- American Doll Posse
- Abnormally Attracted to Sin
- Night of Hunters
- Silent All These Years - regular UK single, limited edition UK single
- Winter - regular UK single, limited edition UK single (recreated from other sources)
- China single
- Crucify UK single
- Cornflake Girl US single
- Audience bootlegs - Mannheim 2 December 2001, Oberhausen 3 December 2001, St Petersburg 30 September 2011, Moscow 2 October 2011
Bjork - Biophilia
Frou Frou - Details
Bruce Hornsby - The Way It Is
Nik Kershaw - Human Racing
Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
Roisin Murphy - Overpowered
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Something for Kate - Beautiful Sharks
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden
Toys - Soundtrack
Hmm...
Nope. I still don't especially want to talk about Night of Hunters. Other than to say I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
I want to talk about Biophilia instead because I decided to opt in to the whole album-as-app experience. I didn't buy Bjork's album on CD. I've only heard it on my iPhone.
Bjork is one of those artists that I'm frequently curious about but never completely connect with. I already own one album that I bought second-hand (Homogenic). I've considered buying others and sampled them repeatedly. One of the attractions is arguably that she conceives albums as based around particular ideas or sounds.
The biggest problem, I think, with Biophilia at times is that the concept is taken sufficiently literally that it hasn't necessarily translated from a concept into music with an independent existence. Some of the songs are very, very sparse. Mind you, sparse can be beautiful. I actually love it when a composer is able to build a musical structure out of only a few small elements. Beethoven's 5th symphony (or at least its first movement) is arguably one of the most famous examples, with so much material drawn from the opening da-da-da-dum. But there are pop songs, too, that manage to be incredibly clean and economical - I just wish one of them would leap to mind right now as I'm writing this.
With a number of the Bjork songs, though, it feels as if I'm just seeing the bare bones. It's possibly not helped by the ability, in app form, to literally see those bones - in visual form. The animations of the music are simultaneously one of the most impressive features of the app (the animations involving circles, bars and lines are quite brilliant as a means of intuitively showing musical form to people who haven't learnt musical notation) but also something of an Achilles heel. You can see exactly what's there in the music - to the point of saying in some cases, 'oh, is that all it is then'.
The quality of the apps varies considerably. Some of them are interesting in interactive mode, some of them are interesting when you just play the song, arguably only one is interesting in both cases ('Virus') and some are dull in both.
As a musical experience, though, the most frustrating thing about the app album is that you can't just play the album. It's forever in the form of 10 separate songs, which you have to click and swipe between, and if you want to hear the songs fully you have to remember which mode will give the most straightforward rendition in each app, as it varies. Instruments are often missing if you select the 'wrong' version.
I suppose one response is that if I wanted to listen to an album, I should have bought a CD (or a music download). Well yes, maybe. But if you're trying to create a new musical experience, wouldn't it be better to ensure that you don't cause people to lose their existing musical experiences? Shouldn't the new part be an addition? Or is it just an exercise in getting more money by requiring customers to effectively buy the album twice?
I don't regret partaking in Bjork's app experiment, but I'm not sure it's going to have a great deal of staying power for me. At some point I may end up resenting the space taken up by an app that's of no 'practical' use that also doesn't do the one thing I would most like it to - provide me with music to listen to.
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