With the intention of listening painstakingly (I mean this word as literally as possibly it has ever been used) to each cut on Vulnicura, which is Björk’s newest album released two days ago, and having made it so far through most of one song I have this much to observe.
She seems to speak English as the circumstances require. I don’t know what the circumstances of recording this album may have been, but she speaks it in the lyrics (which she wrote) as if it were, say, a 27th or 32nd language, after a great many more more important ones in front of it. I guess I should say she sings them, but the singing, hmmmm, how shall I say this?… Having been given to understand that she is admired by some musicians for the extraordinary range of her voice (I could only account for previous experiences attempting to listen to her music, and about which I recall mainly very high pitched keening, and very low pitched moaning—so I guess technically it is correct to say “range” and it is also, as far as I’m concerned, appropriate to say “extraordinary;” I don’t know that I’d use the two terms together, and I know that previously I had an extraordinary amount of trouble allowing myself to use the term “singing” with regard to whatever she is doing with her voice) I thought I’d give her performing another chance.
All I can say, beyond what I’ve said, at least with regard to that first song, “Stonemilker,” which I’m supposing has something to do, at least by some law of allowing variation at one or two removes, with the expression “you can’t get blood from a stone” and so maybe the song is about something impossible that occurred in spite of expectations to the contrary, and that this something has to do with emotions (disclosure: I looked at the booklet that accompanies the album and I see that the English word “emotional” does appear at least twice in the lyrics; I had to read it, because I couldn’t quite decipher it from the sounds emanating from my high fidelity loudspeakers). In all events, just to finish my very preliminary observations, and only about one song, what the English she is pronouncing sounds like is a rendition of what a person in the process of being strangled would sound like, as the English, by way of scientific linguistic description, is at best, strangulated, very highly accented, but with no discernible roots as to the native language of the speaker.
Having listened to that much, I realized that though there have been many forays on my part, boldly and intrepidly, to make my way through an entire album in the past (Biophilia, her last album, and a masterpiece by some accounts, was simply beyond my obviously far too fragile and undeveloped sensibilities), I have never heard any recordings or appearances wherein she had a conversation with another living human creature. So I repaired as we all do in such circumstances to Youtube, and found that she had appeared and been recorded as a guest on several talk shows. One of these was British, and the other was German, though the interview was conducted in English.
I was astonished to hear her speak with a perfect British accent in the former, almost an exact rendition of the accent of her interviewer, the host of the program. I was then further astonished, listening to the German TV show, that her accent had been transfigured entirely into a German inflected sort of English, again, an exact recapitulation of her host’s accent speaking his otherwise perfectly fluent English.
It was also in this latter interview that she responded to the host’s questions about her travel through Germany by train, and she explained, when he pointed out that it was certainly to be anticipated that a celebrity of her stature might be expected to travel by plane, as she could certainly afford it, that she didn’t like to fly because, as she put it in her minuscule soprano German-inflected little girl voice, “The air pressure forces the molecules to go tiny.”
What rushed back into my consciousness, more or less simultaneously, as a kind of aggregate wave of thoughts, essentially a tsunami of cognitive energy, billions of synapses firing simultaneously, was that every previous impression of Björk to which I had allowed myself to be subjected had been exactly the same, and that is, she is clearly the most famous, and possibly the largest, dingbat on the planet.
Stay tuned, as I subject myself to further cuts on this new album.
I will try to capture my impressions, if it’s possible.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/vulnicura/id960042103
byby