How Birds Helped Me Appreciate Björk’s “Utopia” (2017)
A Brief Look Back
When I first listened to “Utopia”, I was underwhelmed.
I blame two things for this.
First, I didn’t listen closely enough. I remember first hearing the album on a bus ride, tired and annoyed after a long day. At that moment, the music — however ethereal — could not compete with my desire to get home and fall asleep.
Second, the album was produced by Arca, whose solo work I had discovered just a few weeks prior — and on however subconscious a level, I was apparently expecting “Utopia” to sound exactly like the experimental electronic adventures of Arca’s self-titled release.
Long story short — I didn’t like the album and it was entirely my fault.
But everything changed when I read some background information and started to realize how important birds were to the production of the record. Specifically — field recordings of birds.
I learned how both Bjork and Arca recorded birds in different countries (in addition to sampling some additional species from old records) and my interest was immediately piqued.
The different uses of field recordings in electronic music are a topic that had fascinated me for years. Whether it’s early musique concrète, the gorgeous ambient soundscapes of Biosphere or the crazy sample-laden road trip of The KLF’s “Chill Out” — I just never get tired of the approach.
So realizing not only that Björk had made extensive use of this technique, but also that I had almost allowed myself to ignore the album resulting from it simultanously disturbed and invigorated me. I immediately snapped out of my passive listening groove and entered into music nerd mode with full force. I needed to look for, find, and possibly catalogue all those birds!
Spoilers: I failed miserably at my completionist obsession to find every single sample, but waiting with bated breath for another bird to show up proved to be an excellent active listening device. It was something to latch on to and finally made me focus on the record and give it the undivided attention it deserved.
Here are just a few examples:
The title track “Utopia” starts off with lovely chirping woven into flute sounds, closes on a few seconds of pure, unaccompanied birdsong and even references birds in the lyrics: “Bird species never seen or heard before”.
As the music and vocals on “Courtship” fade out, the birds and other nature sounds have to do pretty much all the heavy lifting to accomplish the best transition on the album (into “Losss”). They do so admirably.
On “Saint”, the bird sounds are so perfectly integrated into the flute melody, I started to imagine an orchestra’s music director being short two flutists and spontaneously deciding to hire a few birds to take their place.
Birds have opened up “Utopia” for me. And even though this is still not my favorite Björk record, I have returned to it multiple times over the years — sometimes primarily appreciating the overall vision, sometimes being more taken by either the vocal delivery or the production side.
But I’m always looking forward to the birds.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this story!
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