by Vince Aletti
Also see the Village
Voice's concert and club
listings.
Talk back!
editor@villagevoice.com
"State of emergency
is where I want
to be," Björk sang
over and over in her
encore at
Hammerstein Ballroom last
week, but that's just
where she'd
been for the previous
hour and a half.
Working her vocal
range like a DJ
scratching and fading
vinyl, she
never merely sang, she
shaped noise. She
shouted, she
whispered, she crooned,
she shredded lyrics
and rewove them
in midair. She
moved beyond
language, beyond words
to create a
buzzing, burbling,
weirdly thrilling
soundscape--a place
you could lose
yourself in for days.
"I don't recognize
myself," she sang,
and we knew just
what she meant.
In a funny little
white leather
Jeremy Scott dress with
pleated, bat-wing
sleeves, she was
Alice in Wonderland
as Merlin the
Magician, lost in
spaces that only she
could have imagined.
Björk has always
seemed to inhabit
a world of her own,
part twee
fantasyland, part gnarly fun
house. For the
Hammerstein show, the
stage was
transformed into an
underwater scene
with a backdrop of
flimsy scarves that
fluttered like
seaweed. Foaming
billows of cellophane
hung high above
the singer, clear
streamers dangled
around her, and she
bobbed before
liquid projections.
But because Björk
is not entirely at
home in swoony
psychedelia, the
tranquilized mood was
repeatedly undercut
by blackouts and
shattered by harsh
spotlights trained
out into the
audience. Björk thrives in
this gap between
comfort and unease,
sweet and sour,
lulling us and
jolting us by turns.
She knows the drama of
extremes and the
excitement when they
mesh. On one
side of the stage was
an atoll of
strings; on the other,
Mark Bell and a
craggy mountain of
synthesizers.
Scampering between
them, Björk
appeared to mix sound
with a wave of her
wings, sending
jagged keyboard
shards crunching
through the violins
like a crosscut saw
through silk.
"I thought I could
organize
freedom/How Scandinavian
of me," Björk
confesses in "Hunter,"
and clearly she's
learned to let go.
But, onstage and
on her records, she's
also learned how to
turn chaos to her
own ends. She wills
herself to lose
control. She strides
into a song tentatively,
or forcefully, then
lets it take her
and toss her voice every
which way. Listening
to her, the rush
of release is
exhilaratingly
physical; watching
her, you long to be
equally possessed.
But if Björk's
hyperemotionality
edges into gorgeous
mess, it never
goes there. She might
skewer her songs with
raw, crashing
synths, but her
vocals remain
meticulously
orchestrated, operatic even
when frayed. This
tiny gamine,
buffeted by sweet
cacophony at center
stage, only rides
a whirlwind when
she can hold the
reins real tight.
Because she sings
about
transformation, metamorphosis,
it often comes as a
surprise that
Björk's also singing love
songs. Even when you
pay close
attention, the songs
tend to dissolve and
bubble away,
leaving phrases to
float through the
brain: "Don't get
angry with yourself,"
"emotional
landscapes," "You can't
handle love." One
song on her latest
album, Homogenic
(Elektra), is
composed entirely of
what seem to be
overheard quotes,
most memorably "I'm
no fucking
Buddhist but this is
enlightenment." No
matter. Björk
turns words into
atmosphere--bursts of
sensibility
that use language as
freely as they use
sound. In "5
Years," when she bites
into the line "I'm so
bored of
cowards," her anger is
bracing; she turns
the word cowards
into a chewed-up
piece of garbage and
tosses it into a
pot of boiling
synths. In "All Neon
Like," she
promises, "I'll heal you,"
but follows it, "with
a razorblade,
I'll cut a slit open and
the luminous beam
feeds you honey."
Her luminous has
nearly eight
shimmering syllables.
Tossed on wave upon
wave of now brittle,
now honeyed
synth combustions
and those impossibly
lovely strings,
Björk's lyrics are as
ephemeral as smoke,
as vivid as a
lightning bolt--and
sometimes as
illuminating.
"Excuse me, but I
just have to
explode this body," she
tells us,
matter-of-factly. Go on,
girl. She already knows
how to explode a
song. At the
Hammerstein, she could
have been Liza
Minelli channeling
Lotte Lenya, tossing
out crisp little
Thank yous in
between flights of speaking
in tongues. She's
Venus as a girl--or
a mermaid, a sprite, a
friendly alien. She's
the smallest
thing onstage, but she
fills the whole room.
Who could
imagine this? Perhaps
only someone yearning
to be violently
happy and create
a soundtrack for the
neverending
process.
This document last modified
Wednesday, May 20,
1998, 12:39 PM EDT.
---DALE EDWARD CHAPMAN <dchapman@ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> Hey all;
>
> I'm looking for info, primarily opinionated (interviews, reviews,
YOUR
> views) on Bjork's Homogenic. Any good websites/zine
articles/gratuitous
> opinions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dale
>
>
>
_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com