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Concert reviews Music

Bjork

BJORK at Echo Beach, Tuesday, July 16. Rating: NNNN

Bjork’s iPad app album Biophilia was high-concept, idiosyncratic in detail and technologically ambitious. To perform it live, she conceived a series of intimate residency shows featuring an array of theatrical instruments that do things like pluck notes based on the earth’s gravitational pull.

With so much emphasis on the conceptual side, it’s easy to forget that the Icelandic pop innovator has spent the better part of the last two decades as a major festival headliner.

Moreover, as electronic music producers increasingly look to the hard-edged industrial acid of the 90s for inspiration, Bjork’s set at Echo Beach served as a reminder that she was a screamy techno punk long before Yeezus was a twinkle in Kanye West’s eye.

The nearly two-hour set opened with a hair-raising Mongolian choral piece called Solar Winds that ominously accentuated the unbearably hot breeze. Bjork, sporting a ginger afro wig and twinkly blue dress, appeared with a percussionist, a beatmaker and an all-female choir, then segued into Biophilia’s choral centrepiece Cosmogony.

Unlike the Biophilia residency shows, the iPads and daintier technological do-dads were largely relegated to the sidelines in favour of less-subtle flourishes, like a volcanic pyrotechnics display and a caged tesla coil that hung above the stage and farted out electrical bolts of melody.

The songs from Biophilia that upsized best outdoors were naturally the loudest and poppiest: the drum ‘n’ bass jam Crystalline and the thundering Mutual Core – an ode to tectonic plates with a terrifying choral ascent Stanley Kubrick would appreciate. Conversely, the album’s more harmonically complex songs like Moon and Thunderbolt sometimes sounded jumbled despite the show’s pristine mixing.

Having undergone vocal-cord surgery last year, Bjork is once again getting her scream on and her voice is in fine form. The latter part of the set recapped her heaviest back catalogue material, veering into industrial boom-bap on Army Of Me, digital noise on Pluto, tribal chaos on Nattura and hypnotic techno on Hyperballad, which morphed into LFO’s Freak and ignited a dance party on stage and in the crowd.

Suddenly the punishing opening set by experimental rap group Death Grips had a lot more context. It’s tempting to read Bjork’s emphasis on her bangers as a rock star move an assertion of her status as an adventurous electronic music pioneer as the current trends in pop cycle back to the dance music she helped bring to broader audiences during the 90s.

Regardless, the show was a satisfyingly freewheeling break from the highly formalist air surrounding Biophilia. More tantalizing is the possibility the dance party will continue in the recording studio.

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