Music of the Spheres

There are certain phrases, or ideas, that have become so hackneyed and clichéd, that even if they speak to you on a level that is, quite frankly, spooky, you choose to ignore them because they bring out the embarrassment hives.

 These include (but are not limited to) ideas about 'nature' and 'the universe', such as: we are all connected, life and death are an unending and beautiful cycle, nature (if it exists at all) is as repulsive and horrifying as it is stunning and calming, we are tiny, tiny ants floating in a giant black void so vast that we are incapable of comprehending it without our brain matter spattering the nearby walls in a cataclysmic head explosion, and, there are many things still beyond our understanding and conundrums we will, perhaps, never unravel.

See? Those all sound like the kind of things you would hear someone say in a low-rent, badly-acted, abysmally scripted megabucks Hollywood movie about the end of the world. But you also feel them to be true or at least mystical on some level. Well, such is the genius of Björk that she arranges ideas along those lines in musical and lyrical phrases filled with such curious oddness and wisdom that you feel you might cry at your own, pitiful insignificance in the face of our ginormous and splendid earthplanetworldgalaxyuniverse.

Björk's 1st official show (the preview doesn't count, byotches) premiering new material from her 7th official studio album, Biophilia, took place yesterday and ALL three staff members of Shiny & New were in attendance, agape, agitatedly excited and ready for anything.

Fortunately for us (this was our first time witnessing the goddess live in concert, so there was a lot riding on it) Ms. Guðmundsdóttir didn't disappoint. In the stale and formulaic world of the popular music concert, it's not difficult to innovate, but Björk did enough in one evening to make up for the lack of imagination in the cases of almost every single other artist working today. In the centre of a square stage, with audience surrounding on all four sides, flanked by a cryptic hexagon of double-sided screens and mind-bogglingly brilliant midi-controlled instrument-hybrid beasts (such as the gameleste, an enormous hand-wound music box contraption with gramophone horns coming out of it, a monolithic swinging pendulum that supposedly attuned to the earth's movements and what looked like an organ, playing itself) Björk emerged with a choir of Nordic dryads in attendance (and a few nerds to play percussion and laptops) to deliver a set of startling originality.

Usually when an artist plays old favourites nestled in amongst new material, it's the past hits that people seem to get most excited about, but we were genuinely frothing even more at the gills for tracks we hadn't heard yet. Again, we weren't disappointed. There were no sour grapes of bitter mischance for us. "Thunderbolt" had little crystalline (geddit) tears, beading in the corners of our eyes, its combination of synth baseline crafted from raw, purple electricity and ghostlike choir evoking the almost ineffable power and fragility of energy. And "Virus", with its distressing video footage of blood cells fighting a losing battle, turned out to be a surprisingly sweet and melodic lullaby that had us totally enthralled.

Not that the old stuff paled in comparison. A lowkey and stripped back "One Day" made a surprising and moving encore and "All is Full of Love" felt more amped up and volcanic (fitting with footage of tectonic plates in another of her new songs).

Björk herself was ever the commanding presence, seeming to appear out of nowhere, as if she had somehow invented teleportation, too. Her dedication to conveying meaning and intent behind each song and lyric was consistent throughout. We were, at times, mere feet away from her, and although she briefly caught our eye(s), she seemed so devoted to each character and emotion that we felt transported about the universe, not in a hip Mancunian warehouse. And yes, even though she seemed to be reading her own lyrics off karaoke screens, we still believed every word.

We're going to catch her concert again, this Sunday, and perhaps we'll notice or pick up more, but the general feelings we came away with after this first concert was that: the material on Biophilia is, at times, even more challenging and oblique than on her previous record, but as melodic and swirlingly euphoric and majestic as we have come to demand from her (certainly, do not go into it expecting Confessions on a Nordic Danceflöör because not only does that make you an idiot who is incapable of allowing artistic progression or enjoying music that isn't instant or of its time, but also, that's not what you will get); BUT AS WELL, the Björk Live Experience is a visceral and multi-faceted (at times, literally) immersive extravaganza that was so overwhelming, its impossible to really do it justice in a blog post.

If you don't have tickets: despair.

Björk: Biophilia, at the Castlefield Market Hall, Manchester on June 30th, 2011

1. "Thunderbolt"
2. "Moon"
3. "Crystalline"
4. "Hollow"
5. "Dark Matter"
6. "Hidden Place"
7. "Mouth's Cradle"
8. "Isobel"
9. "Virus"
10. "It's Not Up to You"
11. "Sacrifice"
12. "Sonnets/Unrealities XI"
13. "Mutual Core"
14. "Where Is the Line?"
15. "All Is Full of Love"
16. "Cosmogony"
17. "Solstice"
18. "One Day"
19. "Declare Independence"
20. "Náttúra"