Landscape artist

Björk creates a techno-fantasy world

by Jon Garelick

Icelandic pop chanteuse Björk Gudmundsdottir's flirtation with electronica has been one howler of a confrontation: one of the most theatrical of current pop singers encountering pop's most notoriously "anonymous" contemporary style. On last year's Telegram, she turned over an entire album (Post) to remixers. Her voice was sliced, diced, and sequenced into the sonic landscape, and yet she was more Björk than ever. All her mannerisms -- the gymnastic leaps from octave to octave, the deep breaths and bottom-end growls juxtaposed with little-girl lullaby tones -- survived, and not just as mannerisms. "Big-time sensuality!" Björk screamed on her first solo album, Debut (1993). She brings her big-time physical presence to electronica's often icy landscapes.

Björk's theatricality is what makes her new Homogenic (Elektra) such a radical success. Her gradual move into electronica is complete here -- the rippling hisses and pops, the deep subsonic bass and racheting snare drums. But she hasn't given up any of her other obsessions -- jazz horns, South American pop, '60s girl pop, jazz diva cabaret standards, disco, Icelandic folk. Everything's assimilated to her needs. There are times when Björk's tastes have come together in bizarrely off-kilter arrangements. On Debut's "Aeroplane," marimbas, clacking percussion, and birdcalls suggested the worst superficiality of loungecore -- she was a '90s tiki girl. And yet the same tune featured a jazz horn section that wasn't the Hollywood-ish schmaltz you might expect but a half-sour melancholy avant moan arranged by the World Saxophone Quartet's Oliver Lake.

Homogenic opens with "Hunter": a minor-key melodic figure from a wheezy Mellotron over drum 'n' bass-style electronic tabla pops, the latter flipping rapidly back and forth from wing to wing of the sound stage (or left-to-right on your stereo speakers). Then deep, deep bass ostinato with flicking snare that is drum 'n' bass's signature sound. An oooh-ing female vocal chorus follows with a countermelody, and then Björk's distant, echoey voice, "If travel is searching/And home what's been found/I'm not stopping." She identifies herself as "the hunter," swooning strings enter, then deep cello flamenco rhythms and a touch of concertina. Björk's voice moves forward in the mix. "I thought I could organize freedom/How Scandinavian of me." Climbing higher over that multilayered rhythm of strings and electronics, the vocal melody takes a wild leap, answered by her own multitracked vocal chorus. The verse returns, her voice distant again, and then the rhythms gradually build and her voice once more moves forward as she repeats, "I'm the hunter."

"The Hunter" is a vast dramatic landscape, with Björk as the focal point, so it's no surprise when she sings on the next song, "Joga," "I feel emotional landscapes/They puzzle me." The work of electronica wizards Howie B. and L.T.J. Bukem has often suggested landscape, with its layering of rhythm and texture, its static harmonies, the flicking of snare and the heartbeat of bass, its synth figures squiggling forward and back in the mix. In clubs, where electronica developed, the "body" of the music, the physical presence, is completed by dancers. Which is why for a lot of us, the music has always felt incomplete, "anonymous," anywhere else -- interesting, but not fully satisfying. For jazzheads, there were deeper abstractions to behold elsewhere (give me Bill Evans, or for that matter Paul Bley, over Howie B. any day). At least Tricky's trip-hop offers words, and his brooding presence as protagonist. And now there's Björk, commanding the ambient tricks of electronica with all the theatricality of Kate Bush or Peggy Lee.

Björk moves through one mood after another on Homogenic. There's a lead-foot tango ("Bachelorette"), a sorceress's blessing lullaby ("All Neon Like"). The latter ends with a kind of pas de deux of hissing pitches and sonar blips that come together with a slow fade at the center of the mix in the base of your skull. "Pluto" enters with techno-like speed but not the crushing beats, swoons into a moment of strings, then sets Björk's repeated five-note yowl against a relentless sequenced beat -- as if she were going to defeat the machine at its own game.

Björk is still too much -- she pushes everything she sings to the limit. And I don't think I hear one radio song on Homogenic. Björk employs all the trappings of a pop singer, but she's as demanding as an avant-punk. On Homogenic, her tunes, hits or no hits, work with the integral logic of art songs, each a complete dramatic statement. "I want to go on a mountaintop with a radio and good batteries/Play a joyous tune/And free the human race from suffering," she sings on "Alarm Call." If the land of electronica has a Wagnerian priestess, it's Björk.