“Only connect” was the stern instruction E.M Foster gave to would-be artists. I’ve a feeling he would have liked Bjork. A cursory glance through her (now vast) CV reveals the gifted and fearless Icelandic vocalist to be a questing, musical, quilt-maker. She threads together jazz, techno, punk, hip hop, folk, even show tunes – normally to stunning effect.
If, at times, her refusal to take the traditional route has seen her dismissed as a contrived kook, Bjork has never allowed the doubters to taper down her edges.
In fact if her last two albums, Vespertine and all-vocal Medulla are anything to go by, as she gets older, her instinct to provoke grows more extreme.
So we come to this: her soundtrack for the new film from her boyfriend, the avant-garde visual artist (and director of The Cremaster Cycle) Matthew Barney. A more challenging record from a popular recording artist you will struggle to find.
Anyone who happened upon Cremaster will know that ‘film’ is a barely appropriate term for what Barney is about. Advance news on Drawing Restraint 9 – set on a Japanese whaling vessel; the central focus provided by a sculpture of liquid Vaseline called ‘The Field’ – would confirm that a Vin Diesel cameo isn’t to be expected.
And Bjork’s soundtrack is similarly unconcerned with cross-over potential.
The opening track, ‘Giftwrapping:Giftwrapping’ should leave you in no doubt as to the rarefied territory you are approaching.
Will Oldham, backed only by what sounds like a harp, wheezes through a set of lyrics taken from a letter of thanks written by a Japanese citizen to General McArthur in regard to the lifting of the post-war moratorium on whale fishing. Halfway though, just as he’s singing about fossil bones, a choir of school-children join in, almost to help him over the finishing line.
Forget ‘Venus As A Boy’ and ‘Bachelorette’, what we have here is a concerted attempt to get to grips with traditional Japanese instrumentation (most notably the sho pipe), and to combine it with the kind of subterranean electronica that has provoked much of Bjork’s best work.
Both strains fuse brilliantly on ‘Bath’ and ‘Transformation: Holographic Entrypoint’, when, respectively, Mark Bell and Leila collaborate to dizzying, unsettling effect.
These tunes should come with an iPod warning. You won’t be able to walk and listen at the same time. ‘Transformation’, especially, is stunning. It builds up slowly until a multi-tracked tempest of Bjorks brings it to a thunderous close.
Most of the other tracks are instrumental curios – and, in all honesty, it’s difficult to imagine the kind of mental state you would need to be in to play the record the whole way through.
But that’s not to detract from the force of imagination that has gone into its creation. Or to prevent it taking its rightful place as another weird and rewarding diversion in Bjork’s brilliantly serpentine career.