ROCKING THE TWILIGHT ZONE
BJöRK still rocks the Twilight Zone of music
The enigmatic Björk brings her otherworldly persona and voice to Bluesfest. PLUS: Videos, photos and stories from the festival at
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There was a fine Björkian moment early in the first episode of Under The Dome, the summer TV series based on Stephen King’s book. At the town’s radio station, Dodee, the resident techie is seen twiddling the dials of the station’s receiver. It’s picking up a spooky signal moments after the dome has descended on the town. “Sounds alien,” Phil the DJ says worriedly. “Sounds like Björk,” Dodee adds.
Well, yeah. Dodee is right. Otherworldly is a pretty fair assessment of Björk’s unusual vocal style. Gwen Stefani once described the Icelandic singer as “a little alien … You know, a little Tootsie-Roll alien girl.” Stefani meant it as sincere compliment.
Nobody rocks the Twilight Zone like Björk, now 47 and still full of strange charm. She has become the byword for the dark, the strong, the strange and the funky in post-punk music. So it’s fitting that the sun will have fully set when she launches her outlandish, witchy show at the Bluesfest. (She has actually been in Ottawa for a week or so with her daughter taking in the sights and hiking in Gatineau Park.)
Björk wore a gigantic multicoloured wig at recent concerts in Los Angeles, but her outfit at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn. last month was wilder. She took the stage clad in a sci-fi silver dress. Her face was obscured by a headdress of shimmery spikes, like quills shed by an intergalactic porcupine.
Björk’s show is operatic in scale, with a chorus of dancing women dressed in blueand-gold robes — costumes that “split the difference between a tunic and a garbage bag,” in one reviewer’s phrase.
As Björk sings, LED screens perched above the stage flash images of shifting tectonic plates and explosions within the Earth’s core. It’s a long way from 12-bar blues, you’ll notice.
In the mainstream world, Björk is still most famous for the wraparound swan dress she wore at the Oscars in 2001. She was widely ridiculed over the dress — Joan Rivers cracked that the swan was alive when Björk started to sing. But to thousands of young women, Björk became a fairy godmother with a punk attitude, a free woman who might live in the bow of a spaceship and have fabulous romances.
That night she sang I’ve Seen It All, a daring ditty that begins, “I’ve seen it all, I have seen the trees, I’ve seen the willow leaves dancing in the breeze, I’ve seen a man killed by his best friend, and lives that were over before they were spent.”
It was a bold choice for the Oscars, even for a relentlessly experimental chanteuse like Björk. The audience responded with strong applause, likely more for her courage than the song itself.
Björk is still the smartest — and coolest — space cadet in rock. Her concerts now draw heavily on Biophilia, her latest starburst of creativity. It was released in 2011 as an album of interconnected songs along with a system of interactive apps for iPad and other Apple products.
On her website, Björk speaks of the multimedia Biophilia project in what sounds like a mission statement of sorts:
“Much of nature is hidden from us … such as the one phenomenon that can be said to move us more than any other in our daily lives: sound.
“Sound harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music,” she explains. “And just as we use music to express parts of us that would otherwise be hidden, so too can we use technology to make visible much of nature’s invisible world. In Biophilia you will experience how the three come together — nature, music, technology.
“Forget the size of the human body,” Björk continues. “Remember that you are a gateway between the universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and nature who embraces you and all there is.”
If all that sounds slightly woo-woo to you, it’s not. Björk just wants the entire world to have a committed, loving, respectful relationship with nature, that’s all.
With Biophilia, she’s out to capture a kind of natural wonder with high-minded music that doesn’t always succeed.
“I shuffle around the tectonic plates in my chest,” Björk wails on Mutual Core. “You know I gave it all. As fast as your fingernail grows, the Atlantic Ridge drifts to counteract distance.” Only Björk could fit the Atlantic Ridge into a love song.
The song Moon on Biophilia is a hymn to nature’s order; nature’s terrible power is set out in Dark Matter and Thunderbolt. She also intersperses older songs throughout her shows, including Hidden Place and Pagan Poetry, from the album Vespertine, as well as her mid-1990s semi-hit Possibly Maybe.
Björk believes “we are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations.”
Until we get there, she’ll continue to be a total badass on whatever distant planet she calls home.