THE LATEST IN BJÖRK’S ONGOING SERIES OF OCCASIONAL – AND OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGING – REMIX ALBUMS IS BORN THIS WEEK. BASTARDS COLLATES THIRTEEN HARD TO FIND OFFICIAL WHITE LABEL TWELVE-INCH OR LIMITED EDITION CD MESS-UPS FOR, AS THE ARTIST HERSELF PUTS IT, “THOSE PEOPLE WHO ARE PERHAPS NOT TOO SASSY AND DON’T PARTAKE IN THE HUNTER-GATHERER RITUALS OF THE INTERNET.”
Each track is a deconstruction or reconstruction of something from last year’s BIOPHILIA app/album – gorgeous but something of an acquired taste, itself – by, amongst others, Hudson Mohawke, Death Grips and These New Puritans. Cutting-edge electronicists have consistently featured in parentheses on Björk’s single sleeves, so looking back through a 19-year high pile of them readily catalogues a long association with the outskirts.
She’s a contrarian, issuing artful yet mainstream parent albums painted beautifully and with determined coherence from equal parts emotional and intellectual palette, then handing those seemingly finished works over to the fringes of the industry with what appears to be a deliberate instruction to bastardise or obscure the original artistic vision – to sully, disguise and corrupt, or to achieve Cecilia Gimenez-like shocks. Out of the ensuing chaos and desecration sometimes rises fresh and inspired revelation.
Previous remix singles and parent-album themed collections (1994’s THE BEST MIXES FROM THE ALBUM DEBUT FOR ALL THE PEOPLE WHO DON’T BUY WHITE LABELS, 1996’s TELEGRAM and 2009’s VOLTAIC) proved generally entertaining but regularly difficult – though there were arresting moments on each which enhanced Björk’s discography: the minimalistic HYPERBALLAD (GIRLS BLOUSE MIX), for instance, excavated new strata of glacial desolation and melancholy from below the skittery thawing frost of the original.
Here, on BASTARDS, Berlin-based producer Current Value’s remix of SOLSTICE is coolly precise, until a warmly buzzing laser-cutter swathes in and slices everything up, while Matthew Herbert’s SACRIFICE (PINS AND NEEDLES MIX) positions Bjork’s vocals over a collection of low-house beats and keyboard washes – plus what appears to be an old ISDN line dialling up. The Slips’ remix of MOON is probably the closest to the original BIOPHILIA version, placing a loping beat under the harp-plucking, though it’s no less affecting for it. Against 12 radical, and occasionally brutal, demolitions it ends up being the quiet surprise of the album.
Syrian musician Omar Souleyman’s expansions of CRYSTALLINE and THUNDERBOLT are the best, by far, burning the quantized chimes of the original versions to cinders and having them end up sounding like a particularly smoky free-for-all firework party around an Arabic bonfire.
BASTARDS is littered with wilfully damaged versions of the stately and intimate songs from BIOPHILIA – and, as such, is an interesting if not always palatable collection entirely in keeping with the form of those previous remix outings.