With her new (eighth) album, Bjork is about to make the same sort of explosive impact on culture she did when she wore a swan dress and laid an egg on the red carpet.
Biophilia isn’t just a staggeringly ambitious and beautiful album about natural phenomena – a scientific musical, she calls it – but also a fully interactive App.
Within the album’s ‘mother App’, each track features a it’s own relating one that allows fans to explore a particular song’s themes, remix them, lead them off in new directions, even stop them from ending. For example, Virus features a study of cells being attacked and won’t come to its glorious conclusion unless you let the virus do its thing.
You’d think this was ambitious enough, but Bjork also recorded Biophilia with an array of unconventional instruments: a Tesla coil and something called a gamaleste, which, we’re told, pitches up somewhere between a gamelan (a self-contained mix of xylophones, drums, gongs) and an organ-like celesta and is programmed to be played with an iPad. You can hear it on Crystalline before it’s submerged under a wave of Amen breaks. That the album is full of screwy, shifting time signatures is a minor point.
Other musicians have released Apps, such as Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Machine. And bands have been messing with the internet and technology for years. Radiohead were one of the first to release an album, In Rainbows, via download on a pay-what-you-will basis; Kaiser Chiefs recently put a selection of tracks on their website and let fans build their own album; and Hot Chip, just like Kraftwerk, make their own gadgets.
Here are a few more trailblazers…
Kate Bush
She didn’t design her own instruments, but Kate Bush was an early adopter of the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), a digital sampling synthesizer built in 1979. She used the machine on her strangest but probably finest album The Dreaming, a record she produced, performed and wrote on her own. Of course, her success with Wuthering Heights allowed her to become one of the first to use Fairlight – because it was built by hand, it cost upwards of £20,000.
Silver Apples
Probably the most elaborate self-constructed instrument of all time is The Simeon, an enormous, unwieldy-looking oscillator cum synthesizer built by Simeon Coxe III, one-half of 1960s space cadet duo Silver Apples. The band’s synapse-frying music – sometimes Appalachian rave music, sometimes pulsing, nervy electro noise – predated Krautrock, electronica, Suicide and the rest, and the band’s live shows allowed people to see The Simeon being operated live. The oscillators required 86 manual controls, manipulated by pads attached to Simeon’s hands, feet and elbows.
Todd Rundgren
Not only is The Runt responsible for classic 70s power-pop album Something/Anything? and the trippy A Wizard, A True Star, he’s been so far ahead of the technological curve that he gets forgotten. Way back in the mid 90s, when Thom Yorke’s mum was still bleaching his hair, Todd Rundgren began Patronet, an online subscription service for fans to listen to work-in-progress, unreleased tracks and buy his albums. Not only that, but he was also involved in creating the first computer paint programs and tablets.
Mind Control
Long-time recluse Jeff Mangum, the man behind Neutral Milk Hotel’s much-revered classic In the Aeroplane Over the Sea – a terrifyingly stark rumination on mortality inspired by The Diary of Anne Frank – hasn’t made music for over a decade. That was until friend and fellow member of the psych-pop Elephant 6 Collective, The Apples In Stereo’s Robert Schneider, let him play with a new instrument he’d made: the Teletron. Schneider described it in an online interview as ‘a circuit-bent Mattel MindFlex toy that enables you to play a Moog syntheziser by varying your thoughts’. Mangum composed a piece on the gadget, which Schneider played for Duke University’s neuroscience class. We’re hoping Mangum airs it at one of the rare-as-platypus-teeth live shows he’s playing this year.
Comments
Add a comment