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.