I often think Björk will outlive us all. In her decades-spanning career, the experimental Icelandic musician has seemingly never aged, at least not in my eyes. Her music is ever-evolving, always a step ahead of the curve. Her fashion sense has long been iconic and weird, long before the days of Lady Gaga’s red carpet flashiness. There’s no one in the world like Björk, and that’s probably because no one in the world can be like Björk. She is singular. Unique, and not in the way we typically call things unique. Björk is just Björk.
So it’s fitting then that no other musician has embraced the intersection of technology and visual art quite like Björk, and her latest teasers for her publicly releasing VR music videos are no exception. In the past year, she’s experimented both with sprawling, panoramic short features (“Black Rock”), art exhibitions, and now virtual reality. This is all to coincide with her latest album, Vulnicura (2015), except this isn’t some marketing ploy, nor your average music videos. In a way, these visual accompaniments are as important as the music itself. Where last year’s album was Side A to the Vulnicura project, and this year’s visual additions are something of a Side B.
While “Family” and “Notget” have been on display at the traveling exhibition Björk Digital this year, they haven’t seen a wide-release to the grand public. Luckily, following the release of “Stonemilker,” “Mouthmantra,” and “Black Rock,” there are official public teasers for the two additional releases. So you can cancel your international flights to wherever Björk Digital will land next.
Björk’s VR videos are the Side B to her album
In a Facebook post, Björk herself wrote about why she’s explored VR prolifically in the recent year as an artist. “Technology is enabling women to work outside the already formed hierarchical systems,” Björk wrote. “The laptop arriving 1999 gave me a personal studio to make Vespertine. The touchscreen [in] 2006 helped me map my own idiosyncratic musicology outside the classical canon and reconnect it with nature and make Biophilia. VR is helping making a new stage free of politics where sound and vision is swirling free in 360, fully liberated.”
You can watch the teasers for “Family” and “Notget” below. The videos for “Black Rock”, “Mouthmantra,” and “Stonemilker” are already available now.
