Santiago Felipe / Red Bull Content Pool
Bjork poses for a portrait during Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal.
Across a 48-hour period last week in Montreal’s charming historic quarter, a peripatetic Bjork seemed to be, maybe was, everywhere at once. Alongside the fall-foliage-lined banks of the St. Lawrence River where this year’s Red Bul Music Academy put down stakes, Iceland’s most famous export premiered a stunning new virtual reality video for “Family,” the fifth piece of a VR song cycle behind 2015’s heart-wrenching Vulnicura. She also played two banging three-plus-hour DJ sets at the sold-out Cirque Éloizete, building from dark minimalist techno and electronic music to maximalist R&B jams by the likes of Jeremih, Kelela, and even Ariana Grande. And then she gave an extensive, two-hour interview before 35 riveted Academy students.Tthen the usually press-averse singer sat down with journalists.
“Being a punk, I’ve always been really skeptical of big brands, it’s kind of in my blood,” Bjork says from a suite within the renovated historic building RBMA has transformed into its 2016 music Shangri-la. “I’ve repeatedly gone to amazing gigs Red Bull Music Academy has organized [including performances by Le1f, Tri Angle Records, Dizzee Rascal, NON Records and N.A.A.F.I,] and they really have their heart in the right place. They just seem to be giving so much to that community especially to electronic music. I think they really mean it. So I decided to drop my brand-snob thing and embrace it.”
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Santiago Felipe / Red Bull Content Pool
Bjork performs at La Selection de Bjork during the Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal.
Santiago Felipe / Red Bull Content Pool
For the past 18 years, RBMA has created a pop-up music academic institution complete with music lectures, recording facilities and an exquisitely programmed quasi-music festival. It’s all, improbably, backed financially by the deep pockets of a global beverage manufacturer, which for the fiscal year ending 2015 had global sales of over $6.6 billion dollars, according to Forbes.
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Santiago Felipe / Red Bull Content Pool
Bjork lectures at the Red Bull Music Academy in Montreal.
Santiago Felipe / Red Bull Content Pool
Though she politely declined to discuss the new album she is currently working on, saying it takes her years of hindsight to fully understand her work, Bjork now, at least, seems to have a handle on Vulnicura, which chronicled the dissolution of her longtime relationship with artist Matthew Barney. “It feels very different if the mountain is ahead of you and you feel paralyzed and you think, ‘There is no way I will ever get over this mountain. There is like absolutely zero possibility of it. I have no legs, I have no arms, I have no energy.’ That’s what it felt like.”
Now past the summit of heartache, Bjork has the luxury of time and perspective. “There’s always a moment, maybe a year or two later, where I sit down and listen to it all back-to-back and try to make sense of it,” she says. “It was literally like, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea. I have actually documented the undoing of a relationship.’ If I would have planned that it would have never worked. It would have just felt forced or strange or manipulative or self-indulgent or whatever but I was just writing songs and not really thinking about it.”
Vulnicura’s meaning may still be unfolding for Bjork, as it was for those inside the virtual reality vortex at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, where all five videos are on display, delivering something like repeated body blows to the emotional solar plexus (“Stonemilker”), a fantastical cosmic wonderland (“Family,” “Quicksand”) or a bad trip inside’s Bjork’s teeth (“Mouth Mantra”). Nondescript rooms with generic black curtains, swiveling bar stools, goggles and headphone are transformed into three-dimensional vistas of Iceland’s stunning coastline, an interstellar journey, a lysergic-acid surgical experience. When the visuals are paired just right with Vulnicura’s cri de coeurs, like for “Stonemilker,” which features the singer in a 360 degree shoot set astride the exact lighthouse where she composed the song while singing directly into your VR-enhanced eyes, heart and sou, any repression on the part of the viewer melts away quickly.
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Source: Billboard