Bastardo

Well this came out of leftfield. Perhaps we just haven't been paying as much attention to Björk as we should have been, but suddenly she announces her second full length remix album: Bastards.

First, in 1996, there was Telegram, following the huge commercial success of Post. Now there's Bastards. Björk explains her decision to revisit the remix album thusly:

I picked a quarter of them for one cd for people who are perhaps not too sassy downloaders or don't have the time or energy to partake in the hunter-gathering rituals of the internet

SASSY! Björk has categorised downloaders into two camps: the sassy and the not sassy. Does she mean savvy? Does she literally mean sassy? Is she imagining people sat in front of iTunes or The Hype Machine clicking their fingers in a Z formation as they download the latest Biophilia remix package?

Anyway this is what the tracklist is going to be like:

1. "Crystalline (Omar Souleyman Remix)"
2. "Virus (Hudson Mohawke "Peaches and Guacamol" Rework)"
3. "Sacrifice (Death Grips Remix)"
4. "Sacrifice ((Matthew Herbert's Pins and Needles Mix) edit)"
5. "Mutual Core (These New Puritans Remix feat. Soloman Is. Song)"
6. "Hollow (16-bit Remix)"
7. "Mutual Core (Matthew Herbert's "Teutonic Plates" Mix)"
8. "Thunderbolt (Death Grips Remix)"
9. "Dark Matter (Alva Noto Remodel)"
10. "Thunderbolt (Omar Souleyman Remix)"
11. "Solstice (Current Value Remix)"
12. "Moon (The Slips Remix)"
13. "Crystalline (Matthew Herbert Remix)"

(Ed: can we just say it's an absolute crime that this wondrous gem, arguably the best Biophilia remix by far, has been missed off?) 

And seeing as we love to do these and we're here, here's what the artwork looks like next to some of her other artwork:

Stuck In Our Head: "Cosmogony (El Guincho Remix" - Björk

Lying in bed after a 'raucous' night out wide awake until 8am, listening to this exquisite audio frieze of a remix literally... on loop. While the original isn't too far from perfection in it's own way, this is an excellent example of tearing a song to shreds and breaking down it's components before stitching them back together to form a soul-inflating composition of joy. The Biophilia Remix series is, as most remix series are, hit and miss but this is a true highlight. Enjoy with beefy headphones.

Of all the people to resurrect Biophilia...

...we wouldn't have put money on it being a 25-year old Glaswegian. Hudson Mohawke (our favourite DJ for a few months now, but that deserves another post) has sprinkled his pixie dust across one of our favourite Biophilia tracks, "Virus". He keeps the intimate twinkles but inserts grandiose horns, synths which sound like shooting stars and highlights the heart-breaking resignation in Björk's vocals. We've given the album a rest for a while after overdoing it a bit last year - same with 50 Words for Snow - but slowly it's making it's way back into our listening habits, probably something to do with this magnificent remix.

Stuck in Our Head: "Hit 'Em Wit Da Hee" - Missy Elliott

We've had the immaculate video version of this song for years and have spent many hours marvelling at it's flawless use of the practically sacred "Jòga" strings (we reckon that was Timbaland's idea, he's such a Björk stan), however only recently did we discover the original. The harsh and hypnotic guitar string sound in the chorus is hypnotic and our hips suddenly think they're a pair of serpents at a serpent party - maybe a prom or perhaps a Quinceañera. More importantly, MAKE A NEW ALBUM FOOL.

My romantic gene is dominant

Björk showing everyone how the fuck it's done with Biophilia highlight "Thunderbolt" on Later... with Jools Holland. That tesla coil - we just cannot.

Mesmerising.

Not much happens in Björk's music video for "Moon", which is basically her gently frotting her harp with the app footage overlain, but it's mesmerising nevertheless.

Leaky Björk

This came out but wasn't supposed to, or something. Anyway, it's "Moon", the Biophilia opener and next single. It's so beautiful. Totally hypnotic. We've just been sitting, listening to it on loop, over and over again.

HOLD THE PHONE

We wrote an incendiary post about how awful the Biophilia artwork was, but clearly Björk was trolling because, despite it being up and around on the web in official places, it was clearly just some visual hold music. This is the album artwork. Int it incredible. We're shedding a tear. Guðmundsdóttir done good.

My sweet adversary

This blog is becoming a Björk fansite more with each passing day, a process which seems to show no sign of coming to an end considering the album isn't even out yet. Today "Virus" leaked, a composition we hope will be a great step toward pulling back round some of the detractors who long for the 'simpler' days of Homogenic. No, the song is not a regression or a duplication of her sound sixteen years ago but a rather meek, unassuming song which relies on the dichotomy of the simplicity of melody and icily cruel nature of the lyrics.

Discussing the bitter sweet nature of love simultaneously with the passage of the virus, it is a fine example of what the aim of the Biophilia project is as well as being, quite simply, an excellent Björk song. Our eyes teared up at seeing this performed live, as the visuals concerning a healthy, glowing, beating blood cell being attacked by an army of radicals before turning cancerous were remarakably moving, yet the same effect was apparent at home on a laptop. Glorious and powerful.

Educational Crystals

This sort of resembles The Clangers/one of those educational videos from the 80s where everyone had horn-rimmed glasses and feathered fringes and sex was depicted by a stop-motion video of two amorous beavers and an explosion of tadpoles. In other words it's quite the visual feast. At least Björk actually deigned to be in it, although her hunchback rave-dancing towards the end had us snickering more than nodding in fervent agreement.

Sigh.

This is going to seem really petty (and people have had a go at us for this in the past) but we're not happy with the artwork for Björk's new album/app/experience, Biophilia. It's not that we don't like it (in fact it's a big improvement on the monstrously bad Volta artwork) it's just that it's... not right. Let us explain: of course, it's aesthetically pleasing, it's appropriate, you might even say it's beautiful. But it doesn't fit.

Throughout the course of her career, Björk has been responsible for some of the most breathtaking, audacious, eyewateringly beautiful album artwork of any artist working in the realm of music. Her first five albums all featured a stunning, instantly memorable, totally unique little portrait of her, her face, her magnificent hair, an outfit only she could pull off without it wearing her. And then it all went awry. This is the story so far:




This is how it should have gone, really:




You know we're right.

Björk's next single, in full.

If you click here, you can hear Björk's next single, "Cosmogony", in full. It's a regal, spooky, panoramic little masterpiece that seems to try to embody everything from the birth of the solar system to the entire expanding universe. We kinda expected it to sound a little fuller and more epic, maybe with some percussion and a more robust choral sound, but it's stunning nevertheless.

In other Björk news, the Mother app for Biophilia is available on iTunes tomorrow and if you're from New Zealand you're in luck, cuz it's out already. You can see what it looks like, below. We're not going to bore or patronise you by talking about what this project MEANS yet again. We've now read SO many articles about why Queen B chose to merge technology and nature in this musical and sensory synthesis of audio, touch and visual and her educational and innovation-based goals that we don't want to read about it any more. We just want to let the stunning, stunning music speak for itself.

(Pics via Consequence of Sound)

A Saturday afternoon treat...

The "Cosmogony" single cover, above, and a preview, below.

Show me the future

We realise that all we seem to be talking about lately is Björk (Ed - yeah and what?) but this bitch is a gift that keeps on fucking giving. The above image is the cover of the next Dazed & Confused, and is one of the most beautiful B-related pieces of art we've seen. It was also on sale at the gigs we've recently attended (this time yesterday *weeps*) for seventy five fucking pounds, so we'll just buy loads of copies of the mag and rip them for our wall. After we'd gotten over that, we realised bitch is guest editing the entire magazine! Praise be to whichever deity is shining down on us!

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"

We don't mean to gloat but...

WE'RE GOING TO SEE BJÖRK TOMORROW. AND AGAIN ON SUNDAY. BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Here are some mouldy old stones she uploaded to her website because Tumblr is too mainstream.