BJORK: BIOPHILIA

OMG, dont often make these sorts of fanboy posts (not for ages at least!), but I just read the press release for Bjork's music residency in Manchester, and now I'm FREAKING OUT!!!!

Manchester International Festival welcomes Björk to Manchester for the world premiere of her Biophilia live show.

Björk will be at MIF for a three-week residency; six intimate shows in the striking space of Campfield Market Hall for audiences of 1800, her first UK dates in over three years.

Where do music, nature and technology meet? Björk introduces Biophilia, an extraordinary answer to this fascinating question and her most ambitious and exciting work to date. A multi-media project encompassing music, apps, internet, installations and live shows, Biophilia celebrates how sound works in nature, exploring the infinite expanse of the universe, from planetary systems to atomic structure...

 For these six special shows, Björk will be performing new tracks from the forthcoming Biophilia studio album as well as music from her genre-defying back catalogue with a small group of unique musical collaborators. The show will feature a range of specially conceived and crafted instruments, among them a bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ; a 30 foot pendulum that harnesses the earth’s gravitational pull to create musical patterns - creating a unique bridge between the ancient and the modern; a bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid; and a one-off extraordinary pin barrel harp. These devices make visible some of the physical processes that are the subject matter of tracks.

Literally I MUST GO! Just the description of the instruments is beautiful enough 'A 30 foot pendulum that harnesses the earths gravitational pull'... jesus CHRIST that is INTENSE.

It reminds me of one of the opening paragraph's in Jonathon Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close;

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time... That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.

I AM VERY EXCITED.