Biophilia

Isaac and I went to Bjork's Biophilia on Saturday which was as predicted absolutely amazing it was her last show in Manchester so the encore was slightly more 'hooligan' than all the other nights (which was a lot of fun). Biophilia is about the extremities of nature; from the cellular and microscopic to the galactic and planetary, I have always found these aspects of biology a lot more interesting than the organismal and ecological. But I think this is because I find comfort in the fact that we are insignificant; that life in both the tiny and massive scale is much more advanced and complicated than humanity. Because while we will eventually fade and disappear, life will exist in some tiny molecule and there will still be some habitat in space for it to survive in. In the words of Rick Blaine "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world" I think that my childhood love of Casablanca has led to my bleak view of the world.

Anyway back to Bjork (I will need to do stuff to my mushroom ragout soon so tangents will be at a minimum), so many of the songs in biophilia were about my favourite things such as the moon, DNA, solstices and cells there was of course a song on plate tectonics. If only she had done a song on photosynthesis it would have been perfect. Every song had some video to accompany it which are all going to be iPad apps and I think the idea is that you can alter the song by playing with the app (which is pretty cool). The plate tectonics one showed magma moving around under the earth's surface and the breaks in continental plates; this was very useful for me as volcanoes tend to be formed around the spaces between these plates. The volcanic ring of fire marks the edge of a tectonic plate; I say it was useful for me as I find it very interesting but don't really know where the plates are and the video showed this. The song didn't have an eruption and seemed to be constantly building up to one but never quite reaching it and was more about the events leading up to it. There was a female Icelandic choir who were fantastic, the other best new songs were the moon one, crystalline and the virus one. However some slight critisms would be that it was half way between a concert and an art installation but not quite either therefore the delivery wasn't quite right so you couldn't really see the stage. Also pretty much all of her old songs sounded better than the new ones, Isaac was particularly happy as she did Mouth's Cradle which is his fav but I loved the time lapse fungi growth to Isobel. But it was absolutely amazing and I might have to buy an iPad so I can play with the Bjork apps.

Sorry this has been very rambling; maybe Casablanca isn't really that relevant so in the words of Bjork 'thank you' (really its funny when she says it as she has a great accent)