Bjork’s next album aimed at the iPad

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Bjork is showcasing the new 10-track album, “Biophilia,” in an elaborate live show recently seen for three weeks in Manchester, England. A U.S. residency is planned next year. “Biophilia” comes out Sept. 27.

Updated: November 5, 2011 5:20PM

Bjork doesn’t like to think about her legacy. “I try not to. It can paralyze you. It unplugs you,” she says, “with your gut.”

It’s fitting, then, that after selling 3.1 million U.S. copies of her first six solo albums (according to Nielsen SoundScan), the Icelandic musician is ready to move beyond the CD, and even the MP3, and peer into the future.

“I’ve always been aware that vinyl or CDs are not the only way [to release music],” says Bjork, 45. “Both are very short-lived formats if you look at how long music has been around. There are always going to be people who listen to music and always going to be people who want to play it for them. That will never change.”

“Biophilia,” due Sept. 27, isn’t a new album as much as a new experience: The 10-track set will be released as an iPad app suite that invites the listener to tinker with its sonic palette through touch-screen technology. Bjork and a team of developers designed the apps to plunge the listener into the album’s cosmology theme. The suite is stacked with interactive games, visuals and musical tools.

“The spectrum is from ‘music video’ to ‘instrument,’ and generally all the apps are fitting somewhere in between that, sometimes in multiple places,” says media artist Scott Snibbe, who served as one of the chief developers on the project.

For those who don’t own Apple’s tablet computer, “Biophilia” will exist as a gargantuan live show that features one-of-a-kind instruments, an educational program that teaches abstract musicology to kids, a 90-minute documentary that captures the making of the project and a relaunched website — the design mirrors the experience of the apps. “Biophilia” also will be released on CD, and the singles “Crystalline” and “Cosmogony” are out now.

At the center of it all, of course, is Bjork, whose cavernous, emotionally stirring follow-up to 2007’s “Volta” is her most immediate album since 2001’s “Vespertine.”

Before “Biophilia” came to fruition, Bjork was working on new music in a Puerto Rico beach house with engineer Damian Taylor, writing songs on pre-iPad touch-screens and forging new sounds with organ pipes that they had bought on eBay. After an extensive 18-month tour for “Volta,” Bjork was ready to experiment.

“We were making pendulums with elastics, rope, magnets and buckets ... we were building something from the ground up,” she says.

The album was originally conceived as a 3-D movie to be helmed by longtime collaborator Michel Gondry, but around the same time the director bowed out to finish “The Green Hornet” last year, Bjork had become fascinated with the capabilities of the recently released iPad. She reached out to a collection of her favorite app developers through e-mail and presented them with a unique financial opportunity: Without a major label attached to her next project, the apps would be self-funded and the developers would reap the majority of the revenue.

“Bjork did it in a different way, which is that she said, ‘What we can offer you guys is a creative partnership. Let’s equally invest,’ ” Snibbe says. “She has the freedom to decide how to distribute it ... and that’s part of why this project could happen.”

Sometimes Bjork would e-mail the developers (who also included iPad luminaries like Max Weisel and Theo Gray) hundreds of times per day after the project was started last June. Other times, the team would meet up at locations like an abandoned lighthouse in Iceland and work for eight hours straight.

Her goal was to ensure the developers used the 10 individual apps for each album track to showcase the natural elements at the heart of the songs.

“Virus,” a song about parasitic interaction in which Bjork coos, “Like a virus needs a body ... someday I’ll find you,” is supported by an app that lets users fight off green parasites from healthy purple cells that each emit unique ringing sounds. In the game for the song “Crystalline,” which is about shifting natural structures, players can navigate through neon-colored tunnels by physically swinging the iPad around, and collect different crystals that change the musical structure of the song mix.

“I didn’t want the connection between the song and the app to be superficial,” Bjork says. “It had to go to the core.”

Along with the interactive games, all of the apps will feature traditional and animated scores that behave like gorgeously designed karaoke scrolls, as well as an academic essay about each song written by musicologist Nikki Dibben. The 10 apps are housed in a “mother app,” a menu designed as a 3-D universe that lets the user navigate among the apps. Apps can be purchased individually — the “Crystalline” app costs $1.99 — or as a buy-all, with pricing to be determined.

When it came to approaching Apple to use its product as a host of the apps, Bjork says the iPad was chosen simply because it could handle her ambitious creative plans. If another tablet platform is created with the same capabilities as the iPad, Snibbe says, “Biophilia” could possibly be translated to that new platform.

According to Apple sales reports through first-quarter 2011, the company has sold 14.7 million iPads worldwide since the device’s launch in April 2010. And while “Biophilia” will primarily exist on a platform that isn’t yet a household product — the 10 apps also will be available in scaled-down versions on the iPhone and iPod touch — Snibbe believes the iPad represents the starting point of a new creative outlet for artists.

“This is like the birth of cinema,” he says. “I know artists want to embrace it, and if the record companies can find a way to make this work financially and contractually for the artists, I think it will really thrive.”

Bjork’s new website launched in May with a redesign that features an astral pattern similar to the appearance of the mother app. After leaking online in June, “Crystalline” was put up for sale on iTunes and other digital outlets. “Cosmogony,” the soaring second single, was released July 19, and the apps for that song and “Crystalline” were made available for purchase the same day.

Bjork’s personal focus now is on her live show, which will travel the world during the next two years. Instead of visiting new cities every day, the “Biophilia” tour will entail multiple-week residencies in which a custom-built stage setup will be meticulously installed and Bjork will perform her new material twice per week. The project debuted at the Manchester (England) International Festival on June 30, where Bjork performed with a 24-person choir, an iPad for orchestration and unique instruments like a gameleste (a celeste made with bronze gamelan bars) and pendulum harps (a collection of four harps that swing on pendulums) to a crowd of 1,800.

“The residency that we had in Manchester existed somewhere between a music concert, an art installation and a piece of theater,” says MIF organizer Alex Poots, whose festival hosted Bjork for three weeks. Although other residencies haven’t yet been finalized, Bjork is expected to visit eight cities in the next two years, with Iceland up next in October and a U.S. residency tentatively planned for 2012.

On days between shows, Bjork will use her residencies to host free educational programs in collaboration with local schools, in which children will learn about the spatial and structural qualities of music by writing songs on iPads that can be connected to custom instruments. For Bjork, these programs epitomize the point of the “Biophilia” project’s massive task: to use her music to stimulate others in a singular manner.

“The point where cutting-edge technology, music and nature can meet right now is extremely moist,” Bjork says. “I have wanted to start a music school though, ever since I was a child. I guess technology just caught up with me.”

Billboard