FEATURE:
History of Touches
Björk’s Vulnicura at Ten
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THIS feature…
is all about Björk’s eighth studio album. One of her very best. On 20th January, it will be ten years since the release of Vulnicura. Björk explained the album represents her feelings before and after her breakup with American contemporary artist Matthew Barney and the healing process. I am going to end with a few of the reviews for an album heralded as one of the most honest and best from the Icelandic icon. One that I hope is written about as it turns ten very soon. The companion album, Vulnicura Strings, was released on 6th November, 2015. I am not going to drop in the whole feature. However, in April 2015, Sound on Sound took us inside the recording of Björk’s Vulnicura. Before moving onto some of the many impassioned reviews, it is worth discovering a bit more about how this incredible and revealing album started and came to life. More of an insight into Björk’s creative process and some of the technology used for the recording:
“Much of the writing and recording of Vulnicura took place at Björk’s New York home, where she has the ultimate 21st Century studio. The total music–tech content consists of an Avid Pro Tools HD Native Thunderbolt system, Genelec 1032 monitors (“I like them a lot, they sound very creamy. But they can be deceptive, because everything sounds good in them. So you have to be a little careful.”), an M–Audio controller, a Telefunken ELAM 251 microphone and Neve 1081 mic preamp.
Björk takes a hands–on role in directing her string players, as here at Syrland Studios during the making of Vulnicura. For Chris Elms’ first string session at Sundlaugin Studio in Reykjavik, a 15–piece string section was miked very close. “Melody and emotion come first. I will then slowly work on the lyrics. I wrote most of the melodies walking outside, hiking I do that a lot. The melodies whirl in my head, and build up momentum, and then I slowly figure out what kind of shape, structure and mood they need. With this album being what I have called my most ‘psychological’ album, the lyrics were important and strings would support the kind of emotions I had to express.”
Once Björk is clear on the melodies, lyrics, shape and mood of a piece, she will record, edit and comp the vocals in Pro Tools, and in the case of Vulnicura, “work on the string arrangements. I mostly work from my vocal melodies, and I then have the freedom of the computer to arrange.”
She has never really played traditional instruments very much, “which is why I was so excited about the laptop in 1999. I learned to use Sibelius in that year, and most of Vespertine was done on Sibelius — all the music boxes, harps, glockenspiels, and so on. It was the same with ‘Ambergris March’ [from Drawing Restraint 9, a soundtrack album she made in 2005 with Matthew Barney]. With the string arrangements I did on Post [1995], Homogenic and Vespertine, I gradually learned to arrange, but with Vulnicura also to transcribe and conduct when needed. I also started using Pro Tools in 1999 and kinda got hooked. I like that it isn’t on a 4/4 grid, and I can be more focused on the narration, look at the music from a film perspective, rather than as a ‘house’ club thing. But to be honest, by now you can do all things in all programs, so it is mostly about what you feel comfortable with. At the end of the day, it is about the emotion. As a singer I have also always liked the challenge of not being too hooked on gear. This maybe comes from singing through bass amps in punk bands as a teenager. If you want a certain timbre, make it with your throat!
Further string sessions took place at Syrland Studios, with a larger ensemble. For an even more intimate sound, all their instruments were miked with clip–on DPA omnis. “I don’t use samplers much. I will usually gather soundbanks for each album and will then play them in on keyboards. This applies for simpler beats in songs like ‘Venus As A Boy’ [from Debut] and ‘Cosmogony’ [from Biophilia], and so on. I play my string arrangements on the keyboard or in Sibelius, but more and more I am using Melodyne to do complex arrangements with my voice. I will then copy those arrangements over to the strings.”
For the first two thirds of 2013, Björk worked alone with her musical material, both in New York and in Reykjavik. Given the heavy subject matter, it was a daunting task. But, she explains on her web site, “then a magic thing happened to me: as I lost one thing something else entered. Alejandro contacted me late Summer 2013 and was interested in working with me. It was perfect timing. To make beats to the songs would have taken me three years (like on Vespertine) but this enchanted Arca would visit me repeatedly and only a few months later we had a whole album!”
In our interview, Björk elaborates: “When Alejandro first came to Iceland, in October 2013, I had seven songs ready, with vocals and with Sibelius string arrangements. Because of the subject matter the structures were pretty formed. We then sat together, and he in an almost clairvoyant way programmed the beats. In the beginning I sat next to him, and would sometimes tap the basic shape of the beats on the table. Then after he had come to Iceland several times we got to know each other, and we started writing together. We co–wrote half of ‘Family’, and ‘Notget’ was very 50/50.”
Bobby Krlic aka the Haxan Cloak. Chris Elms at London’s Strongroom Studios .Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, is regarded as one of the rising stars of the electronic music world. The Venezuelan, who lives in East London, has enjoyed a tremendously successful two years, programming beats for four songs on Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) and co–producing the whole of FKA Twigs’ EP2 (2013) and part of her debut album LP1 (2014). Last November he released his first solo album, Xen, on Mute.
“When Björk played me the record’s songs in demo form, the strings and vocal were fully formed; the lyrics were finished and a few of the songs themselves were finished right down to their final structure. I cried like a baby first time I heard ‘Family’ and ‘Black Lake’ in their demo stages! After that we just began to unite in finding ways of solving design problems emotionally, so to speak, regarding the production. We began to do this kind of graceful dance. There was a lot of silent understanding about things, a lot of respect. Every song was different, but the tone of the actual work was childlike and fun, with us dancing and laughing to the beats. There was something really beautiful about working on a record on such a heavy subject matter with such a delicate lightness and playfulness”.
I am going to round things up soon. Before that, there are a few reviews that I want to highlight. The first is from Pitchfork. Heralding Björk’s powerful singing and the fact that she ventures into the common break-up album territory but does it in a unique, powerful and personal way, it still has the power to move a decade later:
“Vulnicura is loosely arranged around the chronology of a relationship: the period before the breakup, the dazed moments after, the slow recovery. It’s a sense of time that’s both hyper-specific—in the liner notes, Björk places each song up until the two-thirds mark in an exact point on the timeline, from nine months before to 11 months after—and loose, with half-moments that span entire dramatic arcs. "History of Touches", for example, is a near-forensic exhumation of the precise time of relationship death. The song begins and ends upon the narrator waking her soon-to-be-ex-lover, and Arca’s programming develops in slow motion as Björk’s vocal and lyric circle back upon the scale and warp the timeline: "The history of touches, every single archive compressed into a second." There’s some "Cocoon" in there, in the post-coital setting and smitten sigh, but there’s also the unmistakable sense that everything Björk describes is expiring as she speaks it. It’s luxuriant and bleary and sad, something like sleepwalking infatuated through an autopsy. Skip to several months after in the record's progression, album centerpiece "Black Lake", a masterwork of balancing elements: Björk’s requiem strings leading to Arca’s tectonic-plate percussion and vocal patches, cuttingly crafted (in unmistakably Björk fashion) lines like "I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions" giving way to lines far more unadorned and unanswerable: "Did I love you too much?"
What keeps these questions from sounding maudlin are those flashes of rueful wit (elsewhere, on "Family": "Is there a place where I can pay respects for the death of my family?") and Björk’s vocal delivery; she’s at least twice expressed her admiration, at the pure musical level, of fado singer Amália Rodrigues, and you can hear it in how she leans into syllables, indulging feelings then dissecting them. Rarely does Vulnicura sound anything but seamless; her palette blends in drum-and-bass loops, flatline effects, groaning cellos, pitch-warped echoes by Antony Hegarty. The more Björk has grown as an arranger, the less dated her albums sound; closer "Quicksand" initially scans like it’s approaching over-timely Rudimental territory, but it’s a little late in the album for that, and this is soon subsumed into a string reverie that’s unmistakably hers.
In Björk’s discography, Vulnicura most resembles Vespertine, another unyieldingly cerebral work about vulnerability and being turned by love to besotted viscera, and also an unmistakably female album. Vulnicura doubles down on these elements, from the choir arrangements to the yonic wound imagery of the cover, like Björk’s attempt at a grand unified photoshoot of female pain, to Vulnicura’s echoes from the first track ("Moments of clarity are so rare—I better document this") of the long tradition of women artists thinking and rethinking their own life stories, in public, until they coalesce into art. Fittingly, when Björk dispenses with the breakup framework (and timestamps) two-thirds of the way through the album, Vulnicura becomes about more. "Mouth Mantra" is part glitchy nightmare of grotesque imagery ("my mouth was sewn up… I was not heard") and part reassertion of her artistic identity: "this tunnel has enabled thousands of sounds."
It isn’t just her. "I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them you’re not just imagining things," she told Pitchfork, and on "Quicksand" Vulnicura shifts finally from personal documentation of one person’s rough year to words for those who’ve stayed for it all: "Every time you give up, you take away our future and my continuity—and my daughter’s, and her daughters, and her daughters," Björk sings on the track, just before it cuts off mid-string cadenza. It’s possible to hear this as resignation, but it’s also possible to hear it as a note of hope, that there is a future after coming out of such an emotional wringer, if not quite one that’s reassuring. The ambiguity feels honest”.
I am going to move to a review from NME. Named as one of the best albums of 2015 – Rough Trade and ABC News put it at number one -, it reached number one in Iceland and eleven in the U.K. I would rank Vulnicura among the best Björk albums. It is a stunning listen! For anyone who has never heard it, go and seek it out now:
“Björk’s last album, 2011’s ‘Biophilia’, was a multimedia project examining the connections between nature, sound and technology – or “the universe”, as she succinctly put it. It became known as an “app” album and it wasn’t a gimmick. It made a powerful (and fun) statement about how the 49-year-old’s home country, Iceland, could be run after the financial crisis, instantly making almost everyone else operating in the field of popular music seem a bit thick.
‘Vulnicura’, her eighth full-length, appears to forgo the grand gesture by concentrating on the personal within a very established format – the breakup album. But as Björk herself said on Facebook when the record was rush-released on 20th January (a consequence of it leaking the weekend previous), “First I was worried it would be too self-indulgent, but then I felt it might make it even more universal.”
Opener ‘Stonemilker’ is set, according to the liner notes, nine months before her breakup from American artist Matthew Barney – father of her second child. On it, Björk sings, “I better document this”. Perhaps what’s most shocking about ‘Vulnicura’ is not that it’s a traditional, straightforward set of songs (that’s just Björk not repeating herself), but how true a document of real life it is. There’s less allegory and metaphor in the lyrics than usual, resulting in Barney getting a very direct kicking. Communicating with him is like “milking a stone” she sings on ‘Stonemilker’; by ‘Black Lake’ – set two months after the breakup – she’s bored of his “apocalyptic obsessions” and accusing him abandoning their family.
So raw is the lyrical narrative (it ends ambiguously with three undated tracks that offer no real resolution, but some optimism), it almost distracts from how clever and detailed the musical backdrop is. Masterful string arrangements by Björk (‘Lionsong’, ‘Family’) express matters of the heart with the same candour as the words, while Venezuelan producer Arca’s fractured, difficult beats (‘Lionsong’, ‘Notget’) – often in uncommon time signatures – reflect the disruption to Björk’s real-life rhythm. It’s not an easy listen, but a brave, beautiful and affecting album – an attempt to find order in chaos that, as she wishes for it, offers a “crutch” to the heartbroken”.
The final review is from The Line of Best Fit. Gathering widespread acclaim, Björk would follow Vulnicura with 2017’s Utopia. Her most recent album, Fossora, was released in 2022. This amazing artist has barely put a foot wrong in a career that is more than three decades old. Not many artists can claim that kind of consistency!
“The above quote is excerpted from a larger note about the album, its concepts, its production and its early release (originally scheduled for March, it was pushed ahead nearly two months after being leaked a mere week after its announcement). It's not the singular point of Vulnicura—an album about breaking up, falling apart, lashing out, pulling together and moving on—but that message is ever present at its core: There is a way out. It's jaded, it's bitter, it's ugly, it's painful—but it ends.
Vulnicura is Björk's ninth studio album—assuming you include her 2000 Dancer in the Dark soundtrack Selmasongs (which you, of course, do) and not her 1977 self-titled child album (which you, of course, don't)—and features production from Arca and engineering from The Haxan Cloak, alongside Björk herself. The album is essentially broken into chapters: the bitter end, the breakup and the first steps forward. Its very name, Vulnicura, melds the Latin vulnero and cura: the wound and the cure—and captures everything between the two.
Though Björk describes Vulnicura as a "heartbreak album" centered on her breakup with artist Matthew Barney, it is not, in the strictest terms, an album about solely about a breakup. Rather, it fixates itself on an entire cycle of heartbreak—its inception and its inevitable aftermath: despondence where there once was love and hope where there was once despondence. For despondence has its way of breeding hope—creating the claustrophobic tunnel through which a light inevitably shines at the end of.
Interestingly enough, Björk contrasts Arca's knack for speedy beat-making on Vulnicura with the three years it took her to produce 2001's Vespertine. Yet, on the Björk Genre-Transcendence Scale®, Vulnicura finds its sound and style nestled most snugly next to that very album. And—speaking from a more biased place—it's also her greatest work since. Though it's built around a thematic concept, Vulnicura is not caught in the lofty conceptual trappings (be they for worse or for better) of the three albums she's released over the last 10 years: Biophilia, Medulla and, to a lesser extent, Volta.
Vulnicura is as dark and ominous as one might come to expect from a Björk album (especially one boasting involvement from Arca and The Haxan Cloak), yet it's filled with these delicate, shining moments within its darkened overtones. There's the guttural conclusion to "Notget," in which Björk exasperatedly offers one last repetition of the song's mantra: "Love will keep us safe from death." Or how Björk and her featured vocalist/"Goddess of Love" Antony Hegarty collude their intricately layered vocal tracks among the dense string arrangements and caustic beats of what the singer calls her "worship-of-love" song "Atom Dance."
Yet where "Notget" and "Atom Dance" showcase the aftermath, displaying disparity laced with a mere tint of hope, at the other end of the spectrum lies the angry and omnivorous "Black Lake" (which Billboard amusingly called a "10-Minute Diss Track" with a snide likening to Big Sean & E-40's "I Don't Fuck With You"). Here, across ten minutes of brooding tension and sparse intermissions, Björk lets the bad blood boil, unleashing all five stages of grief in near unison. She recounts the good, the bad, the worse and the efforts made to make it work, before lashing out "You have nothing to give / your heart is hollow."
Björk has said that she wanted to put this all out there at once, formatted as a chronicle of sorts. She has succeeded and then some. Vulnicura is stark and powerful in a way that Björk has merely danced around for years. Here, in these songs, she has shed all of her skin: the lavish costumes, the genre-defying ambiguity, the punk rock empowerment, the unwavering emotional fortitude and the entirety of all assumed personalities that one might instinctively assign an icon. Here, on Vulnicura, she is simply Björk: a rattled human being caught within an emotional vortex, letting off the sort of violent chemical reflexes we are all prone to. Vulnicura is humanity at its most volatilely sublime”.
Vulnicura Strings provided a more uncompromising and intimate take on the original album. It was a fascinating project. Vulnicura Live, also released in 2015, features fourteen songs with The Heritage Orchestra that were captured during her Vulnicura tour. Turning ten on 20th January, Vulnicura is a phenomenal album from Björk. Demonstrating why she is one of the most distinct, versatile and consistent artists ever. It the work from a master that…
EVERYONE needs to hear.