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Biophilia Remix Series: Part 2
Bjork, Death Grips (2012)

Download it here

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Bjork performing "Crystalline" on Later... with Jools Holland

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Bjork's "Moon" music video, from her new album Biophilia
Directed, produced, and art directed by Björk, Inez and Vinoodh, M/M Paris and James Merry



björk: moon from Björk on Vimeo.

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Biophlia, Bjork (2011)
256kbps leak

Please pre-order a copy of Biophilia here before you download
This is maybe the best album you've heard in the past 10 years

01 Moon
02 Thunderbolt
03 Crystalline
04 Cosmogony
05 Dark Matter
06 Hollow
07 Virus
08 Sacrifice
09 Mutual Core
10 Solstice

Download it here

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 Bjork has posted a note explaining Biophilia's two-week delay

dear folks

i would like to explain why my album is coming out later than was first intended

after humongous and fun adventurous work with the app builders we handed in the music for the app box last may i felt sonically it fitted that underworld of apps and virtual reality like a glove , kinda acoustic and clean with a slick dark sub but somehow the cd needed more blood and muscles , oxygen and stuff

i felt the album had different kinda growth potential than the app box and it is important to follow those hunches even though they are slippery and you don't know sometimes where they are taking you

i played biophilia for few weeks in manchester and some of the songs grew while playing them live and i decided to add some of this into the album , i ended up even using a live recording of one of the songs on the album . take my hunch the whole distance but in order to do that i had to put the album back a bit

my friend , the incredibly talented music maker leila arab came to iceland with no notice and added some sonic sculpting , especially to the bottom end and the great talented mastering engineer mandy parnell came over as well and helped me give the whole thing more warmth and flesh somehow

i am really happy i did this , seems like biophilia the album has a body

leila also introduced me to "current value" who now has put a new beat into one of the songs

hope you like it

warmth , björk

As if we needed more to be excited about...
OCTOBER 10

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The four most exciting dates of the year...

October 10 - On the Water, Future Islands
October 11 - Biophilia, Bjork


November 20 -The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
November 21 - 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush

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Biophilia packaging
28 days...

Please note that the cover depicted in these pictures is not the final cover, and the release date has been moved back to October 9/10. You can see the cover in an earlier post by clicking the 'Bjork' or 'Biophilia' tag attached to this post

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Bjork's "Moon" single, from the (recently delayed) Biophilia, is availble now available on iTunes The corresponding app, a music sequencer, is also available to download. You can preview it below...

With each new moon we complete a cycle and are offered renewal —to take risks, to connect with other people, to love, to give. the symbolism of the moon as the realm of imagination, melancholy, and regeneration is expressed in the moon song and app by musical patterns and visual images which wax and wane, and by lyrics about rebirth.
The moon app connects musical structure, human biorhythms, and cycles of the moon and tides : robs of pearls are strung out attached to a spinal chord whose fluid rises and falls with changing phases of the moon and the harp sequences.
The animation shows the changing shapes of and relationships between the harp melodies, allowing us to find connections between musical and natural cycles.

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Bjork's fourth Biophilia single "Moon" can be streamed here
MP3 soon!

Headphones recommended 

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Bjork's Biophilia cover

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"Virus" is here a few days early!
I will continue to update the stream link until (and add a download link only when) we have a full quality file

Download it here

The following essay is included in the "Virus" app (pictured above) within Biophilia, written by musicologist Nikki Dibben. Each song has one

In "Virus," Björk captures her relationship with a recurring throat infection —candida, a normal part of the human body system but one which causes infections when it overgrows. Fungi such as candida grow in a close and long-term relationship with plants and animals —what’s known as "symbiosis"—and it’s this bond which Björk describes.
Björk’s lyrics reference well-known symbiotic relationships : mushrooms and trees, viruses and human. Viruses are incredibly abundant and found in every ecosystem on earth, infecting animals, plants, and bacteria. Whereas animal species replicate cell division, viruses need a host cell to make copies of themselves, sometimes lying dormant, but often resulting in the death of the host cell. The virus app takes you through the drama of this life cycle.

Björk’s deadlier inspirations for virus include parasitic symbiosis in which one organism benefits at the expense of another, often by taking over the host, or even changing the host’s behaviour — an alarming analogy for love between humans! For example, a parasitic worm infects the garden snail, making its eye stalks swell and throb with larvae so that the stalks resemble caterpillars, and causing the snail to crawl to the top of foliage at sunrise—something they would never normally do. This lures birds to eat the larvae with reproduce in the gut of the bits who excretes the eggs, and these are then eaten by other snails who themselves become infected.

Another inspiration from nature was the control of ants by a parasitic fungus : the fungus attaches to ants as they cross the forest floor and releases chemicals in the ants’ bodies that cause them to fix to leaves a certain height from the floor where they die. the fungus then sprouts from the head of the dead ant and the spores drop to the ground, starting the cycle again.

Listen to the song’s juxtaposition of its grim subject matter with its romantic-sounding music —an irony you’ll find more often in the music of the sugar cubes, of of Björk’s earlier bands, than in her latest solo work. We get a musical hint that all is not well in the symbiotic relationship just before the fourth verse when there is a sudden shift to a new key, wild modulation, and pitch bends in the choir on the lyrics "you fail to resist".

As in other tracks from Biophilia, Björk uses musical sound and structure to communicate her ideas in "virus". For instance Björk took the idea of a virus multiplying and created its sonic equivalent in the busy gameleste arrangement, using a generative music program —a sequence of rules expressed as an algorithm (a set of mathematical interactions) which operate on musical material put into the program such that the compositional process takes on a life of its own.

Instruments containing copper, like gameleste, cymbals, brass and hang (a bronze flying-saucer-shaped object struck with the fingers) appear throughout Biophilia and it was a happy coincidence when Björk discovered that copper was used to cure candida. The use of generative computer programme highlights the similarity between biological and digital (computer) viruses, linking the themes of music, nature and technology that run through Biophilia.