October 4–11, 2001

music

Vive La Vespertine

Probing the mind of the anti-Madonna: Icelandic misfit queen Björk.

by A.D. Amorosi

Crocodile tears: Björk sheds her emotions on the cover of her eponymous book.

Not long ago Björk — Iceland’s favorite daughter of brassy avant electronica and outrageously giddy dance tracks — was pinned by French Education Minister Jack Lang with the country’s Knight of the National Order of Merit medal, an achievement just short of its Order of Arts and Letters honor bestowed upon literary geniuses. Whether she was wearing the feathery dead swan shouldered during the Academy Awards, the same that she wears swooningly on the cover of her new CD Vespertine (Elektra), is not known.

Imagine for a sec the Björk of Dancer in the Dark (the visionary murder-musical in which she starred and sung last year) or the nub-nosed, collapsible-house-music princess accepting the shimmering medallion. It’s almost like a damned Björk video, where she, some goofball angel, reduces bombastic show-stopping song into one small-spun glimmer of gold.

Think Björk the alchemist. The real ray of light. The Icelandic iconoclastic idiot genius (a tag given by New York writer Evelyn McDonnell in her Björk book, Army of She) ruling righteously. She is a musical, visual and emotional explorer, an innovative electronic maven, a voracious collaborator and an icon of goofball cool and forward fashion who’s unleashed not only her finest CD yet in Vespertine, but a book (Björk, Bloomsbury, $35) that places the totality of her aesthetic ideals and mind-stirrings in line with Marshall McLuhan.

Better put, Björk is the anti-Madonna: She’s an unobvious artist whose collaborations (for the book: Spike Jonze, Anton Corbijn, Sir David Attenborough; on record: Tricky, Howie B, Goldie, Plaid, Nellee Hooper, Mark Bell, David Arnold, Talvin Singh) keep all unions pure while accenting the brazen.

Where Madonna borrows underground types to create mainstream dialogue between herself and a next audience, Björk takes above-ground sorts and brings them into the recesses of experimental operatic lullaby bliss (i.e., Hooper, who produced the smooth neo-soul likes of Soul II Soul).

That the results are sexy, dangerous and obsessively divine (without the aid of religious conversion) means that somewhere in England, Madonna is burning her kilt and cursing in that weird Cockney-meets-Detroit accent of hers about how someone’s beaten her at her own bullshit.

Starting with the lush Yma Sumac-esque (she the four-octave ranging Incan princess whose exotica was the toast of post-WWII lounge lovers) "Hidden Place" and ending with the flickering harp-plucked, Oval-sampled "Unison," Vespertine is holy light itself: vocal-electronica’s most religiously intimate introverted record. It’s a secret silent sound whose origins lie in the somnolence of "It’s Oh So Quiet" but rippling with portentous choirs swelling over cricketlike percussion and plunger-splattering bass lines onto which Björk tattoos a voice of a thousand whispers.

Co-produced by scuff-mastering electronicists Matmos and highlighting the strummed silly harp of Zeena Parkins along with windswept Björk-choirs and widescreen orchestration, Vespertine deals in obsession. While the minimalist love song "Cocoon" traffics in sex-sensual poetry, like "A train of pearls, cabin by cabin, is shot precisely across an ocean from a mouth of a girl like me/ To a boy," the luminously lush "It’s Not Up to You" faces romance in more coy and cautious fashion: "If you leave it alone it might just happen," she says, spittle still moist.

For Björk, public shows of l’amour are not meant to cause undoing, as she states through the regal sonic reverie of "Pagan Poetry" and "Undo."

She is "praying to be in a generous mode… quietly ecstatic." But made mad by love’s obsessive qualities, she can’t help but burst forth, ending "Pagan" in whispered winces of "I love him… she loves him" over and over.

Ultimately, love — of art, of song, of sex, of self — eats her alive, flushing her down "Heirloom"’s clattering, cluttered percussive dream-world sanctum where she equates losing the voice to swallowing light itself.

Unlike the delicate denial of Vespertine, Björk the book is a lovely loud thing that can bring you to the brink of laughter and amazement: a mind-fucking journey into a willing witnesses’ head where she’s revealed in photographs and snapshots of icy atmospheres around her, childlike drawings and absurdist texts that offer — in the words of Philippe Parreno — "defining certain variables which compose [Björk]."

Björk is a wellspring of weirdness. We are presented with richly colored photos of her as spider-web breathing demon and lady of the lilies (by Jurgen Teller), masturbating angel (by Stephane Sednaoui) and teasing water vixen (by Kate Garner). Random images — close-ups of french fries and body parts and men swallowed by their own shirts mingle with dreamy post-anime cartoons and scribbled balloon illustrations to forge something of a mad child’s diary.

This art project — which Björk intended to include a glass table-top cover that Bloomsbury deemed too expensive — and its boisterous reverie of images is matched only by its odd inclusion of texts. There’s an interview with Sir David Attenborough by Björk that pits the pair with an amazing amount of commonality. There are cryptic clippings from Icelandic author Anna Yates’ "Thyne Eyes Saw Me" and "Under the Wings of Valkyre" that are as smothering and as swallowing as the painted-over Björk snaps and unrequited kissing photos interspersed throughout the stories.

Swallowing and consumption seem to be ever-present metaphors where both Björk and Vespertine are concerned. Both exist in states where love, art and images of self can eat one alive. With this emotional gulping at stake, throughout both works, one can only wonder what’s adrift within poor Björk’s fragile mind, a mind as beautiful as it is perhaps dangerous.