“The album is about voices,” Björk told Alex Ross of The New Yorker of her burgeoning new album, with the working title of Ink, in early 2004. “I want to get away from instruments and electronics… I want to see what can be done with the entire emotional range of the human voice – a single voice, a chorus, trained voices, pop voices, folk voices, strange voices. Not just melodies but everything else, every noise a throat makes.”
The title of the album may have morphed with the passing of the months, but Björk’s vision remained resolute. That quote could, and does, act as the mission statement for what finally became Medúlla, Björk’s hymn to the earthy and the ethereal, a majestic work that turns twenty this week.
“About voices” is as explicit as one can get about Medúlla: there are traditionally sung melodies that wouldn’t sound out of place, with different arrangements, on her previous records, but there are whimsical vocal exercises too. There are untethered bursts of enraptured vocalising, but then a round of exquisite choral singing over the brow of the hill. There are low, heavy bass notes supplied by human beatboxers (Rahzel of The Roots, Mike Patton of Faith No More, Dokaka, and Shlomo) that provide a subterranean bed for Björk’s mercurial toplines, and fills delivered by the hyper-ventilations of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. There are horn sections mimicked by the voice of Gregory Purnhagen, and what sound like alternately warm and menacing instrumental parts that are actually crafted using samples of the voice. There is noodling, there is dissonance, there is experimentation erring on the side of ugliness – and there is much beauty, sombre elegance, and joyful abandon. In short, the human voice acts not as a highbrow concept on which to hang Björk’s latest batch but as the perfect foil for an album that explores – not just through its lyrics – simply what it is to be human.
There is the ode to generosity of spirit and life-giving in ‘Pleasure Is All Mine’, the frustration and disappointment in ‘Where Is The Line’, the loss of identity and attendant self-doubt in ‘Show Me Forgiveness’. There is pleading in ‘Desired Constellation’, the wonder of beauty in ‘Oceania’ and the wonder of the human body in ‘Mouth’s Cradle’ and ‘Triumph Of A Heart’ (surely the pinnacle of the Björkian subgenre of ‘ode to human organs’). Many of us give voice these feelings and emotions in our daily lives, and Björk – alongside the superb musicians and vocalists with whom she worked on Medúlla – quite literally vocalise these feelings and emotions on this masterful opus.
While Björk was never quite a ‘mainstream pop star’, Medúlla arguably activated her latter reputation for wilful obscurity, avant-garde experimentation, leftfield peculiarity – quite forgetting that, despite her previous albums achieving commercial success and even considerable traction on pop radio, Björk was never anything other than experimental – it was a happy accident that her singular orbit was able to coincide with a time when songs like ‘Hyperballad’, ‘Army Of Me’ and ‘Hidden Place’ could become recognisable successes in the arena of chart pop.
For every ‘Human Behaviour’ there is a ‘Pluto’, for every ‘Venus As A Boy’ there is an ‘Enjoy’, something a bit more discordant, aggressive and unsettling. But by the same token, for every ‘Ancestors’ – Medúlla’s intrepid and arguably maligned exploration of the guttural nuances of Inuit throat singing, performed with gusto by Tanya Tagaq – there is a ‘Desired Constellation’ a song of twinkling beauty and soaring grace; for every ‘Miðvikudags’, one of Medúlla’s strange and elusive noodling interludes, designed to spotlight “every noise a throat makes,” there is an ‘Oceania’, a bewitching tribute to the exquisiteness of nature.
Indeed, Medúlla is actually home to some of Björk’s most ‘straightforward’ and catchy pop melodies. Dressed in different clothing, ‘Who Is It’ and ‘Triumph Of A Heart’, for instance, could have become this album’s ‘Human Behaviour’ or ‘Possibly Maybe’ and did gain some success at the lower end of the UK Top 40: lingering melodies, punchy choruses, and, in the case of ‘Triumph Of A Heart,’ a banging beat (delivered by Rahzel). ‘Who Is It’ possesses one of the most joyful chorus melodies of her career, and the arrangement – all jerky beatboxing and layered humming – only adds to the thrill. It’s credit to Björk’s artistic confidence that she didn’t attempt to arrange these songs more palatably or hold them back for another project. ‘Who Is It’ had begun life during the Vespertine sessions in 2000, and one can imagine it replete with that album’s glitchy electronica and choral mystery, but Björk was devoted to making it pop of a different sort and committed to the idea that the absence of traditional instrumentation and production can be pop.
Thus, the Brazilian drums in the early versions of ‘Mouth’s Cradle’ were excised, electronic programming was only accepted in Olivier Alary’s subtle, sensuous work on ‘Desired Constellation’, which itself was based on a sample of Björk’s singing on ‘Hidden Place’ from Vespertine and only one instrument – the piano on ‘Ancestors’ and ‘Oceania’ (played by Nico Muhly) – remains. The rest of this landscape, earthy and cave-like, is made up entirely of the human voice – and it is quite astonishing to hear the level of imagination involved in bringing a full-scale work like this to fruition. Medúlla is, to my mind, one of modern pop’s most extreme and successful examples of this kind of committed and courageous artistic experimentation – on the back of beloved albums of such high acclaim as Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine, Björk was willing to put it all on the line for the sake of art.
Electronic beats are substituted by beat boxing, the stunning wintry choirs of Vespertine are replaced with choirs that are alternately solemn (the sublime, peerless ‘Vökuró’), unsettling (‘Pleasure Is All Mine’), or terrifying (‘Where Is The Line’). Voices are sampled to mimic the effect of electronics and instruments (‘Mouth’s Cradle,’ the ‘organ’ at the end of ‘Who Is It’ being a sample of Björk’s voice), horn sections are replaced by ‘human trombones’ (‘Triumph Of A Heart’), and she thrives on sequencing extreme contrasts of loveliness (‘Sonnets/Unrealities XI’) with dissonance largely unfamiliar to the Western ear (‘Ancestors’).
In style and execution, Medúlla has more in common with the output of artists like Meredith Monk, but it is a mistake to think that Björk decided to trade all of her inherent pop smarts for the obscure. Rather, she seems to revel in pushing this music to the limits of what she, her collaborators, and the technology of the recording studio can do; to the limits of what pop can do. That is surely what the best and bravest artists strive for, to push themselves, their listeners, and the form itself. Medúlla is possibly the most striking example of this in Björk’s career, one of constant innovation that moves the pop landscape forward.
Contemporary reviews of Medúlla were positive, in a way that may seem surprising considering that Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine continue to get their flowers today in a way Medúlla doesn’t. “Not only the bravest record she’s ever made,” ran Mojo’s review, “it’s also one of the strangest and most uncompromising by a major artist to get a commercial release.” Described as “challenging” by Billboard, PopMatters saw it as “enchanting” and, as David Peschek wrote in The Guardian, “Medúlla may divide Björk’s audience, but, combining intellectual rigour and sensual ravishment, it is brave and unique.”
There is the sense though, that Medúlla began a run of Björk albums with a reputation for being more of a challenge than a joy to listen to. The immediate follow-up, the soundtrack to Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), cemented this view with its complete abandonment of pop mores. 2011’s Biophilia took the ‘concept’ mode of Medúlla’s earthy-meets-ethereal to its zenith and was met with a reception that was again broadly positive but tempered with caveats like Slant’s view of a “failed and overly formal experiment in hyper-theoretical songcraft.”
It might be a challenge, but Medúlla is also a pleasure for its own sake. It is complex and rewarding, a distinctive work of layering, texture, and contrasts. “[Vespertine] was very introverted,” she told <i>The New Yorker</i>. “It was avoiding eye contact. This one is a little more earthy but, you know, not exactly simple.” Dismissing it merely as ‘work’ for the listener risks that potential listener losing out on some astonishing music.
‘Where Is The Line’ is probably more intimidating than it might have been with its vocal-only arrangement; Mike Patton’s growling bass voice is bone-shakingly intense, while Björk’s main melodic line is caught between the seesawing edits of queasy back-and-forth male/female choral singing. She would instruct the choir to apply different syllables and vowel sounds to notes and encouraged “a little bit of a pagan edge, a bit of Slavic”. The beatboxers provide the rugged terrain on which the choirs and samples can build. Rahzel is the album’s mainstay in this field and provides the rumbling bottom end, with Japanese peer Dokaka supplying the middle range (including the strangulated noises on ‘Triumph Of A Heart’). On ‘Where Is The Line’ Rahzel fires bullets of aggression, machine-like, through the strange chaos of jarring voices and blunt production. It is brooding, scary, not a million miles from an alternate universe horror film; it has “more of a rock feel” Björk said, with typical understatement.
‘Vökuró’ is perhaps the most beautiful recording of all in Björk’s catalogue. A twenty-strong group of singers gathered together by Magga Stína specifically to work on this album and known as The Icelandic Choir, give voice to this arrangement of the Jórunn Vidar song, which in turn is an interpretation of a poem by Jakobína Sigurdardóttir. Vidar was an inspiration for Björk, for decades the only female member of the Icelandic Composers’ Society. ‘Vökuró’ is minor-key exquisite: sombre, solemn, everything beautiful and magnificent about the human voice, everything emotive and moving about the power and potency of choral singing.
And what of ‘Submarine’, the murky, velvety duet with Robert Wyatt that sits, impervious, at Medúlla’s halfway point. It is as dark and enigmatic as its title would suggest, but the moment where the vocal arrangement (built on the pair’s sinister “do-do-do”s) opens out to allow Björk to sing in her higher register, unleashed and rising, evoking a watercraft rising from the depths and breaching before sinking back down into the abyss. It is a thing of rare beauty.
One cannot talk about a vocal Björk album without talking about her own extraordinary voice – keening and soaring, exultant one moment, cooing and childlike the next; Björk made her name with her astonishing range and versatility, the sweeping movements up the register (think the way she sings “emotional” in ‘Jóga’ or the coda of ‘Bachelorette’), and the veering between naive giggling (‘There’s More To Life Than This’) and guttural animal noises (‘The Modern Things’). Medúlla showcases the breadth of her skills – the power and the restraint – but, in typical Björk fashion, she doesn’t need to be the star of the show. Her voice is central, yes, but it is more the main voice, literally, in a cast where each singer is key to the whole. Listen, for instance, to the mix of ‘Mouth’s Cradle’ and note how her main vocal line is not always as upfront as you might expect. You can’t have a tapestry with a single thread, however vibrant and strong that thread may be.
‘Ancestors,’ the precursor to challenging experiments like ‘Holographic Entrypoint’ from Drawing Restraint 9, moves Tanya Tagaq front and centre. It takes the joy of Inuit throat-singing competitions – where women face each other and try and make each other smile with the range of noises they can generate – and sculpts it into a song that wordlessly suggests the original conception of the album, or as Björk herself described it, that “5,000-year-old blood that’s inside us all; an ancient spirit that’s passionate and dark, a spirit that survives”. In the run up to the release of the album she also said: “Something in me wanted to leave out civilisation, to rewind to before it all happened and work out, ‘Where is the human soul? What if we do without civilisation and religion and patriotism, without the stuff that has gone wrong?’”
The album was titled Medúlla to mean ‘marrow’ – the essence, the core. That’s true of everything from the naked, bare emotions in the lyrics (“the shame is endless / but if soon start forgiveness / the girl might live”) to the striking artwork (designed by long-time collaborators M/M (Paris) and photographed by Inez and Vinoodh) – Björk masked with a helmet of her own hair, looking direct to camera, imploring, confident, ancient, and new. Whereas Vespertine’s engine was its introversion, Medúlla – crafted during the early months of motherhood to her daughter Isadora – looks inward in order to look outward: the “[shaking] out of the heavy deep sleep,” the primal as the universal.
