Bjork - Voltaic
I much prefer this to Volta - I admit that I simply never want to listen to “The Dull Flame of Desire” again, and hence have rarely returned to the album. That song, and most of the others, are missing from this live album, which pulls evenly from as far back as Post.
Bjork’s tendency to overthink is here restrained by live performance’s tendency to reduce everything to what can happen synchronously.
Here’s a bjorkish thread I was reading on the internet:
Does the music you like reveal anything about your intelligence? (via Carrie Brownstein)
Obviously there are smart people who listen to any given piece of music. To begin with, the authors of a piece of music must have some degree of intelligence in order to write, play instruments, and record themselves, and they listen to the music they create. However, some of them may be thinking about something other than music, so that the music itself fails to arrest the mind - for example, they may be dancers, or cultural theorists. As a listener, the confusing of domains - ie believing oneself to be enjoying music while in fact enjoying a picture, or a word - is a mistake, and as such is evidence of imperfection. Nonetheless, an intelligent person can find value in any piece of music, as music (or at least as sound), but may not care to bother with it.
But while this means that there is no music which only appeals to the stupid, it is still interesting to wonder whether there is some piece of music which only appeals to the intelligent. For example, what about something complex like The Rite of Spring? Or something that sounds like broken eletronics, like Oval or Tetsu Inoue might make? Or something which _forces_ the listener to think in extramusical terms, like John Cage or Gastr Del Sol?
In the end, though just as an unintelligent person can mistakenly believe that they are enjoying musical qualities when in fact they are attending to image or popular culture movements, one can of course mistakenly enjoy any “smarties-only” piece of music on similar grounds, or because Mom and Dad played it way back before the factory upriver started poisoning the well (leading to lowered intelligence in the community).
5 months ago
