Bjork
She’s juxtaposed pretty trad stuff and abrasive electronics in the past, on beat-driven efforts like Post and Homogenic, but only on Vespertine does the marriage seem perfect. Set against Vince Mendoza’s sweeping, elegant orchestral arrangements and a heavenly choir, each pluck of Zeena Parkins’s harp and each spiky note of the delicate melodies Bjork wrote specifically for music box sparkles like a gem. Layers of electronics–contributed by imaginative collaborators like the San Francisco duo Matmos, British producer Matthew Herbert, and Danish producer Thomas Knak–throb, slither, crunch, and spark rather than beat, beat, beat. They’re almost always muffled, never truly percussive, as if played under a pillow; at one point a sample of the shuffling of playing cards functions as a rhythmic motif. Somehow, amid all these noises Bjork finds room to sing a series of indelible but not necessarily catchy melodies–oddly shaped phrases, curlicues, and childlike cries. On many of the songs she doesn’t need to raise her voice above a whisper; she sings the sexy “Cocoon” as though her lover were still in “sleephood” in the next room.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This dynamic performance suggested that Bjork was discovering on the spot how to harness her outlandish tools live, but it might have just been that there was no recorded blueprint for the new tune to be held up against. At any rate, it was the one moment where making music for one person and for thousands was exactly the same thing.
