While my son’s birth has been the most joyous event of my life, he has put a serious damper on my and Anna’s concert-going. I tell my musician friends: I’ll happily come to your gig, as long as it’s on a Sunday afternoon with walking distance of my apartment. Well, today, Björk obliged us by doing exactly that.
Anna and I have been to two of her shows previously, and both were delightful experiences, but they were also in support of her two weakest albums (Volta and Biophilia.) This time, however, Björk is touring with Vulnicura, a beautiful set of songs, her best work since Medúlla and a welcome return to the sonic palette of Homogenic. Here’s my favorite track:
Björk has a wildly different ensemble with her every time she tours. This time, she was backed a fifteen-piece string ensemble comprised of members of Alarm Will Sound, Manu Delago playing electronic drums and Hang, and Arca playing beats, synths and turntables. They played most of Vulnicura, pretty faithfully to the recording. They also did a few older tunes, in fresh arrangements. The standout was “The Pleasure Is All Mine,” with the vocal parts faithfully transcribed for strings. It was quite different, but still devastatingly effective.
They also did one of the strangest and strongest tunes on Homogenic, “All Neon Like.” While the recorded version uses much the same instrumentation as the people on stage, Björk shook things up by changing the beat from a slow shuffle to doubletime straight eighths, and she danced ecstatically to them.
The other major standout was a slow and ominous take on “Come To Me,” from Debut. Which came out over twenty years ago! I am old.
People who want to perform electronic music live face the problem that no one wants to watch people hunched over laptops or hitting Play on a DAT machine. Björk deals with that problem in several creative ways. One is by singing with riveting intensity while dancing like no one is watching and wearing futuristic outfits. Her singing, dancing and fashion sense show no signs of diminishing or mellowing with age. God bless her.
As compelling as Björk is as a stage presence, there’s still the problem of making the music come to life onstage. The aforementioned wildly varied live instrumentation helps. For the Volta tour, all of the electronic beats were canned, but she also had a live drummer playing wild free jazz on top. Hearing and seeing all those lovely strings and drums played live today helped a lot. However, I felt some frustration with Arca’s synths and beats. They sounded fine, but it was hard to tell what exactly he was doing, and how it related to what we were hearing. Electronic musicians have a ways to go in tying gesture to sound in a way that the audience can get imaginatively involved with.
Björk had a new twist to the stage show this time: animated scores for the Vulnicura songs by Stephen Malinowski, whose classical MIDI visualizations I’ve admired for years.
I can’t overstate the power of a live score being projected over the performers. It’s easier to follow a contrapuntal string arrangement when you can see the lines rising and falling together or separately. Being able to see what’s coming a few measures later creates a feeling of anticipation. And while at times the scores got behind or ahead of the performers, they were still fun to watch just as eye candy. Classical venues would be wise to start doing this. Even projecting standard music notation would help people engage imaginatively. MIDI piano roll is better, since the relationship between the visuals and the sounds is so obvious. Malinowsky gives his software away for free. Get on that, classical music world!
The non-Vulnicura songs were accompanied either by regular lighting, or by footage of snails mating and a spider shedding its carapace, both shot in extreme closeup. They were disturbing, beautiful, richly biological. Much like Björk herself. I haven’t agreed with all of her aesthetic choices over the years, but even her most baffling or frustrating ones are thought-provoking. Her best ideas are transcendently great, futuristic and earthy, intellectual and intuitive, idiosyncratic and crowd-pleasing, all at the same time. She lights the way forward.
Hi, good day! Thank you for this good review! I went to this show and it was for sure one of the best concerts I’ve been to. I enjoyed it a lot. I agree with you about Björk’s singing and dancing not diminishing with age. I actually thought that in these new shows, she has more space to dance around and enjoy like in the old times. To all this I would add that the sound at the theater was spectacular. The beats, strings and of course her voice were delightful to hear. A great concert indeed!
Just one question. The videos included here have been deleted from YouTube. Did you record them? They were good to watch for memories… Thanks!!! :)
I didn’t record the videos, sadly.
Great report, thanks Ethan! I don’t necessarily have anything to add, but since I was listening to Vulnicura when your post landed in my inbox, I’ll take it as a sign that I should respond;-) I do think Vulnicura is her most emotionally engaging work in a long time. I’m not sure she’ll tour it in Australia, so you can count me as officially jealous.