Bjork
Medulla

All voices. Everything new and dark and early Bristol days – me and Dan going to collect Chris from the top sloping room at Ashley Hill to go into town and him leaping around the room and grinning and “Let me play you this! And this!”

The all-vocal (although not all the way through...it deceives you) nature of the album everyone said reminded them of people like Meredith Monk…so much of my degree seems assimilated and borne out in this…but like when I played Susie a new song of mine and she said “It’s like you’ve escaped from your training”…I am reminded again that in birthing these academic ideas and initial noises into “popular” medium is not to betray or escape it…when in doubt, give…there is a calm here that is stronger than the lace and foam of Vespertine…so many of the voices sound sexual or animal in nature, communicating neither meaning, percussion nor melody.

The second song talks about forgiveness for misery, for having “lost faith in myself and giving up my own interior to inferior forces” – the shame is endless. The phrases and arrangement are so much like a happy confession in an empty church. There is a freedom in here despite the darkness, the rhythms of “Where is the line” snake and escape as would be expected, and the octaves and choirs catch you unexpected…it feels like a continuation of the philosophy expressed first in “Army of me”…perhaps these are long-term discourses Bjork works through…songs sometimes representing return and renewal as well as revelation…I am elastic for you…

When I bought this, and took it back to the wooden room I shared with Dan in St Werburghs, where the garden dripped with gooseberries and mint, we tried so hard to read the inlay card, the words and the background the same colour so only by endlessly squinting and turning it to the light could you even make out some of the lyrics… Dan sat up at the computer and laboriously typed out the lyrics, arranging the text in varying patterns of right justified, middle justified, left justified…dark mornings, herbs and spices at Scoopaway and ushering at the Watershed, taking it in turns to listen to the CD on walkmans and rushing home each night to talk about it more. So much of the album is Icelandic and it doesn’t push the listeners away. You are invited to a new language.

The next song to appear in my language is one I sang a lot in 2006…I changed it from the purely vocal dance/dub-scape to wallow in to a piano-based two-step…I was rehearsing the Wasteland and Prufrock and the Folk House a lot, and enjoying those first early and exciting days of seeing Jon…thinking of those early positives and myself as a new person…and the dangers of urging likenesses…For this reason the album has pushed me forward from Autumn 2004 where there is so much moving that the whole world is shaking; to Spring 2006 where there is snow and tequila and lights on the water. Thinking of all those things, I particularly like now the slow and considered breath that constitutes the end of each percussive phrase…feeling that those experiences were the last gasps of a system of me in decline, and for good reasons…

The next song pushes me back to 2004…this and Bright Eyes and Animal Collective and Panda bear and everything else surrounding me and everyone at the time led me to messy, chopped-up voices, tiny incongruent and pluralized vocals tripping over each other…Submarines clustering in the sea. We are not all that scientific.

An urgency around the desire to make it right. Gods worrying over their actions. Repeatedly. A table with multiple singers, held at varying distances away from the microphone. Shouting. And thinking of Gods; the seashore being a witness to everything from Grecian myths and planet of the apes…Yves Tanguy landscapes and singing trees; differing time-scales – all worries, deaths and joys are contained here. The waves end abruptly and takes me to the juxtaposition of the seas of Mull, Calgary Bay, Tobermorey and Craignure then Silverknowes with the Irn Bru bottles bobbing in the grey and my last picture of the Edinburgh people sitting with their faces to the sky and their backs to me. And whoever wrote the poem that comes next, “if this should be, I say, you of my heart send me a little word that I may go unto her and take her hands saying ‘accept all happiness from me’. I wish I had known before I had got myself so sad – there is happiness everywhere and I feel I need to shuffle back to track two.

The noises of wolves at doors permeate the next song…but there is a piano playing inside and voices melting over each other to distract from the coming teeth, or to persuade them to pass by with only a taste of blood…this is complicated and frightening but it washes out and disappears. It is still in the process of becoming another story.

It is interesting that “Mouth’s cradle” makes mention of “All those Bushes and Osamas”…Dan was so delighted at the idea of Bjork becoming political…it seems to be the one thing she’s not…I wish I still had the print of those lyrics so I could analyse it with the knowledge I’ve found for myself in this area over the last couple of years. I will say it makes to think of the scene from metropolis where Freder sees the M-machine briefly as the open mouth of an Egyptian funeral pyre for unwilling sacrifices, led up the stairs by unsympathetic foremen who feed then unconcernedly to a keening fire below. Freder clears his eyes and sees the machine again. Personalities and icons then being the fuel of hate on both sides? We close instead with a party and celebration of biology. I am surprised I can listen to the words as closely as I do; previously those descriptions of the pipes, pumps and valves of the human body would have horrified me and left me speechless and weeping somewhere. I feel proud to consider myself as a series of compartments these days. To see oneself as full of joyful oxygen.