*** Bjork Corner ***

[7/4]

The Zeitgeist Reloaded

An ecstatic, tear-bursting evening in Björk's pagan gospel church

by Greg Tate, VV

May 8th, 2007 3:36 PM

Beloved by all—even pole dancers

James Baldwin liked to say "Artists are here to disturb the peace." True that, Jimmy, true that. But when those rowdies are really on their game, they also rip folks out of mortal time and the fear of extinction. Lunge them away from their circadian lockstep and into the white-water roller-coaster rush of mythicized ritual frenzy, becoming mad, redemptive angel-banshees on the loose, casting wide nets, screaming love on that ass.

A lifetime of loving Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman prepares you to love Björk and the way she worries the notes, stresses tonality until it cracks not because she can't help it but because she lives to crucify a pretty melody with her own brand of wounded, buck-wild, Middle Earth dissonance. She has become this century's zeitgeist artist for that reason, that alarming sonic tongue she uses to zap her diversity-conference audience's sense of emergency, fragility, and pure animal panic. She also operatically exalts and exudes that most elusive and fanciful of human desires: untrammeled, untamable freedom, laid out to the pomo techno-tribalist beat all you earthbound E.T.'s now call home. What the funk were the Wachowski Brothers going for in that Matrix Reloaded rave scene? Nothing less than the pagan gospel church of Björk in full-spectacle throw-down mode.

At her Cinco de Mayo gig at the United Palace Theatre in Harlem—where you can still go Sunday afternoons to catch Reverend Ike preach the gospel of "plenteousness"—Björk showed a Negro how far we've come from 1964: lots of grown-ass white women skuh-reem-ing her name like bobby-soxers and teenyboppers once shrieked for Frank, Elvis, and the Beatles. Even everybody's favorite gangstress, our girl dream Hampton, broke down in tears the moment Björk opened her mouth. Lots of grown-ass Others doing the same: Blackfolk, queerfolk, Latinfolk, Asianfolk, hippiefolk, gothfolk, hipsterfolk, graypantherfolk . . . Björk's is a hunter-gatherer ministry calling all barbarous bohemian nations. Plenty of nappyheads for sure (you know we represented), but was trill hiphop in the house? No, nobody vaguely resembling a single ATL stripper in sight, though human nature tells us, just like East Village Nuyorican she-males once transformed the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" into a personal problem, down in the Dirty, Björk's probably inside hella pole dancers' iPods. "Pagan Poetry"? You know them girls are living there: "Swirling black lilies totally ripe/A secret code carved."

But forgive me for being so gauche. Like us old heads used to do with Miles, I'm not even supposed to tell you what she sounded like before telling you what she was wearing, but a brother's thousand-yard stare ain't what it used to be and, strained for details (Was that bell of Halloween-flavored plumage made of feathers or taffeta? Were those thigh-high witch's boots?), all we know for true is a black storm of barely shorn hair got shook like a Polaroid picture, and nobody does the centaur dance better.

Her band of gypsies included an all-homegirl brass ensemble, a vocal choir decked out in gaily colored church robes, a drummer, a synthesist, and a laptop jockey who doubled on a 'Pod-rigged wheel of steel. Special guests per her new album, Volta, included Antony (minus the Johnsons), two members of the Congo's own opening act Konono No. 1, and Ming Xiao-Fen bluesing her pipa like the spirit of Blind Willie McTell had gotten all up in her area. Gargantuan eco-friendly banners were strung across the back of the stage as if UN Plaza had been taken over by tree huggas with attitude. Nobody since Larry Levan has bewitched or deafened a crowd like her, and he's for damn sure up there in snap heaven raining "fiercefaeriewarriorqueenbeatchyoubettawork!" catcalls down upon her.

No brag just fact: Like she already told you, when it comes to being post-everything, every-freaking-body short of Stockhausen, Sylvester, and Joni Mitchell needs to go get a late pass. The set list spun gold and new, crescendoing through nothing borrowed and plenty newfangled Icelandic-tinged country blues. If you're deep off in the cult, you won't be mad at Volta—she'll likely already have you at hello and whatnot. And at this point, like Prince, she's a legacy artist. Her best work's not necessarily behind her, but what is behind her is kinda genius, and whatever happens now is postscript. Still, we'll review: Volta's brass ensemble thing sounds a wee bit too Stravinsky-on- Demerol. In concert, it was more haunting, droning, and Doppler Effect–ish, poking up through the martial drum din and then receding. And maybe it's just moi, but her and Antony on the same track . . . don't you think that might be too much drama, m'dear? Like Freddie Mercury had done a mating dance with Nina Simone. We're supposed to humanly process all that surgical emoting at once? Your call, G, I'm just saying.

Thankfully, Björk and kora master Toumani Diabaté both seem more comfortable in their own skins, more like when handshakes collide rather than worlds. Her pairing with thumb-piano–flaunting Konono No. 1, on the other hand, makes for more friction despite their mutual affinities. And the very prospect of her and Timbaland chirping and hiccuping on the same track is hands-down the best idea for a collab anyone's had since Sun Ra and John Cage made nice on Coney Island in 1986. Missy so owns Tim's thang that when you hear these Björk/Tim joints, you may feel compelled to drop the hee-haws in her absence. But the first one to mash up Volta's "Declare Independence" and Missy's "She's a Bitch" is a ripened lily.

The freak-flag–waving "Independence," by the way, served as Björk's electropunk encore at Reverend Ike's Palace. One can only imagine what pandemonium might have ensued had her battle cry been a genuinely risky non-sequitur like "Fuck the Police." Even so, Tolkien never told us the Elf had militant-house anthems for days. Or that whatever scares this hi-fi priestess ain't got nothing to do with man, god, machine, mother nature, or the way of the drum.

[7/4]

May 4, 2007

Music Review | Bjork

Bjork, in Fighting Spirit, Links Church and State

By KELEFA SANNEH, NYTimes

The last time Bjork played Radio City Music Hall, five and a half years

ago, she was in heaven: dressed in white, accompanied by the harpist

Zeena Parkins. But when she returned to the space on Wednesday night,

she was somewhere else entirely. The night began with a reddish dress,

scorching red flames and pummeling beats: it was clear she had descended

into a post-disco inferno.

And there she stayed for the rest of her short but intense set, which

lasted less than 90 minutes. Even when the pummeling stopped, the

ominous atmosphere remained. Few singers express exuberance better than

Bjork, but this show was severe and sometimes taxing: love songs were

reborn as laments; dance tracks were reinvented as military marches.

The concert was tied to the release of “Volta” (Elektra), her knotty but

impressive new album. The album includes collaborations with the

Congolese percussion group Konono No. 1 and the hip-hop producer

Timbaland, and Bjork uses their clattering contributions to emphasize

the inherent violence of rhythm. In between these outbursts are muted,

moody songs that could almost be religious meditations.

In that sense her performance brought church and state together; sacred

rituals and military ones. The stage was decorated with about four dozen

flags of different sizes, and certainly Bjork looked serious enough to

lead a small army or a big congregation. Some songs were dominated by

the churchy sound of a harpsichord or a pipe organ, while others marched

forward alongside brass from her native Iceland. And eventually,

inevitably, these two tendencies came to seem like one: a restless

fighting spirit.

There were some disappointing moments, including that opening: a

discombobulated version of “Earth Intruders,” the new album’s fierce

opening track. (She was joined by Konono No. 1, which was also the

opening act, and she said it was the first time she had performed live

with the group.) And sometimes that brass section was a drag, turning

her more meditative compositions into funereal dirges.

Even so, it’s hard to dampen the drama and power of Bjork’s voice; her

every high or loud note inspired a roar from the obsessed fans in the

audience. (And that subsection included just about all of them, it

seemed.) She sang a sublime version of “I See Who You Are,” from the new

album, accompanied by the warp-speed plucking and scrabbling of Min

Xiao-Fen, who plays the pipa, a Chinese lute.

She was joined by Antony Hegarty, from Antony and the Johnsons, for a

duet, “The Dull Flame of Desire.” At first the song, with its stylized

lyrics (“I love your eyes, my dear/ Their splendid, sparkling fire”),

seemed oddly cool, as if the two were merely going through the motions,

not celebrating “passion’s kiss.” But as the song slowly and

methodically built to its crashing climax, the idea became clearer. This

was yet another tribute to the power of ritual — the power of intoning

simple, familiar words until they sound strange.

No doubt this crowd wouldn’t have minded a few more old favorites

(though she did sing a somber version of “All Is Full of Love”), or

maybe a costume change. But there is also something intriguing about

Bjork’s insistence on now, her determination to link each tour to her

current obsessions.

Six years ago, on “Vespertine,” she sang, “It’s not meant to be a

strife/ It’s not meant to be a struggle uphill.” These days, she doesn’t

seem quite so eager to give herself over to bliss. The concert ended

with “Declare Independence,” a furious (though fanciful) protest song

from the new album. “Make your own flag,” she chanted, and then: “Raise

your flag!” Sometimes, the pleasure of giving in is no match for the

pleasure of not.

[7/4]

April 29, 2007

At Home Again in the Unknown

By JON PARELES, NY Times

I READ on the Internet that I was doing a hip-hop album with Timbaland,”

Bjork said, and giggled. Timbaland, the producer whose splintered beats

have propelled some of the best current hip-hop, collaborated with Bjork

for three songs on “Volta” (Elektra), her first album of more-or-less

pop songs since “Medulla” in 2004. But Bjork being Bjork, “Volta” is no

hip-hop album.

Bjork, 41, describes “Volta” as “techno voodoo,” “pagan,” “tribal” and

“extroverted.” Those words barely sum up an album that mingles

programmed beats, free-jazz drumming, somber brass ensembles, African

music, a Chinese lute and Bjork’s ever-volatile voice. It’s a

21st-century assemblage of the computerized and the handmade, the

personal and the global. “This relentless restlessness liberates me,”

Bjork sings in “Wanderlust,” which she calls the album’s manifesto. “I

feel at home whenever the unknown surrounds me.”

She was on more familiar ground a few weeks ago, giving an interview in

the recording studio at her house in Rockland County, N.Y. It’s an

odd-angled room with fuzzy pink walls and a view of trees leading to a

glimpse of the Hudson River far below. Dressed all in red, with her hair

up in puffs on each side of her head, she looked like an Icelandic

cartoon elf. She was adding some final mixing touches and sound-effects

transitions to the album, and there was a song left to finish. The next

day she would visit a New York City studio to record some French horns,

seeking a sound for “Pneumonia” that would be “creamy with a blue emotion.”

The music on “Volta” is earthier than “Medulla,” her almost entirely

vocal album, and “Vespertine,” her 2001 album full of ethereal harps and

string sections. It’s bound together by the brass instruments she

deployed in her 2005 score for “Drawing Restraint 9,” a film by her

husband, the multimedia artist Matthew Barney; she said she heard more

possibilities than she could use in the film. “Volta” also rejoins her,

in some songs, with a big beat. “It’s like I’ve got my body back, all

the muscles and all the blood and all the bones,” she said. “It is

definitely in your face, but I feel it overall as being quite happy.”

“Volta” doesn’t aim for any known format. While some songs touch down

with drumbeats and synthesizer hooks, others are rhapsodic and strange.

Bjork sings about travel, passion, nature, self-reliance, motherhood,

religion and a suicide bomber. For this album, she said, she was

determined to be “impulsive.”

“I didn’t start off with a musical rule,” she said. “It was more

emotion.” She said she asked herself: “Are you playing it safe here? Are

you actually being impulsive or are you totally subconsciously planning

every moment? Are you really allowing enough space for accidents to happen?”

In her native Iceland, Bjork sang everything from children’s songs to

punk before reaching an international audience as a member of the

Sugarcubes in the late 1980s. She knew early on what she wanted to do

with her voice. “I was quite conscious that I wanted permission to be

able to be sad and funny, and human and crazy and silly, and childish

and wise,” she said, “because I think everybody is like that.”

Like much of Bjork’s music since she started her solo career with

“Debut” in 1993, “Volta” harnesses technology to sheer willfulness. No

other songwriter can sound so naïve and so instinctual while building

such elaborate structures. And few musicians have managed to sustain her

unlikely combination of avant-gardism and pop visibility.

Even those who ignore her music can’t forget her fashion statements,

like the swan-shaped dress she wore to the 2001 Academy Awards. She also

set down ostrich eggs along the red carpet. “People didn’t find it very

funny,” she said. “They wrote about it like I was trying to wear a black

Armani and got it wrong, like I was trying to fit in. Of course I wasn’t

trying to fit in!”

Bjork has three New York City shows scheduled: Wednesday at Radio City

Music Hall, Saturday at the United Palace Theater and next Tuesday at

the Apollo Theater. She will probably be the only headliner ever to

perform at those places backed by a 10-woman Icelandic brass band along

with laptop, keyboards and a rhythm section.

Bjork is suspicious of the word pop, and doesn’t sell her songs to

advertisers or accept sponsors for her tours. “I don’t want to be the

conqueror of the world or be the most famous person on earth,” she said.

“I’ve got no ambitions in that direction. Otherwise I would have done

things very differently, I think.”

But she appreciates reaching a large audience. “It would be too easy to

walk away and say, ‘Oh, I’m just going to do these ornate objects that

only a few people, blah blah blah,’ ” she said. “That’s just pretentious

and snobbish.

“I believe in that place where you plug into the zeitgeist, the

collective consciousness or whatever,” she continued. “It’s very folk.

Soulful. Not materialistic. I believe in being a fighter for that

soulful place.”

Bjork made “Medulla” and “Vespertine” largely at home while nurturing

her daughter, Isadora, now 4. “I had a baby, and I was breast-feeding

and organizing my work around that,” she said. “Even though I had a lot

of collaborators, they would come for one afternoon for a cup of tea and

leave. They would be visiting my universe, my world. When I started

doing this album, I had a bit of a cabin fever of being too much in the

protection of my own world, so it was time to be brave and get out.”

Bjork recorded “Volta” at studios in the three places she lives — New

York, London and Reykjavik — and traveled to San Francisco, Jamaica,

Malta, Mali and Tunisia. Now she was willing to show a visitor some of

the inner workings of her songs.

A computer sat open on her recording console. It showed a screen for the

recording and editing program Pro Tools — a familiar sight to musicians

— with the multitrack mix of “Earth Intruders,” the first song on

“Volta.” “Is music getting too visual?” she asked. “We could open a

bottle of wine and talk about that for five hours.”

Stripes of color, each one a sound or an instrument, crossed the screen,

starting and stopping. “It’s like doing embroidery, like when I used to

knit a lot as a teenager,” she said. “You just sit and noodle all day

and have a cup of tea and make pretty patterns.”

She hit the play button, and the tramp of marching feet began, soon

topped by percussion, swooping synthesizers and Bjork’s voice, wailing,

“Turmoil! Carnage!” New blocks of color announced new instruments: in

this song, the sound of Konono No. 1, a Congolese group that plays

electrified thumb pianos amplified (and distorted) through car-horn

speakers. (She recorded with the members of the band in Belgium, and

they will be joining her on some tour dates.)

The beat came from Timbaland, a longtime fan who had sampled Bjork’s

song “Joga” and finally got around to collaborating with her last year.

“I walked into the studio with Timbaland with no preparations,” she

said. “Usually I would have already written the song and there would

just be a small little space for the visitor. But now I just wanted some

challenge. We improvised for one day, and I just sang on top of whatever

he did.

“You just walk in the room and it’s just” — she made an explosive sound

— “pfff!, and I just went pfff!, and we did seven tracks, just

p-p-p-p-p-p. You get really smitten by his energy. It’s like, why doubt?

Who needs the luxury of doubt?”

Timbaland’s beats made their way into “Earth Intruders,” “Hope” and the

song that sounds closest to other Timbaland tracks, “Innocence,” which

has sucker-punch syncopations from, among other things, a sample of a

grunting man. After their recording session, Timbaland got wrapped up in

producing albums and touring with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado,

leaving Bjork to edit and augment the tracks.

“I was a bit confused first, because I got a lot of stuff of his and was

maybe expecting him to arrange his noises,” Bjork said. “It ended up

being quite a good thing for me, because apparently he never gives other

people stuff and lets them complete it for him. So he actually trusted

me to do that.”

For “Hope,” a song that ponders the story of a pregnant suicide bomber,

Bjork went to Mali to meet Toumani Diabate, a djeli (or griot) who plays

the harplike kora. They could have exchanged musical ideas

electronically. But “I wanted to sing it with him at the same moment,

because it’s always different when you do that,” Bjork said.

“She wanted everything to work naturally,” Mr. Diabate said backstage

after a recent concert with his Symmetric Orchestra at Zankel Hall. In

Mali, he played and she sang, trying lyrics she had brought until the

syllables fit and they had a few songs. She chose “Hope” and handed

another one to him. “She said, ‘Take this and use it any way you like,’

” Mr. Diabate said. “I couldn’t imagine a superstar doing that.”

“Hope” ended up using a Timbaland beat and multiple, overlapping,

tangled tracks of kora, traditionally a solo instrument. Mr. Diabate

tweaked the results until he was satisfied. “She opened a new door for

the kora,” he said.

Other new songs have their own convoluted stories. Bjork visited Jamaica

with Antony Hegarty, the brooding-voiced lead singer of Antony and the

Johnsons, to record a lovers’ duet with lyrics from a poem by Fyodor

Tyutchev, “The Dull Flame of Desire.” They sang together, improvising

back and forth, for a full day; then Bjork edited their duet into a

smoldering seven-minute drama, worked up a brass arrangement and decided

to set the whole thing to an electronic beat.

It didn’t work. Eventually she brought in Brian Chippendale, the drummer

from the rock duo Lightning Bolt. She told him: “I’ve tried so many

beats on this song, but I think it should start with silence, and I

think it should build up and then you should sort of take over. And it

should be a beat that’s not a normal drumbeat but more like a heartbeat

or something that you feel.” He improvised it in one take.

Some of the lyrics on “Volta” obliquely address topics like politics,

feminism and religion. “Declare Independence” uses a stomping,

distorted, ravelike ’80s beat from her longtime collaborator Mark Bell

while she exhorts: “Start your own currency! Make your own stamp!

Protect your language!” She was thinking, she said, about Greenland and

the Faeroe Islands, which are still part of Denmark, as Iceland was

until 1944. “But also I just thought it was kind of hilarious to say it

to a person,” she said. “It’s just so extreme!”

Other songs, she acknowledged, are messages to herself. The elegiac

“Pneumonia” uses only French horns, building up slow-motion chords

behind Bjork’s voice, as she reflects on a bout of pneumonia she had in

January and on whether she had made herself too isolated: “All the

moments you should have embraced/All the moments you should have not

locked up.”

She also sings to her two children: her daughter and her son, Sindri,

who is 20. In “My Juvenile,” a ballad accompanied by sparse clusters on

a clavichord, she chides herself for the way she treated Sindri —

“Perhaps I set you too free too fast too young” — while Antony sings

“The intentions were pure” by way of reassurance. “You sort of let go

too much when they’re 14,” Bjork said. “And then suddenly when they’re

16, you behave again like they’re 8. And then when they’re 18, you think

they can fly across the world on their own. And then when they’re 20,

you tell them off because they’re wearing a dirty jacket. It’s clumsy.”

“I See Who You Are” speaks gently to her daughter, imagining her entire

life span and beyond, “when you and I have become corpses.” It’s set to

lightly plinking electronic tones, the Icelandic brass ensemble and the

fluttering, surging notes of a Chinese lute called a pipa. The song is

simultaneously a lullaby and an international concoction, an improbable

mix and a cozy sonic fabric.

While making the album, Bjork said, she read Leonard Shlain’s book “The

Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” which propounds a theory of history

shifting between dominant brain hemispheres: right and left, image and

word, intuition and logic, natural and manmade. “It doesn’t have to be

right; it’s just an interesting speculation,” she said. As the

embroidery of her songs moved across the computer screen, and as her

voice sang the lyrics of “Wanderlust” — “Peel off the layers until you

get to the core” — it sounded as if the alphabet and the goddess were,

for the moment, in harmony.

Edited May 9, 2007 by 7/4

[7/4]

Army of Two

New albums from Tori Amos and Björk.

by Sasha Frere-Jones May 7, 2007

NYorker

By the time Tori Amos was thirty, she had been through several drafts of

a career. A child piano prodigy, she was the youngest person ever to

attend the Peabody Conservatory of Music, in Baltimore. (She was five

when she auditioned.) In her early twenties, she was the lone woman in a

rock band called Y Kant Tori Read. (The group released a single album,

which sold fewer than ten thousand copies.) In 1992, after some

wrangling with Atlantic Records, whose executives were apparently

dubious about the commercial potential of what they called “this

girl-at-her-piano thing,” she released a solo album, “Little

Earthquakes,” on which she sang about Christianity, body image, and, in

the remarkable song “Me and a Gun,” rape, often with the force and

sometimes even the sound of her idol, Robert Plant. “Little Earthquakes”

was the first in a series of albums by Amos which helped prove that a

girl at her piano could make songs that were as artistically complex

and, sometimes, just as popular as those of a shaggy boy with an

electric guitar.

A year later, the Icelandic musician Björk released her first solo

album, “Debut.” Like Amos, Björk had recently left a rock band full of

men, the Sugarcubes, a successful independent group and the fourth she

had been in since she started playing piano and singing publicly, at the

age of eleven. Björk’s main instrument is her voice, a glassy, elastic

alto with the sonic power and range of an electric guitar. She found

inspiration in dance music and the electronic instruments used to make

it, increasingly avoiding anything resembling a traditional rhythm

section. Amos’s music draws on the baroque songwriting and melodramatic

vocals of Kate Bush and the long, expert melodies of Joni Mitchell, and

she favors a lineup of bass, guitar, and drums behind her piano.

Amos and Björk are now in their early forties, mothers and artists in a

market that has shown little interest in promoting women much over the

age of consent, especially avowed feminists who invoke goddesses and (in

Björk’s case) will wear a swan in place of a ball gown. Both are

releasing new albums this month. Stylistically very different, Amos’s

“American Doll Posse” and Björk’s “Volta” are two examples of how a

female pop musician can maintain her career without compromising her

politics.

In a recent interview with the online magazine Pitchfork, Björk said of

“Volta,” “It’s sort of maybe trying to put out some good vibes for the

little princesses out there.” She added, “All they want to do is be

pretty and find their prince, and I’m, like, what happened to feminism?”

Her lyrics are usually less direct. One form her feminism takes is

simply ignoring conventional wisdom. Many artists would hesitate to

appear on an album cover, as Björk does on “Volta,” in what seems to be

an enormous dodo-bird suit covered with a melted sangria candle,

especially an attractive woman who could win over all sorts of people by

wearing, say, a tighter dodo suit.

The album begins with a rebuke to the White House: “Earth Intruders,” an

odd and boisterous song inspired by a visit that Björk made to Indonesia

after the 2004 tsunami. There she envisioned a wave of people taking

political action, an image that she described to Pitchfork: “Maybe a

tsunami of people would just come and hit the White House and scrape it

off the ground and do some justice.”

The music for the song was provided by the ubiquitous producer

Timbaland, who in 1999 sampled her majestic track “Jóga” for a remix of

Missy Elliott’s song “Hit ’Em wit da Hee.” On “Earth Intruders,”

Timbaland bisects a clomping dance with nasty synthesizer howls. Björk

begins singing in her full-chest voice—one of pop’s most reliably

ecstatic stimuli for the past fifteen years. “Turmoil . . . carnage,”

she says, dragging out each word. She speaks the chorus at low volume,

nestling the words in the blend of live drum sounds and digital cries:

“Here come the earth intruders; there’ll be no resistance. We are the

cannoneers, necessary voodoo.” “Earth Intruders” alludes only briefly to

her Indonesian epiphany: “And the beast with many heads and arms

rolling, steamroller.” Björk has no obligation to make her politics

explicit, but it’s a shame that she keeps her anger cloaked. (Of her

intentions for “Volta,” she has said, “It’s 2007. It’s not some hippie

shit—‘go-back-to-your-roots.’ It’s all march forward.”) Had she included

one or two specific references—Washington, cowboys, Black Hawk

helicopters—“Earth Intruders” could have grown fangs without becoming

preachy.

Björk’s collaborators on “Volta” are eclectic to a fault: the Congolese

group Konono No. 1, which plays amplified kalimbas; the frantic drummer

Brian Chippendale, of the American duo Lightning Bolt; a ten-piece

all-female Icelandic brass band; and a Chinese pipa player, among

others. This musical solicitude is a testament to Björk’s fearless

curiosity, but her restlessness can be wearying. When disparate teams of

musicians attempt to realize one musician’s ideas, every song becomes

yet another stone turned over rather than one put in place. On “Volta,”

melodic motifs rarely repeat the way they do in most songs, and many of

Björk’s vocal performances feel like improvisations.

In “Vertebrae by Vertebrae,” the brass band plays a low chord twice,

then moves up a whole step to play another chord four times, and then

stops. Though you’re hearing a live band, the music has the feel of a

loop, like a Steve Reich ostinato slowed way down. Twice, the music

dissolves into parallel sheets of sound; Björk’s voice is reproduced

electronically, creating a harmonic foam, while the horns play discrete

lines. There’s a looped beat in the murk somewhere, though no one seems

to be playing to it, and it’s hard to identify a motif, despite a

surfeit of melodic material. “Vertebrae” is one of many songs in which

Björk—who grew up with the simple populism of punk, and who launched her

solo career by exploiting the equally basic populism of dance

beats—makes music that has little to do with pop. Several horn passages

in “Vertebrae” and “Wanderlust” have a hypnagogic grace, and

“Pneumonia,” one of the few tracks not cluttered with sound, presents a

gorgeous chamber-music-style arrangement of horns and voice for what

could be Björk’s mission statement: “To shut yourself off would be the

hugest crime of all.”

Shutting off is not often a problem for Amos. “American Doll Posse” is

aggressive and, occasionally, overstated; Amos fans who have complained

that they haven’t heard from “the real Tori” in a while will be

relieved. In the past three years, Amos has released only one complete

album, “The Beekeeper” (2005), which buried her natural vigor under

music that occasionally incorporated gospel and R. & B. but in the end

was lax and weirdly docile. “American Doll Posse” returns to her music

of the nineties: fired-up songs centered on the piano, her robust

singing, a rhythm section, and loud guitar playing more indebted to the

seventies than to the ohs.

The album title refers to characters that Amos created for the record:

Pip, Tori, Clyde, Santa, and Isabel. These women appear on the cover,

five Amoses digitally manipulated to occupy a single space. The one

called Tori has long, straight red hair and bangs, wears a floor-length

dark skirt, and holds a chicken. (The concept owes much to the work of

the artist Cindy Sherman.) If you do some research, you can figure out

which character sings which track, but this is unnecessary. Amos has

always played a variety of characters in her songs; it wouldn’t be a

stretch to say that her work is concerned primarily with how different

women experience the world. (Amos once said in a television interview

that she was elected homecoming queen simply because she had made an

effort to talk to all the girls in her high school.)

Amos’s album, like Björk’s, begins with a rebuke to the Bush

Administration: “Yo George,” a dirge for piano and voice, in which Amos

(as Pip) sings about the “madness of King George” and asks, tremulously,

“Where have we gone wrong, America?” She must know that the

public-service announcement is a dicey gambit; the song is only

eighty-five seconds long. On “Big Wheel,” a rhythmically assured rock

song that features a distorted slide guitar, Amos sings as a woman who

is claiming her independence: “Baby, I don’t need your cash, mama got it

all in hand now.” And in “Secret Spell” she sings to a younger woman,

maybe herself: “Jumps at three, tears at thirteen, just turn you around

for eighteen wheels in a high heel, just turn you around, sold a dream

at twenty-three.” The guitars on “Secret Spell” are reminiscent of songs

by R.E.M., a group whose plangent, chiming guitar style has not been

reprised in the twenty-first century as often as, say, U2’s has.

Amos’s anger is appealing, especially when she’s parsing gender

stereotypes. She takes on the acronym MILF—a term that “Tori” decides

she likes—and a more ageless insult, “fat slut,” which becomes a

character in a song of the same name. Björk’s concerns on “Volta” tend

to be more global, but “Declare Independence,” a brief punk rant,

contains a lyric that would work just as well in a song by Amos:

“Declare independence. Don’t let them do that to you. Make your own

flag. Raise your flag!".

[sidewinder]

I like her looks...can't say I've ever heard any of her music.

Bjork is very famous for her 'fashion' sense, and like her music to some it is a little 'off-the wall'.

Che.

Got me sweating there for a minute, until I realised that this was posted in 2005 !

Edited May 14, 2007 by sidewinder

[Van Basten II]

I had a first listening of her latest album, gotta say it's more easy on the ear and more accessible than her previous one, like the brass arrangements.

[WD45]

Same here. I really enjoy the contributions from Antony -- another unique voice for sure.

[7/4]

Same here. I really enjoy the contributions from Antony -- another unique voice for sure.

I was just reading discussion about his contribution elsewhere...I'm not familiar with him, but I like what he's doing with Bjork.

[Chuck Nessa]

I'm not familiar with him, but I like what he's doing with Bjork.

Can you post videos?

[7/4]

[jasonguthartz]

I'm not familiar with him, but I like what he's doing with Bjork.

Can you post videos?

This may disappoint you (in several ways):

[Van Basten II]

I'm not familiar with him, but I like what he's doing with Bjork.

Can you post videos?

I'm not sure you wanna see Anthony in action.

[clifford_thornton]

I never cared much for her, either, or her art-star beau, Matthew Barney. But hey, what do I know about music, art, or even West Coast Jazz?!?!

[7/4]

hateful sidenote: all you suckers who "believe" in benign provenance should git to splainin' how Antony & say, the even more loathesome Beck (different styles, similar subset of asswipe white boy adulation tho' Anthony has camp appeal too) live, Lou Reed too, sadly &

Cowboy Copas, Otis Redding & Ronnie Van Zant do not. (Cocorosie exist to make "music" & Booker Little & Jimmy Blanton did not.)

Beck's hooked up...he's a Scientologist.

[Parkertown]

Great show at Red Rocks last night. Interesting horn arrangements using the 10 piece Icelandic Girl Brass Section.

Bjork is striking...she was on last night. Fantastic performer.

"Declare independence,

don't let them do that to you"!

[7/4]

New Opera to Be Based on Von Trier Film

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 24, 2007

Filed at 10:56 a.m. ET

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) -- Denmark's Royal Theater has commissioned a new opera based on Lars von Trier's 2000 film, ''Dancer in the Dark.''

Poul Ruders, a leading Danish composer, will write the music for the work, while the libretto, in English, will be written by Henrik Engelbrecht, head of dramaturgy at the theater.

Swedish soprano Ylva Kihlberg is set to sing the role of leading character Selma when the opera premieres during the 2010-2011 season, the theater announced Thursday.

Von Trier's movie, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, starred Bjork and Catherine Deneuve.

Bjork played the role of a Czech immigrant factory worker in the United States who becomes blind because of a congenital disease and tries to save money for an operation to avoid the same fate for her 12-year-old son.

Von Trier also directed ''Breaking the Waves'' and ''Dogville.''

He said in a recent interview that a period of depression had left him unable to work, and he expressed doubts about when he will return to filmmaking.

[7/4]

Report: Bjork Attacks Photographer

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Icelandic singer Bjork attacked a newspaper photographer shortly after she arrived at New Zealand's Auckland International Airport on Sunday, local media reported.

Bjork, who is in the northern city of Auckland to perform at the Big Day Out concert on Friday, tore "New Zealand Herald" photographer Glenn Jeffrey's shirt after he photographed her arriving at the airport early Sunday, he told news agency New Zealand Press Association according to a report on Monday.

Jeffrey, a news photographer for 25 years, said Bjork was accompanied by a man who asked him not take photos.

"I took a couple of pictures ... and as I turned and walked away she came up behind me, grabbed the back of my black skivvy (T-shirt) and tore it," he told the agency.

"As she did this, she fell over, she fell to the ground," he said. "At no stage did I touch her or speak with her."

Bjork said nothing throughout the incident but her male companion was saying: "'B, don't do this, B, don't do this,'" Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey said he spoke with Auckland police about the incident later Sunday.

Bjork or a representative were not immediately available to comment on the report.

[Noj]

hateful sidenote: all you suckers who "believe" in benign provenance should git to splainin' how Antony & say, the even more loathesome Beck (different styles, similar subset of asswipe white boy adulation tho' Anthony has camp appeal too) live, Lou Reed too, sadly &

Cowboy Copas, Otis Redding & Ronnie Van Zant do not. (Cocorosie exist to make "music" & Booker Little & Jimmy Blanton did not.)

Beck's hooked up...he's a Scientologist.

Beck's one of my favorite current musicians, despite the Scientology thing.

Bjork does her best Sean Penn! Sweet.

[Guest Bill Barton]

She can tear my skivvy any time she so desires.