[angelfish]

how stunning thx for posting

[Frida]

Quote:

Bjork Unveils Multimedia 'Biophilia' Project By Simon Vozick-Levinson When Björk came home to Iceland after her 2007-2008 world tour, she found herself at a career crossroads. For the first time in years, she had no immediate obligations to any record label. "That was really exciting," she tells Rolling Stone. "It's sort of where Radiohead were a few years ago [before they self-released In Rainbows]. I could do whatever I wanted." Three years later, the singer is gearing up to unveil Biophilia – an ambitious cross-platform project including her seventh studio album (due this fall), high-tech live performances, a revamped website, a documentary and a line of interactive iPad apps (one for each new song) that she will roll out later this year. She sees Biophilia as an experiment that just might change the way music is consumed. "I think I'm probably semi-autistic or something – I'm just obsessed with riddles," Björk says. "It felt like the music industry was off the grid, and I wanted to solve the riddle." David Fricke Reviews Björk's 'Vespertine' She explored several alternatives to the traditional album format before hitting on the iPad plan. At first, moved by the financial crisis that hit Iceland in late 2008, she envisioned Biophilia as a physical structure dedicated to the study of music and nature. "Suddenly there were all these half-built huge buildings and unemployment and chaos and people rebelling," she says. "I was thinking I could get one of these buildings and change it into some sort of music museum-slash-school." She imagined young children wandering from room to room, hearing new sounds and learning all the way. Björk began writing songs for Biophilia around this time, thinking of them as a curriculum of sorts. A favorite topic was natural science; the album has lyrics about crystal formation, plate tectonics and DNA replication. "I've always been interested in science," she adds. "My favorite subject in school was math, so I was quite often alone in classes with boys and chess nerds. When I was a kid, my rock star was [British naturalist] David Attenborough." As she continued writing and began to record, engineer Damian Taylor helped her build or buy all manner of studio toys, like early pre-iPad touchscreens; a digitally programmable hybrid between a gamelan and a celesta; and a hotwired Nintendo controller hooked up to a pipe organ. Playing with the new instruments gave her songwriting a welcome shot in the arm. "I had been using similar methods for a while [before this album]," she adds. "Maybe I had gotten lazy. I really had to break out of old habits." Meanwhile, Björk still wasn't quite sure how she was going to deliver her new music to the public. After the museum/school dream proved impractical, she weighed an offer from National Geographic to score a 3-D nature film. "I was like, ‘Wow, that would be the coolest thing ever,'" she says. "I would be labelmates with sharks and lemurs!" She began writing a script with longtime collaborator Michel Gondry, but this plan fizzled in turn when he had to devote more time to directing The Green Hornet. (Gondry ultimately directed a forthcoming video for Biophilia's first single, "Crystalline.") She found a solution last spring, when Apple released the first-generation iPad. The tablet computer, she realized, offered a way to pack all the educational and entertainment value of a museum or a movie into an affordable form that would be available around the world. "I felt like technology had finally caught up with us," she says. "I got pretty over-excited." She flew a crew of top app developers out to Iceland last summer, convincing them to work for free in exchange for half the profits from their creations. Together they devised a clever iPad game for each of Biophilia's 10 songs, every one reflecting some aspect of music theory as well as a lesson drawn from nature. Users will be able to build a basic drum machine from DNA bases in "Hollow," fight off an army of mutating rhythms in "Virus" (pictured) or arrange geological layers to form chords in "Mutual Core." Björk performed songs from Biophilia for the first time this week at Britain's Manchester International Festival, where a 24-woman Icelandic choir backed her as she manipulated sounds using an iPad and assorted bespoke instruments. She plans to take the expensive production to six-week residencies in seven more cities over the next three years. "The thing we're struggling with now is how to do the tour," she says. "The way we're doing it, it'll be lucky if we earn zero."

Björk - Crystalline - Biophilia - First Official Teaser




Björk - Gameleste - Biophilia




Preview Björk 'Biophilia' - First reactions



rollingstone.com/inezandvinoodh.tumblr.com

[Scott]

i highly recommend the new tune! it's very good.

[BerlinRocks]

cannot wait for her new tour.
any informations about that yet ?

[Diorette]

^ Me neither. I want to see her live again.

Loving Crystalline. I can't wait to hear the album.

[Frida]

Crystalline

Quote:

The Science of Song, the Song of Science MANCHESTER, England — In one song that Bjork performed here on Thursday night, the bass lines were zaps of artificial lightning from a Tesla coil in a cage. In another, a sizable Victorian-looking contraption of stainless steel, the Sharpsichord — part giant music box, part harp, part gramophone — used a rotating barrel to play deep, bonging counterpoint. For another song, four 10-foot pendulums swung in a computer-maneuvered sequence to pluck delicate, harplike figures. A gameleste — a celeste with gamelanlike bronze bars replacing the usual sugarplum-fairy notes — and a portable pipe organ, both remotely controlled, pinged and tootled through the set. A roving 24-woman choir in sequins and gold lamé capes, Graduale Nobili, sang dense, cascading harmonies behind Bjork, the constantly surprising Icelandic songwriter. In a frizzed-out wig and a sparkly garment that was a robe on one side and a mini-dress on the other, Bjork was performing her new collection of science-minded songs, “Biophilia,” from an album to be released in September. It was the concert premiere of “Biophilia,” commissioned for opening night and five additional performances by the Manchester International Festival, which continues here through July 17. Bjork’s concert was staged in the round in Campfield Market Hall, a warehouselike building now used by Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry; about 1,800 fans were packed in around modest rope barriers, just a few feet from the musicians. Despite the intimate staging and the unusual instruments like the Sharpsichord and the pendulum harp, the concert — along with the coming album and its associated Web site — is among the more standard aspects of “Biophilia,” a Bjork project that has snowballed with missions and media. By now “Biophilia” has brought together not only Bjork and her recording studio collaborators, but also instrument makers, smartphone app designers, scientists and a musicologist. “I didn’t intend it to go so big,” Bjork said with rueful pride in an interview before the performance. “It’s the way most complex project I’ve ever done. There’s been like 500,000 million e-mails and meetings.” But from their beginnings, the songs on “Biophilia” had a grand ambition: to unify music, nature (as described by science) and technology. “Biophilia” is a possible paradigm for the 21st-century album, one that welcomes the interactivity of the Internet and harnesses the power and flexibility of devices that incorporate video, audio and user control far beyond the play button. The songs on “Biophilia” will also be released as apps — one for each song, to be sold as modules in a larger app for the entire album — for the iPad and iPhone. (The developers have not yet decided whether to reprogram the apps for Android devices.) Along with animated graphics, some of which were shown on overhead video screens during the concert, the apps hold not only detailed analysis of the songs — including both conventional and newly devised music notation — but also gamelike excursions through the music, visions of scientific phenomena and the potential to be used as musical instruments themselves. A listener can hear a song, see its structure, play along or completely disassemble some songs and turn their components into something new. “What Bjork is doing feels a lot like the birth of cinema or the birth of opera,” said Scott Snibbe, a media artist and leading app developer who managed the “Biophilia” project and whose studio created three of the album’s apps. “We’re entering the age of interactivity. The passive, one-way media will become a blip in human history. Bjork had a complete, unified concept where everything was interconnected. The music wasn’t dominant, the image wasn’t dominant, the interactivity wasn’t dominant. Everything worked together the way a movie or an opera does.” For instance, the Tesla coil onstage, for the song “Thunderbolt,” finds its digital equivalent in an app that lets users make sounds by gesturing to draw lightning bolts — or swirls or dots or polygons — on the touch screen. Some apps can output MIDI signals that can release any sound in a musician’s library, letting the user apply Bjork’s musical elements and interfaces to create music that sounds totally different. The apps format will allow Bjork to add material to the album after its release; the app visualizes the album as a galaxy, and each song as an additional constellation. “Biophilia” also encompasses performing residencies in eight cities over the next two years (including, tentatively, New York in early 2012), with music education programs for children at each stop. That’s because the project began with pedagogical intent. Since her own days in music school in the 1970s, before she started making her name in Icelandic punk bands, Bjork had been thinking about music education that would encourage creativity rather than rote and would look beyond classical European models. “We need to build on other things that are not just major and minor,” she said. “There are a hundred scales.” Additional performances of Bjork’s “Biophilia” are on Sunday and Thursday and July 10, 13 and 16 at the Manchester International Festival; mif.co.uk.

Bjork Facebook Page / nytimes.com

[Frida]

Quote:

The 200th issue of Dazed & Confused is on sale this Thursday 7 July, and the magazine celebrates this publishing milestone by inviting Björk to guest-edit the entire issue and "show us the future". Dazed editor Rod Stanley meets her at her home in New York to find out all about her remarkable new album and "app suite" Biophilia, currently making its performance debut in Manchester. Also in the issue, she presents many of the scientists, designers, programmers, musicologists and artists that inspired and created the project. The cover is exclusively revealed here, from the stunning shoot by artist Sam Falls, and styled by Katy England. Accelerate!

facebook/bjorkdotcom / dazeddigital.com

[Scott]

more proof that bjork is still the reigning queen.

[Menace]

Volta was disappointing, but Biophilia seems to be going in a very nice direction.

[mousyy]

inezandvinoodh.tumblr.com

[Scott]

btw,isn't exciting to see all of the iconic artists releasing such inspiring,vital and relevant work this year? from PJ Harvey to Radiohead to Kate Bush and now Bjork.....

[vintagemuse]

Quote:

Björk reveals Biophilia artwork, configurations Consequence of Björk continues: One day after the album track “Cosmology” hit the web, the Icelandic singer-songwriter has revealed the artwork for her forthcoming LP Biophilia. If you couldn’t tell, it’s right above. That’s not all though; Björk is now accepting pre-orders for Biophilia and, of course, there are a variety of configurations to consider. The album will be available on CD, LP, and digitally. There’s also ‘The Biophilia Manual,’ which is a “48-page, full-color, hardbound, cloth-covered, and thread-sewn book, tipped on lenticular panel to the front cover, with foil-blocked spine and back cover; the music is housed in black uncoated board wallets.” Wait, you have $800 to spend? Try the ‘Ultimate Edition’… The Biophilia Ultimate Edition, presented in a lacquered and silkscreened oak-hinged lid case, consists of the Biophilia Manual along with 10 chrome-plated tuning forks, silkscreened on one face in 10 different colors, stamped at the back, and presented in a flocked tray. Each fork is adjusted to the tone of a Biophilia track, covering a complete octave in a non-conventional scale. It will be made to order and fabricated only once; each case comes with an individual numbered certificate. Pre-order your preference at Nonesuch Records’ webstore. The album is due for release on September 27th. Also, the aforementioned “Cosmogony” and the Biophilia ‘mother app’ are now available for purchase on iTunes. Hopefully you have a lot of money saved up.

ONTD | consequenceofsound.net

If I had money I would most definitely buy the $800 mega-deluxe edition. Meanwhile the app is fantastic.

[Scott]

that does sound ingenious. kind of makes one think of perhaps a copy of visionaire. i have to say the 'manual' version sounds just as pleasing as the more exorbitant ultimate version,although it sounds incredibly beautiful. i'm liking though that artists are offering up stuff a bit more special in recent years to go along with their albums. it's like giving an added dimension to the concepts....making it that much more of a treasure.

[Menace]

Loving Biophilia so far... Cosmogony and Virus

[Menace]

mmparis