LaRM day 43 (Bjork)

Next up are the four live albums that were released individually and as a box-set called Livebox (all 2003). The recordings cover the whole of her career up to that point and were meant to loosely recreate the running orders of the studio albums. The first, Debut Live, is essentially all taken from the MTV Unplugged performance in 1994, and it’s absolutely fabulous. It truly demonstrates just how creatively she and her collaborators think, reworking keyboard parts on harps and other stringed instruments totally successfully. Her voice is fine and the whole show is really very special. The Post Live album is slightly less successful as it focuses much more on the electronic components of the compositions and brings out the relative blandness of the songs as well as being often more faithful to the recorded versions of the songs. An accordion and tabla combo don’t help things, but when the show does work it works brilliantly. A couple of Post songs are missing and are replaced with reworkings of a few Debut songs, but it also includes a stunning live version of the Japan only released ‘I Go Humble’, and most of the recordings are from the Post tour in 1997. Homogenic Live is more mixed up, missing a few Homogenic songs and replacing them with tracks from singles and songs from both Debut (weirdly Anchor Song gets the most outings over the course of the four albums) and Post. The songs are taken from a number of different live songs throughout Europe and maybe that explains the strangely disjointed feel of the album. It’s a relatively muted, sedate set and while at times it passes by unnoticed there are some truly fabulous pieces. The version of ‘5 Years’ really brings out what a beautiful song it is, there’s a blistering outing of ‘Bachelorette’ and ‘Joga’ is just wonderful, a rare example of a recorded live version of a song being desperately moving. The violin being to the fore for many songs is a real boon and the relationship between the electronic and the live instrumentation is absolutely perfect throughout. The Vespertine Live disc cannot hope to match up to the original album, but it is still quit stunning, delicate and restrained, with beautiful instrumentation and choral backing vocals. Again, a couple of the songs from Vespertine aren’t included but there are a number of singles tracks and two from Selmasongs. The whole thing is a gossamer version of a live performance and you can imagined how graceful the whole experience must have been for those lucky enough to see the shows.

It’s possibly telling that between the release of Vespertine and her next studio album Medulla (2004) Bjork’s relationship with artist Matthew Barney was cemented by the birth of their daughter. The sound of Medulla is more immediately warm and the central conceit of the only sounds on the record being created by the human voice may be related to the idea of the voice being so powerful an influence on a developing foetus. Total conjecture, but there is definitely something changed in the way she approaches sound, recording and song structure and whether it’s to do with being challenged to up the ante artistically by her husband or spiritually by her daughter is unimportant. The record is another step towards the pure intellectualisation of popular music and although it has a couple of immediately accessible songs (‘Who Is It’ is a lovely, relatively straightforward song, and ‘Triumph of a Heart’ although that’s maybe the low point of the album) for the most part it’s a fascinating and mostly successful fusion of sound as art and song as communication. If you’re prepared to make the effort and meet it halfway it’s a fantastic and very rewarding record.

A further step into abstraction is evident on the soundtrack to her husband’s multi-media Drawing Restraint 9 project the following year. There are scarcely any songs here, mostly atmospherics, and challenging ones at that. Accompanying what is apparently ostensibly the story of a stricken whaling ship, the tunes on Drawing Restraint 9 are a mixture of styles and forms, from beautiful harp pieces to electronic clankings, with some Medulla style vocal pieces composed of gasps and moans and wails. It’s very hard to really get a handle on the album as a whole and many of the pieces sound like their sense would become clearer when coupled with the artwork (although from what little I’ve seen of Barney’s work that may be optimistic). It’s bold stuff (the ten minute ‘Holographic Entrypoint’ is an old Japanese man making noises and knocking a block of wood) but it’s hardly the place to start if unfamiliar with Bjork’s work. And neither is 2007’s Volta, which is less deliberately and purposefully abstract but is still a tough work to really get to grips with. It received fairly mixed reviews on release and I tried to love it but failed. Listening to it again now I have no idea what it was I was missing. It’s a fine record, full of stunning touches and a real sense of purpose. It’s possibly too dense, too much fussy noise in the background, but the songs are really special. It is something of a step back to the kind of Homogenic template, but there is more going on here than at first appears and it turns out it’s a fantastic record, not the dud I had thought at all. Nonetheless it does have that indefinably complicated air about it which makes it hard to really get a handle on.

Last year’s Biophilia tomorrow morning and we’re all Bjorked out.