Complete in themselves, they
also await their remixes.

http://www.nytimes.com/20...7f250f2728


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Ok, this is what it boils down to:

"This album is everything and the kitchen sink. I liked it. You might, too."

I posted this yesterday and it got drowned in the VMA threads...

http://www.prince.org/msg/8/112423

Anywho, I thought it was a GREAT article. Can't wait to buy this tomorrow!!!

WooooHOO! She is TRULY a brilliant artist, ahead of her time. The more I get into her, the more I'm fascinated and amazed. This article really nails it.

I started salivating while reading this article.

POOK LOVE REMIX OF ALL IS FULL OF LOVE

THERE PROBABLY BE REMIX LIKE THAT!

TAKE AMBIENCE AND MAKE TRIPPY HOP

POOK said:

VinaBlue said:

OoOoOoHhHh Remixes!

sinisterpentatonic said:

Word.

OdysseyMiles said:

I think we all need napkins!

i have a strange relationship w/ Bjork's music. I want to like her... i feel like i SHOULD like her... i have all of her CDs... i find her very interesting and cool...

and yet.. I find that I rarely listen to her music after the initial spins when the CD first comes out. It just never connects long-term with me, for some reason, although I always enjoy them while I'm listening to them. There just isn't that urge to come back to them later.

The one exception: Life's Too Good, the 1st Sugarcubes album. THAT is a classic new-wave album.

JonSnow said:

I LOVE the Sugarcubes....especially that album. I've been listening to them a lot lately. Somebody should start an appreciation thread for them

whistle edit
[Edited 8/30/04 18:20pm]

JonSnow said:

I was like that too. Then one day she took hold of me and didn't let go.

On the beat review.