It’s tempting to say that Bjork is entering one of the most fascinating periods of her career. The same can be said for any period of her career really, and many people have their favorite periods of Bjork’s output — the richly emotional early material, the crunchy electro-experimentalism of the last decade or so — but recently, over the last four to five years, there has been something of a renewed focus. Each album is less a conscious break from the one before; each new thing isn’t original for the sake of it. There’s absorption of the old and the new, the human and the machine, and the tension between the two, always essential to Bjork’s most interesting work, comes out most fully-realized on 2011’s app-based album “Biophilia.”
The album, which exists more as a multimedia-based project than a traditional album (even though it exists on fuddy-duddy plastic formats as well), contains a set of songs linked to closely related apps that went beyond mere visual accompaniment. Each song-app visually engages with the track’s themes, some even letting you deconstruct the elements and put it back together again. The concept is useful in that it ties together two strains of Bjork’s work that have, in other periods of her career, felt remote — the personal and the technological. Human interaction is filtered through machines, opening up the process of making and exploring music into the hands of anybody with a handheld device. (The Museum of Modern Art purchased the app back in June, the first ever in its collection. A week later, the museum announced it would be staging a massive Bjork retrospective in 2015.)
But how does this all translate to a live setting? Bjork is one of the most captivating performers around, but this project is, for obvious reasons, hard to put on stage. “Bjork: Biophilia Live,” a new film that will begin a run at the IFC Center in New York City on September 26, provides an answer, although it’s a bit muddled. Directed by Peter Strickland (“Berbarian Sound Studio”) and Nick Fenton, the film misses the album’s high concept. David Attenborough provides an introduction, and the film is clearly influenced by his historic BBC nature films, interspersing stunning footage of nature and the internal workings of the body. But the results seemed slapped together after the fact. The concert that was filmed, without the outside footage that blends in and out of the performance, could have been any concert film anywhere.
Except for the fact that, even when displayed in the most matter-of-fact way, Bjork’s performances are still more interesting, sonically and visually, than almost anything else. This performance, which is heavy on material from “Biophilia,” sees the singer wearing a dress that resembles the innards of a wild animal coiled around her small frame, joined by an all-female choir wearing sequin dresses and dancing erratically around a stage placed in the middle of the audience. Around all of this is the music, of course, but more importantly, the instruments. Bjork created a handful of specific instruments for the “Biophilia” project, many with the idea of blending the electronic with the analog. Joining the large group on stage is a Tesla coil that can be played and a pendulum that creates sounds by the way it swings.
Beyond the new material, the most exciting thing about “Biophilia Live” might be the way that Bjork filters some of her old material through this process. “Isobel,” one of the most evocative songs Bjork has ever written, is here stripped of its lushness and transformed into a mid-tempo floor-thumper, while the combination of instruments turns “Declare Independence,” Bjork’s most political song and a perfect concert-closer, into a wild and distorted anthem, transposing her earliest, Crass-inspired punk roots onto her computer-generated experiments. After years of searching in the furthest corners of sound, it seems Bjork has finally found the human in the machine.
