Björk - Biophilia [2LP]

Björk's Biophilia set out to connect music with crystals, viruses, lightning and the moon, and somehow made all of it feel intimate. The album spreads across two LPs here.

Released in 2011, her seventh album was billed as the first app album, arriving with a suite of interactive apps that tied each song to a natural phenomenon and a musical idea. She composed parts of it on a tablet and shaped it during the Icelandic financial crisis, framing the whole project as an exploration of how nature, music and technology connect. It later grew into a series of educational workshops held on four continents.

The instruments are half the story. "Thunderbolt" uses a Tesla coil as a sound source, crackling arpeggios and all, while "Crystalline", co-produced with the dubstep duo 16bit, rides a custom-built gameleste before erupting into a breakcore finale. "Solstice" is built around a harp played by swinging pendulums, mimicking the movement of the Earth, and "Virus" returns to the gameleste for a delicate, chiming love song with a biological twist.

Elsewhere the songs move at their own slow, cyclical pace, her voice hovering over sparse patterns with plenty of air around every note.

Away from the screens it was designed for, Biophilia reveals itself as a deeply human record about how small we are, and how connected.