Biophilia is Björk’s eighth album, if album is not an obsolete term. It comes in a variety of formats. You can purchase it as a download, or even as an old-fashioned CD in a jewel case with a lyric booklet. But it’s the first collection of music you can buy as a series of apps.
This version (for which you will need an iPad or iPhone), gives you a set of digital tools that allow you to interact with the work in a range of visual and sonic ways. At their simplest, the apps add a kind of video-game component to the music, although the graphics are spectacular. But there are other tools here that enable you to essentially perform your own remixes.
The most traditional thing about the package is the songs. These appear to have grown out of Björk’s fascination with the scientific world, which she interweaves with more conventional pop themes. In Virus, she sings of the relationship between a virus and a cell, as a way of describing her attraction to a destructive lover. In Mutual Core, she uses the image of tectonic plates: “Trying to match our continents … to form a mutual core.”
The dance beats Björk once toyed with are now almost entirely absent. For most of the set, her voice hovers in a sonic space, the boundaries of which are defined by a variety of distinctly non-rock instruments, from harps, brass and organs to more recent innovations like the gameleste (a hybrid instrument created for Björk), sharpsichord and teslacoil. At times, she is joined by an Icelandic choir, which could be a whole chorus of Björks.
The sparse soundscapes suggest a meditative stillness. So when a frantic drum’n’bass rhythm explodes unexpectedly in Crystalline, it doesn’t anchor the song as a beat would normally do, so much as violently disrupt it.
But although Björk revels in the possibilities afforded to her by technology, Biophilia reaches far back as well. There’s something in her singular voice – the way she pushes it beyond its already spectacular range, almost breaking on phrases like “craving miracles” – that seems to tap some primal spirit.
And although futuristic in its conception, Biophilia demands an immersion that is oddly old-fashioned. In its sustained and all-encompassing artistic vision, with its elaborate interactive components, one is almost returned to vinyl days, when a new record meant a prolonged session in front of the stereo, poring over artwork and lyric sheet while losing oneself in the sound.
BIOPHILIA, Björk (Polydor/Universal).