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.