Imagine drawing symphonies with a fingertip. It's the kind of synaesthetic contrivance that is usually the preserve of science fiction. But large parts of Icelandic singer Björk's latest album were made like this – tracing hillocks of bass or curlicues of strings on touchscreens: intuitively, gleefully. Then there are the bits of tunes composed on computers and plugged into newly invented, old school-sounding instruments via revolutionary new electronic interfaces.
Like those ghostly automatic player-pianos in old westerns, they seem to play themselves. Meet the "gameleste", a Heath-Robinson cross between the Indonesian gamelan and the celeste. It gets a starring role on "Virus", a tender love song. "Like a virus needs a body/Soft tissue needs blood/Someday, I'll find you," croons Björk, in her sweetest lullaby mode, as the gameleste plinks naively along. By contrast, a giant Tesla coil provides a wild Frankenstein energy to standout tracks such as "Thunderbolt". To say that the end section of "Thunderbolt" sounds like evil robots passing wind should not detract from the tense wonder of Björk's spectacular swooping vocals, dogged by a flock of choristers and some malevolent bass.
And that's just the naked sounds. This ground-breaking album is probably best experienced as a series of apps, in which the user part-composes the songs by waving their iPad around. Really, an album review can't do justice to the three years of interdisciplinary brain-bumping that went on between Björk, programmers, app guys, instrument-crafters, film-maker Michel Gondry, David Attenborough and National Geographic magazine to create a work that celebrates the wonder of the planet and of human ingenuity.
But does it work as an album of, y'know, songs? Hell, yeah. Those of us accustomed to the nice, safe, regular shapes of music, worked out in multiples of four bars, might well have found some of Björk's endeavours a little irregular for some time now. The midsection of Biophilia is pretty forbidding, too. "Hollow", for one, is a troll-hunting soundtrack rich with horror-film organ sounds, demonic choir and an irruption of hard dancefloor digitals.
But even though Björk has composed it in zigzags rather than neat blocks, and on unfamiliar instruments, Biophilia is no clever-clever cacophony. Like the natural world from which it draws inspiration, the album has structure and convention. And there is always the anchor of Björk's voice and her words, which conjoin emotional forces and elemental processes. Anyone recently heartbroken really ought to belt up for "Mutual Core". "You know I gave it all/ Trying to match our continents/To change seasonal shifts/ To form a mutual core," she hollers. Nameless bass sounds shift around beneath her and then the beats go berserk. Those who grumble that Björk has abandoned the dancefloor can find some joy here, albeit in tantalising bursts.
The background to Biophilia found Björk with nodules on her vocal cords, without a recording contract and the Icelandic economy in freefall. But what emerges here is hope, in new ways of doing things that don't abandon the old, untamable, pre-digital world. The achingly pretty "Cosmogony" rehearses a variety of creation myths, enlisting silver foxes and black eggs to nail this intricate album's simple raison d'être: a sense of wonder.
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