Bjork’s Vulnicura VR, pop music’s first and most emotionally immersive virtual reality album
Icelandic artist Björk Guðmundsdóttir and co-creative director James Merry released the final version of her ‘breakup album’ into the ‘pop’s first virtual reality album’; now exhibiting in London exclusively at OTHERWORLD VR arcade
“I often feel like some sort of -technology- bridge. I’m there in the middle, to translate nerddom to the normal people or something”- she said in Ars Technica.
Both artists worked on this mesmeric project for over five years by re-imagining and re-making seven tracks from the album launched in June of 2015.
“It was amazing… there were people crying, laughing and gasping, and people talking to Björk like she was there. It’s so beautiful seeing tears coming out of the bottom of a VR headset. It’s like a humanity and technology mashup in a really beautiful way”, stated James Merry, the record’s co-creative director in an interview for the Guardian.
Vulnicura translates ‘cure for wounds’ from Latin, it’s an opening up album about a very intimate part of the songwriter’s life as it follows her divorce in 2013 from the artist and long-time partner Matthew Barney. In an NME article in 2015 and referring to the breakup of her over-a-decade marriage, Björk said ‘it was the most painful thing she ever experienced’; the creation and recording of this album helped her to bear the grief and despair of her heartbreak. She added -in an interview for Pitchfork-:
“Vulnicura VR has been a long journey which began when me and Andy Thomas Huang -Chinese-American director- started talking about how we wanted to document ‘Stonemilker”, expressed Björk in the Rolling Stone magazine. The song’s video was then filmed with a 360-degree camera in an Icelandic beach by the end of 2014. She continued: “the whole process has been an improvisation, but I wanted to have the courage to grow along with how 360 sound and vision tech was growing”. Merry was Björk’s right-hand man in the production of the album and the creation of the full VR edition. The idea of operating in artificial reality came up later on while trying a VR headset at her house in New York, “she -Björk- realized it could fit these heartbreak songs… it was just a really good overlap between the medium and the content”, continued Merry in his interview with the Guardian.
With the collaboration of other artists such as American inventor Stephen Malinowski, directors Jesse Kanda, Warren Du Preez, Nick Thornton Jones and the insertion of 3D animations plus interactive scores, Vulnicura’s new version came to life initially featuring 360° visuals of four of its songs including “Mouth Mantra” and “Notget”. The artwork was later on housed by Björk Digital, exhibition that traveled around the world, visiting Australia, Iceland, England, France, Japan, and several US cities since mid-2016.
“It’s one of the scariest journeys I’ve taken on”, said Björk to Ars Technica on structuring the full collection together. The final version of the album, a “many-headed beast”, is composed of seven full visually and auditive immersive songs that take the observer through her heartbreak’s journey from grieving in claustrophobic darkness to healing and awakening.
More than a singer, songwriter, producer or even actress -she starred in a few movies, including the prize winner “Dancer in the Dark”, performance that granted her the Best Actress Award in the 2000's Cannes Film Festival-, Björk is truly an artist: one of the most eccentric and avant-grade female artists in history. It is unusual to find a neutral zone when referring to her music, people either find it utterly brilliant or just extremely weird: it is a love-hate relationship.
According to a BBC article, a journalist once said that those who buy the musician’s records “live in houses without comfy sofas in them”. Despite the critics, Björk has received more than 40 nominations throughout her career and won world-known titles such as BRIT and MTV Europe Music Awards. She challenged music paths with her idiosyncratic genre-bending tunes, from classical to electronic, and her way of perceiving the significance of the sound-image relationship: “more people’s eyes are more mature than their ears. Some songs need a dozen listens to sink in; with a visual, it will sometimes less as long there is synchronicity between the two” -she stated in Pitchfork-.
The enthralling Vulnicura VR is currently being hosted by OTHERWORLD, in London, Haggerston, until the beginnings of January 2020. Users will have access to an up to 55 minutes journey in private single VR pods. The set features a whole visual and sound immersive experience for seven of the songs exhibited, and other sensorial effects to imitate Icelandic breezes.
