Bjork

Homogenic

OK...forgot to post this when I wrote it...

This is the Bjork I associate most with my brother; the album cover first appearing to me set against the black ash furniture of his teenage room, and that funny trio of artefacts he had over his desk; a crucifix, a lava lamp and a Terry Practchet poster. I have a photo of him sitting in front of his computer with all that in the background, a picture of Nirvana taken from NME or Kerrang or something…my room was light blue and I painted it with quotes from the Beatles that I found…way meaningful…I concentrate back into the song where Bjork sings “I thought I could organise freedom, how Scandinavian of me” and fight back a smirk thinking of Sofia…it is a nice smirk though.

I remember the video for this song; early Edinburgh days when it still felt like a holiday, Veronica had it on her laptop, for some reason…downloaded? Pirated? Bonus material? Computers still felt an unknown quantity, laptops unacceptably exotic. Bork wags her head back and forth on the screen and fleetingly, becomes a blue bear which looks markedly unsuitable for hunting.

I bought this CD in the Bolton HMV in one of those three for fifteen quid jobs…think I bought Gomez and Elvis Costello at the same time. I played this a lot in Temple Villas. I nearly wanted to type “Temple Meads” just then…fresh in my head from an adventure yesterday of having to walk very carefully (social worker coat and bag intact) the wrong way down a motorway on the cycle path, fixing in my head the sight of the towers of Temple Meads, which turned out to be Trinity anyway…anyway.

Joga…and my main memory of this is sitting in Rick’s room at University; he had an amazing hexagonal low table with a variety of drawers on it where he did out the I-ching and painted fairies and demons and the walls, Sisters of Mercy playing and a smell of sweat hanging in the room. We all sat there the night they worked out how to take symmetrical pictures of our faces, Tim looked like Slimer from Ghostbusters, Jen looked like a lion…we listened to this song and I remember Jen singing along to it, very softly. Veronica and I had already begun to talk to each other all friendly like over the topic of Bjork (which would prefigure the Kate Bush orgy that made up the first part of Edinburgh) and Jen was adamant she didn’t like Bjork, but began to concede and sang along in the dark.

I saw the video for this for the first time in Japan when Chris and Hayler got out the Michel Gondry DVD of various videos. I have to say I was disappointed with the video contrasted to others I’d seen. We sang it on karaoke – Japanese selections better that English….or maybe I sang it that crazy Christmas eve wine/beer-fuelled four-hour marathon of singing and tambourines…

I had forgotten Unravel. I played it so much the summer between first and second years. I had forgotten this – the experience of hearing a song one had forgotten for so long is aching…to be fair, there is so much music I hadn’t listened to for so long…co-habiting requires compromised decisions between “what we will listen to” and I have been, despite appearances, passive in many aspects of my life. The time I’ve spent in my own compositions; the wasteland and perfection and the bomb most recently has used up most of my music listening time…there is a wealth of music that has shaped my life which has been neglected and forgotten for too long now, I see this. This song holds such importance in my head; this afternoon we’re going to London to go and sing songs for beautiful wonderful and mourned Rosie; and I have never equated the two planes of reality (knowing this song/being the person whom knew and experienced this song and knowing Rosie) together, feels strange and my head feels opened out.

Bachelorette marks, unfortunately, the start of my demise in this album…it promises much to me but my interest has never resurfaced; although the line about “You will go astray like a killer whale trapped in a bay” brings back all those images of the whale who swam into the Thames to die. What was it that was so horrible and beautiful about that? I wish I’d seen it.

The next song, All neon-like, fills me with the same feeling, an impatience, wanting her to get on with a melody, a hook, a point…the resulting music seems too pedestrian to be properly, excitingly boring (in the style of Phillip Glass or Kraftwerk or whatever) and never goes anywhere to redeem it…it’s a better kind of coffee table music but still that’s what it is…

Alarm call wakes me up (so to speak) – and this was a song that resonated in the summer where, contrary to the lyrics, everything scared me. It goes with that Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach CD I kept listening to; one of the many doctors who met me in A&E as I railed terrified around the building recommended it, and having heard I wasn’t impressed, recommended trying it again, like a prescription. Maybe I was going for the insistence of “It doesn’t scare me at all” and making it real; those experiences were some kind of alarm/exhaustion, and the idea of “Today has never happened and it doesn’t frighten me” must have seemed nice, especially when dangled with love and happiness. I smoked my way through most of that summer and remember mostly the acrid smell of beer as I cleared empty bottles night after night in the Varsity in Bolton.

I’m afraid that this is one of the songs where I can hear the Bjork parodies and the Bjork realities becoming one…”Excuse me but I just have to explode” seems so studied to me, the polite with the anarchic in an engineered way. All those hesitations seem (like Tony Blair’s funeral speech) so studied. Perhaps the juxtaposition is supposed to work in the same way as the Revolution 9/Goodnight clause in the White Album…I know that “All is full of love” which is to close the album is delicate and beautiful. I arranged this for a singing group I was involved in at York…we sang Hildegarde Von Bingen stuff, Sara McLachlan, some Kerry Andrew originals, I think one Liz Kearton original too, and this. Six-part vocals…it was lovely, if I remember correctly. I’m sure there are recordings stashed in a vault somewhere. I remembered this song just the other day, walking home from the gym in that post-exercise rush and chill. Standing at the traffic lights on Newfoundland road and singing it to myself under the noise of the traffic. There are two versions of the song, one introduces drums and euphoric brass. The other is this one, just harps and strange electronic crunching. The other one seems to fit with the video, this one fits better in my head. It feels like a hymn.

Bjork
Vespertine

Edinburgh – still in the days when we thought it was a holiday. Did we have a couple of copies floating around the flat? I heard one track from it during the summer; there was a free CD with a newspaper and I stood in the kitchen of the Varsity pub chopping red onions and leaning my forehead against the metal shelving, stopped suddenly by the noises coming from the tinny speakers above the noise of the dishwasher.

I listen to this album today frighteningly tired – sleep is eluding me again and I dreamt last night of shutters in a supermarket coming down and catching me by the neck, shop assistants doing nothing to help me while I die on the floor. The sleepy, swimming nature of the music is helping me more now than coffee and a sickie from placement is doing…aquamarine and lace…the conventional wisdom says that Bjork recorded this shortly after completing “Dancer in the dark” with Lars Von Trier…complicated and devastating film. There is orchestral and choir-cushioned comfort in all of this…it shows that she was recently in love. I like the first track more today than I have done ever…

I can hear the influence of Matmos here, in the beats and clicks and static scattered across the headphones. Delicacy and shadows predominate. In these early days of Edinburgh, I got a job at some nightclub…The Living Room? One of those on Cowgate near the Gilded Balloon…we went there fairly early on and I remember Jen and I talking about Bjork in the queue for the cloakroom…I got a job there, but my brother came for a visit, we all drank wine, I forgot the time, ended up having to taxi it down to the nightclub slightly worse for wear and was put on the cloakroom…sat there slightly drunk and chain-smoking, two in the morning I was told the night was over, given an envelope with my pay, a taxi home with other workers and never went got it together to call for another shift…when I returned Chris was waiting for me and we walked the dawning streets of Edinburgh looking for tobacco…not a difficult feat in the city of ill-health…all the boys and girls from the good old days of York had discovered ecstasy recently and I believe my brother had sat with them as they listened to this album on a loop full of happiness.

I was trying to hear Bjork’s music as consolation at this point but unfortunately it helped me feel excluded from a heaven I didn’t really understand…not much of this album stays in my head, although it’s lovely, the loveliness kind of leaves almost no impression…

Undo stays with me because of the experience in the kitchen (with the walk-in freezer I always feared I would accidentally trap myself in) and because I mixed it into my frightening song “Waverly”, written about what would be the final escape from Edinburgh; the visions of the train disappearing as it had appeared…and thinking back to the section of the meadows (was it the meadows? It was behind Bennett’s/Home Street Bar, behind the theatre, near where James with the broken leg lived…all trees) where I lay down and cried once in the middle of the day…later imagining myself on that day covered with leaves and remaining. I’m aware how these recollections sound only morbid and horrible – at the time I had been labouring under hopes and ideas that Edinburgh would be the answer to these feelings which started in York; pressure and pain in breathing and sleeping, which I saw so well last night…I heard and recognised this song first as a comfort for something which hadn’t begun, and when I wove it into the headache of “Waverly” it felt important to remember the seeds of this. The cello supports the singer and each of the bells playing begins a new part. If you’re bleeding, undo – remembering the impact unravel had on me the other day this seems semantically and emotionally to be the second part…thinking of wires and leads tangled and twisted at the gig last night, thinking of the gathering for Rosie and seeing her as real but departed rather than simply dead is all part of it.

Maybe because Undo has always affected me so much; the rest of the album feels like a let-down…in Pagan poetry, the “I love him I love him I love him I love him” is awful…it stays in my head as something terrible and stupid. Too much of this album is like a birthday cake. Perhaps because at the time I was living under the welt of superstitious and primitive crystals, Beltane and Wiccan soap; the mysticism in this album irritates me. Somewhere between the modern things and scientific re-reading of dinosaurs in Post, has Bjork become a slave of this particular brand of conservatism? I’m reading a Furedi book about this at the minute so I’m aware my influences may be poking out of my bag…but as my intellectual/artistic crushes of the last five years or so attest (Don DeLillo, Piet Mondrian, Charlie Chaplin, Brett Easton Ellis, David Byrne and recently baby-steps reading around the Enlightenment) - I am very suspicious of wide-eyed child-like wonder, harps and clouds…I am trying but I’m not further affected or pleased by this album…

It is a very specific place though…the whole album is shot and woven through with the same mood, the same tentative exploration and yes it is correct…I am just very aware that it currently doesn’t match with me…it feels like smoke drifting into a room, like a nightmare of a drug education video…lighting on people and showing them briefly for what they are, moving swiftly on and never settling…in and out of the kitchen (and I see Colville place here with all the ethnic wall hangings and Dylan CDs, the blackcurrant jam and crusty loaf in the kitchen, the chess games between Steve Norrie and Steve Elphick, beanbags, Jung lovers scattered in all the corners and a Scottish winter closing in. We wander the Botanical gardens and pose for school photographs as we investigate the trees and the grass. We are grownups now and walk to art galleries, we work in offices and catch new buses. We have chosen these bars and decorated these rooms. I remember candle wax melted in exact shapes, a CD player connected externally to a stereo that never worked, a salad with apples and raw mushrooms combined, wooden salad fork to serve and that fabulous mirror/mannequin combo at the end of the corridor, a knowledge of three different bedrooms in the one house – the tiny one, the huge one with the slanted ceiling and fireplace where we sat, and the orange one with the piano where I briefly lived with the steps and the leaves and the trees.

Bjork
Post

This is the first CD I bought. I had emerged from a period of listening to my parents record collection, sitting in one of the shabby yellow/gold/green/used-to-be-brown armchairs that Therese’s mother had brought with her when she moved in (with a kind of knitted patch over the corner of one). I had got so used to the physicality of vinyl that the CD, with the silver-painted-coloured side confused me…I thought the information would be on this “top” side, and that the silver was decorative rather than functional. It couldn’t possibly play…I didn’t know the information was held on the underside of a CD and I put it in the newly-bought CD player upside down. I remember my father buying the CD player and how it seemed risky or indulgent to do so.

This is the first CD I bought, and I loved it all the way from sixth form to now. I play the first track and I remember being so entrance and horrified by the weird video, a gorilla, a dentist, a diamond…I think of my bedroom at Temple Villas, the candles I suddenly discovered I like (Vanilla bean) and the millions of photos I had and loved. My Snoopy lamp. The lilac oak-tree duvet cover which coincidentally matched the curtains. All elements and markers of a charmed life.

Hyperballad confused me, I couldn’t associate the fluttering synth-y sounds with the horror of what I heard and it took me a long time to filter through the noises (and the stupid sonic the hedgehog video which frankly irritated me) to the horrible story of watching cutlery rolling down a hillside and imagining an abrupt and shattered death as the best way to deal with current reality…not quite suicide, even further than that…but as years go by I wonder about an alternate reading of the song, that maybe she revels in feeling safe and enjoys her lover and her house more and appreciates them more, rather than as a consolation against death…perhaps there's nothing wrong at all…?

The string quart version of this that was on…telegraph? Tele something…the blue album which I discovered at Watches etc in York…I worked with an amazingly arrogant guy called Ross who, as Jenny pointed out, had fantastic eyebrows…I think she nurtured a bit of a crush on him but I always thought he was a dick…but he did bring in good bits of music…I heard it there, I found it in Avalanche in Edinburgh. But it was one of the CDs Dan decided “we” should get rid of in the purge he insisted upon every so often. I do wonder if part of the reason Dan and I fell to pieces together was the matching of his very Methodist bread-and-water aesthetic, the kind of dry and pious way he held himself together (and I know he struggled with it) combined with my Catholic upbringing on gilt and guilt, gold and the sacred, flowing, singing ringing blood – incense and self-loathing, of which a taste for gold is the only compensation. The string quartet version of this song on that doomed album combined with a bizarre radio-edit “crunch” version of it, in which the voice was rendered so divorced from the song it was alarming…all three played together one after the other…how much can be done through arrangement and architecture of the song…how much is form and how much is content…

I put together an acoustic guitar version of this in my early months of Bristol gigging. It is the wooden, as opposed to plastic, lace or sheet metal version of the song.

I listen to this album on a walk to the doctors, then up to the university then back home again for a study day, where so far I’ve thought a lot but written not much. I listen to TH Modern Things in the waiting room, there is beeping and the red scrolling list of people’s names to be called and seen. I feel protective towards this song. Track three is a difficult space to fill, when thinking about the grammar of albums (or perhaps thinking of grammar is ungrammatical?) My legs are tired. I love this song. There isn’t much more to say and I’m sure as I pulled deeper and deeper into it, and all the images of giggling toasters and volcanoes crowded into my brain, I fell into shafts of sunlight in the waiting room. And I like the way the term sounds. A pushchair being rolled comfortingly back and forth on the carpet made me think at first it was a new and delicious sound in the mix of the song I hadn’t heard before.

Chris Heppell and I decided this album was plastic. It’s Oh So Quiet is definitely cartoonish, but so much better for it – I heard some Jazz Band at York cover this, the singer was far too hesitant in the “Wow! Boom!” part of the song…killed it. “Enjoy” seems self-consciously malevolent and I’m not sure why…maybe I put too much psychologically into it when I was first listening to it…thinking how dark and twisted it sounded, all the regret and anger of desire.

“You’ve been flirting Again”…such a confusing and strange song. It’s bizarre because it kind of presupposes a knowledge of the narrative already, before the song ahs started…and if you don’t know it, then it doesn’t really matter…it’s a whispered piece of advice at a party but delivered from a pulpit…you don’t know these people really so why are you listening? Isobel also confuses me because my brain is now hard-wired to accept Isobel as the less problematic offspring of ALP and HCE; but I associate her with the moon, the trees and only those that swing over a fighting and rioting Shem Shaun/Moot Jutt etc. Her that turned into the moon as her mother turned into the sea – I can’t quite make it fit with Bjork’s description of “A forest glade dark”, bursting into flames and raising wonderful hell.

“I miss you” is a song I adored at University and played constantly, it seems. I love the skipping of the backing in the middle eight. I have a thing about walking in step with people. If I’m holding hands, linking arms, if arms are round shoulders of even none of this physical contact is there but mental contact is, I feel wrong and uncomfortable, like I’m limping if I’m not walking exactly in step. I often hop skip and jump to make the footsteps match up. Quite a few people I know take advantage of this in a pleasant way, and themselves hop skip and jump so I am forced to replicate their ridiculous steps. It has always ended in laughing, but I am very serious in intent. That part of the song reminds me of that.

The two songs on the rest of the album that kill me are “Possibly maybe”, which I had a version of with a string quartet…not sure if it’s my beloved Brodsky quartet or not, but it’s beautiful – the arrangement and the song. I love the way it shows sexuality as it is – all hair and corners, and that it shows exhaustion and greed as part of the same mix.

I prefer listening to music on headphones, something about the way music hits the space of the room can either kill or emblazon it. Currently I prefer headphones and appreciate the intimacy required by this, the last song on the album. The clicks, moans and whispers are part of the road.

Bjork

Debut

Following an unfortunate concurrence where I was reading about The Moomins (darker and more beautiful than I could have hoped) and my thinking about this album, I had days where all I could think of was “There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to Moomin behaviour…) which I still rather enjoy.

Chris Heppell and I had some night in Edinburgh of smoking rather a lot of weed and delineating each Bjork album according to what material it reminded us of., This was wood. The others will be told as they come.

I’ve mentioned Bjork already in the context of vocal production and scope of lyrics and the unfortunate way people have of regarding such people as “kooky”, meaning of course “women”. The textures of the arrangement, even once one has gotten over the many different and bizarre things she can do with her voice (how much of it is not being a speaker of English as a first language? As Sofia says, am I Swedish or interesting?)

There’s a big smell of mid-90s dance to this tho…it’s on this album where this is most prevalent that the amazing landscape she builds (for me) collapses and meanders…what’s that quote about David Byrne about “in his quest for irony he rushes to the brink of irrelevance…”? I agree a little on this and I certainly think Joanna Newsome is guilty of this too…”It’s a hot day and I’m dressed lightly…” – there’s a song on some advert at the minute in which a female singers breathlessly confirms that she is waiting with cho-co-lates and…dan-de-liyunnnns

Venus as a boy seems the most sing-y so far, a certain element of world music, the middle eight bit full of those Bjork-isms Chris K and I know as the “Chairman Mao” refrain…I love the celebration in here…the next song (There’s more to life than this) was one of my earliest favourites…I love the idea of her running our (live at the Milk Bar toilets) to a bathroom where little microphones wait for her…her vocal delivery was always going to be fodder for people to laugh at though…Sofia showed me a French & Saunders thing which is pretty funny and yes, pretty accurate…that bloody video for Big Time Sensuality (coming up later) had a lot to answer for, and I think maybe made her a figure of fun…not helped much by the big It’s oh so quiet thing…photos of her with swans round her neck etc…it’s still so dance-y…that was the time so it’s OK, not a criticism, the backing vocals here are cheesy but good.... it’s interesting how the 90s sound historic now…

It swings gently into the Rodgers and Hammerstein “Like some-one in love”…hearing this song made me re-think ideas about cover songs being evil, terrible, lacking in originality…shows here that context and form are all, the unexpected is always upon us…in the same way as “Till there was you” on the With the Beatles album, a sudden step backwards in time is cool, in the sense of a breeze. This song seems to have the quality like “It must be love” by Madness; of the physical and mental sensations of love – an opening of space and clarity. Not many songs can do that.

The arrival of Big Time Sensuality disappoints me, this album seems to take a downturn for me at this point until the last two songs. I went out to a ukulele night at Mr Wolf’s recently, the first band on was a rock&roll tribute kinda band…playing all the old pleasers (I’ll admit I was happy to hear Johnny B Goode which has taken on thrice-played nuclear weight for me I’m afraid; heard on the radio as a young couple watch the planes go by, heard again as the first public safety announcements begin, and then one last time in the post-nuclear world, a ghost on maybe the last radio alive as our new heroine picks her way through the landscape of bricks and the dangling feet of lynch mobs –who knows why? Who cares? – to give birth in an abandoned hospital) and everyone dancing dancing dancing…I don’t like rock and roll much at all, and was particularly displeased that night (wanted ukulele action) and so could only hear the music as a series of signals, building a further signal of rebellion…the baseline going up and down and up and down, the lyrics as formulaic as you like…all to me sounding like a code for “Dance you fucking monkeys…this is having a good time and you are having it…dance”. Dance music seems to be “dance you fucking lab monkeys”…dance music (like all music) has all these codes running through it, it is nowhere near as simple as a nice tune and a rhythm to dance to…if we’re stuck in our post-now world then everything has a meaning and we run through the museum (smash n grab) messing up the exhibits but never losing them…although I start to realise these songs I had written off in my head have more to them than first thought…I recognise one from an advert which disturbs me…the words resonate for me especially at the moment and I think of Bjork in the same way as Evelyn from American Psycho…that amazing section of “This was the bone season for me and I needed a holiday. I suggested summer in the Hamptons and Evelyn, like a spider, accepted”. I note the use of tabla pretty much everywhere in this album and want to comment on it, but I remember I may have overused them in songs I wrote around this time too…The Anchor Song was another early discovery of delight, and I’m pretty sure it stayed in my head when I wrote a certain section of The Wasteland…even before that I was held by the call and response between the voice and the instruments…the clashes of notes, the clumsiness…

The last song, Play Dead is so grand, dramatic. I have a strange anecdote attached to it…when I worked at an autistic school in Edinburgh, I worked with a teenage boy who asked me in his special robot voice to make him a tape of “dance-music-from-the-late-80s-preferably-87-through-to-1992”. As he loved this music so (and I recently acquired some old CDs of it, now unfortunately stolen by evil ex-housemate who as well as screwing us on the rent and bills managed to make off with a selection of her favourite souvenirs from myself and the two girls who also put up with her…I saw her rifling openly through Rosie’s pile of clothes once for a scarf she decided she wanted…) I was able to use the promise of music as a behavioural tactic with him. He unfortunately went through a phase of being “inappropriate” with a boy in his class. I was asked to talk to him about it, and he said “It’s like that Bjork song, play dead. It is sometimes just like sleeping” was the only answer I could get from him…it was an interesting subterfuge if ever there was one to avoid answering difficult questions. It also lent the song a peculiar perspective forever in my head…