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.