Your rating
Tracklist
13 tracks · 64 min
13 tracks · 64 min
Ever the inventive artist, for her eighth studio long-player Björk also turned inventor, commissioning the construction of specialist instruments to compose these 10 tracks upon. Among them, the gameleste – a fusion of gamelan and celeste – which can be heard, a persistent twinkle in the mix, across this set’s lead single, Crystalline. The Icelander also turned to rather more modern hardware for this album – certain tracks are partly recorded on an iPad, and the intention is for each of these tracks to emerge as an app, as well as via traditional album formats. Impressively 21st century stuff, for sure. But while her commitment to composition away from typical means – she doesn’t play piano or guitar, so seeking new options is both a necessity and a novelty – is commendable, experimentation is nothing without accessibility, especially for a musician with an audience as sizeable as Björk’s. Thankfully, Biophilia serves as wonderfully as a ‘standard’ album as anything else – a plus, given that interest in her app series is, one imagines, slightly on the wane (it certainly is in this writer’s household). Conceptual in the sense that each song is associated with a readily presented the…