Playing songs from her latest album, Vulnicura, which deals with her separation from husband Matthew Barney, the performance will be classic Björk: melancholy and supernatural in turns, with otherworldly instruments, psycho-poppy visuals, and a general air of alien and distressed beauty.
Opening for Björk will be the Venezuelan producer and DJ Alejandro Ghersi, better known by his stage name Arca, and Houston-born producer J’Kerian Morgan, better known as Lotic.
I won’t hide I don’t like Björk anymore. At least not like I used to, instead of embracing the DIY trend where new artists create their own instruments/tools to create new sounds, she’s still keen on eccentricities, she’s always been…. well… she’s reached that level where she could ask for a golden toilet and Dali would come out of his graveyard to design one just for her.
Maybe I’m a bit gaga, but in any case here’s her latest egonstrument… one of a series for her upcoming album “Biophilia”. The Gameleste is a hybrid gamelan celeste; the original steel bars of a vintage orchestral celeste were replaced with bronze tonebars hand-made by UK cymbalsmith Matt Nolan, and the instrument was rebuilt and MIDIfied by Iceland’s top organ-maker, Björgvin Tòmasson.
Amongst her other custom-made whims for Biophilia we’ll be able to find four ten-foot pendulum harps, in which the swinging motion plucks the strings and illustrates the songs’ gravitational subject matter. There is also a unique ten-foot pin barrel harp called the Sharpsichord, twin musical tesla coils,” “a hang player and an award-winning 24-piece Icelandic female choir, and the gameleste of course.
As you can imagine her Biophilia party won’t just be limited to an album, but also a series of iPad apps (one per track), and they’ll all come together in a “mother app” called “Cosmogany”. Although we’re more keen on the 90-min documentary about the album recording process… by Pulse Films.
Now look who got together! David Longstreth’s classical touch “Dirty Projectors” & the (now dead?) queen of avant-garde electro Björk…. after Brandon Stosuy from Stereogum asked them to collaborate together in this great project.