One of the most innovative and anticipated releases of the year, Björk’s seventh studio album is an epic multimedia adventure and the Icelandic artist’s most ambitious project to date. Binding music, nature and technology together with her own unique brand of eccentric and joyous electronica, Biophilia is the work of an artist at the height of her creative and conceptual powers. But what does it all mean?
Speaking to prominent programmer Luc Barthelet about his role in Björk’s new app album project Biophilia, I began to notice that there was one theme which kept cropping up; education. “Björk is not just focussed on the performance or on the song itself but how it expresses with people and how she feels about it and how she expects people to feel about it” says Barthelet, whose impressive resume spans over twenty years in the computer games industry, a leading credit in the development of The Sims, and who now resides as executive director of intuitive future search-engine Wolfram Alpha. “She wants to educate people about the music”.
It is a theme which is implicit from the very beginning. The app suite is introduced by the soothing voice of David Attenborough, a childhood hero of Björk’s, who takes you by the hand into the cosmos of Biophilia – “the love for nature in all her manifestations”. You can’t help but feel like you’ve stumbled upon a forgotten corner of the Science Museum. This impression is by no means accidental, for when Björk first began working on the project three years ago, the initial idea was one of a music-house or museum, in which each room would tackle a different part of the concept.
Introduction to Biophilia
But what exactly is the concept behind Biophilia? In a BBC radio interview earlier this year, Björk explained that she was trying to find the simplest point at which music, nature and technology meet. It is a task which not many scientists let alone musicians would want to set themselves. Cosmogony, the album’s ‘mother’ song, is a self-styled ‘song of the spheres’, whose lyrics record American, Chinese and aboriginal creation myths, an apparent reference to the “pre-industrial values of a nineteenth century naturalist”. Offset this with the album’s obvious exploitation of cutting edge 21st century technology and Björk’s desire to go “forward to nature” and the conceptual depth of the project begins to come into focus. This is, after all, only the very first track on the album. “I’m not a Christian so this album is sort of how I see myself in the universe and humankind” she explains in an interview with Wired Magazine, “I’m embarrassed all the time how big-headed it is”.
And yet one can’t help but feel that the scope of the project was somewhat accidental. In the same BBC interview Björk spoke of her initial desire to do something really simple after “Volta”, her most “bombastic” release to date, full of “hooligan songs” and accompanied by an uncharacteristically extensive world tour. She went on to express her excitement at using the iPad not only to perform but to compose music and of her intentions to be the world’s foremost “electronic troubadour” – an itinerant musician armed not with a guitar but an iPad, traveling the world playing and creating using only this 21st century music box.
As it turned out, her shows couldn’t be more different. Backed by a 24 piece Icelandic choir and accompanied on stage by such instruments indigenous to Björk’s entourage as the Gameleste (a celeste whose strings have been replaced by gamelan bells), the Sharpsichord (harpsichord played with a turning spiked cylinder), harp-playing pendulums and sound-emitting Tesla coils, her shows are as theatrical as they are musical.
And yet to process all this expansive cosmic paraphernalia we need look no further than the music itself. As a pedagogic project, it is very much a music lesson first and a science lesson second. Since her days as a pupil at the Barnamúsikskóli Music School in Reykjavik, Björk had longed to open her own music school free from what she felt were the shackling principles of a classical musical education. Her hope was that the development of touch-screen technology would bring about a tactile revolution in learning, switching the emphasis from teacher to pupil, from passive to interactive learning. Biophilia is the incarnation of that ideal.
Fundamentally, each of the ten tracks on the album highlights and articulates a basic musicological concept. Only once this has been established do the scientific themes begin to fit into place. The crystal formations of Crystalline are analogous with musical structure, the malignant Virus with phrasing and generative repetition and the gravitational cycles of Moon with sequences and counterpoint.
And this is where the apps come in. By the time Björk’s idea of the music house had come to nothing, technology had caught up with her. “She knew she was doing a new album and she wanted to to something interesting and interactive on the iPad” recalls Barthelet.
The app suite, housed in a ‘mother’ app available for free with Cosmogony, would replicate the different rooms of her music house – an app per song per concept, each with their own unique and democratic space in the Biophilia galaxy. Each contains an acoustic score for those lucky enough to be able to read music and a wonderfully satisfying visual animation for those of us who aren’t, as well as a short essay by musicologist Nikki Dibben which picks apart and analyses each track in depth. However, the most significant step forward is the interactive element of each app.
Written by Barthelet, the Crystalline app is one of the most complete examples of the grand plan in action. Like an Atari updated for the 21st century, the game involves collecting sequences of crystals while hurtling down colourful tunnels to the sound of Crystalline in order to unlock new tunnels, each of which correspond to a different section of the original track.
“We started to have the discussion with Björk in late August, September [of 2010] and went to Iceland in the first week of October”; early meetings which he remembers fondly for their openness and creative fertility. “From the very beginning it was about getting people to participate. I think that after one meeting with her I realised that she was really good at attracting creativity and expressing and letting people work with her to add and augment the creative group. It is a rich environment around her”.
Official video for Crystalline, directed by long-time Björk collaborator Michel Gondry.
That is not to say that she didn’t keep a keen eye over developments, and it was Björk in fact who came to Barthelet with the idea for Crystalline. “She already knew the song at that time and she had thought of it as different segments” he explains. “When she started to look at what kind of interaction she wanted to have on the iPad she kind of liked these tunnel games so she wanted it to be a little bit of a tunnel”, betraying the endearing mixture of conceptual depth and childish whimsy that informs her decision making. “She has attached a lot of different feelings to the different tunnels”. As a result the structure of the original track changes subtly depending on which tunnel you end up in.
While Barthelet explains that “the goal was to give control to the user about which segment of music would be playing next”, he was quick to point out that “the game does not impact the song, other than making choices”. Finding the balance between consumer interactivity and the intentions of the music is a problem which is certainly evident across the app suite, solved with varying levels of success. Touchpress designer and colleague of Barthelet Max Whitby points to that of Hollow as a particular success “in which designer Drew Barry creates an incredible 6 minute animation around Björk’s music that takes the viewer on a journey inside the living body down to the level of DNA inside all our cells”.
For the Crystalline app, the success of the concept both as a song and as music lesson lies in repetition. “What we wanted is to have the game give you a feeling of the music and the notes to build a mental visualization [each crystal gathered corresponds to one twinkling strike of the Gameleste]. Now when you are in a tunnel and you play you get an idea of what kind of notes are going to come next, so you are really reading the score in front of you. That is part of the way you actually connect with the music, because you have those expectations that start to arrive and are satisfied. It is a learning process”. And like all learning processes, it takes time; a commodity not overly abundant in an age flooded with instantly available content and information.
However, give Biophilia the attention it deserves and what results is a rare and increased engagement with all aspects of the music. It is a point which Barthelet likes to stress: “if you play the game for a while you are really learning the song, more than if you are not interacting with it, more than if you were just listening to it”. Watching each track through the lush animations on the app hold every aspect of the music to account. Every note, every brittle strike of Crystalline’s Gameleste is brought into focus by its visualisation.
The Biophilia app succeeds in renewing our interaction with music, and Barthelet sees this as just the beginning. “We see that when the difficulty of the tools drop under a certain level then all of a sudden there is an explosion of content” says Barthelet. “If it takes you half an hour to put together an app that reacts to music in the way you feel, you’re going to express yourself that way… There will be a billion of them on the web in no time”.
For the time being though, it is Björk and her team of programmers who lead the way.
If challenging rather than acquiescing to received knowledge is the cornerstone of a good education, then in Biophilia Björk has equipped us with the tools to begin our own critical appraisals of music, technology, nature and the world at large. Closing each set with a raucous choric version of her rabble-rousing protest song Declare Independence, Björk is perhaps suggesting that she certainly wouldn’t want you take her lessons at face-value.
The Biophilia album and complete app suite will be released on Monday 10th October (Tuesday 11th in North America), with a 2LP vinyl available in the coming weeks on One Little Indian.
