bjork

Björk @ Citadel Music Festival, Aug 2

27 July 2015

Björk is playing the Citadel Music Festival in Berlin this week, taking the stage of August 2.

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.

See the event page for details. **

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The Gameleste

30 June 2011

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.

Her first single “Crystalline” leaked 3 days ago can now be streamed via SoundCloud and is out from One Little Indian / Nonesuch Records.

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.

More info this way

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