sonic magic

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Chie Aoki, Body 18-2·23-2, 2018, lacquer and hemp cloth on polystyrene foam, collection sokyo gallery Chie Aoki, Body 22-2 (memory of life), 2022, lacquer and hemp cloth on styrofoam, private collection Chie Aoki, body 17-3, 2017, lacquer and hemp cloth on polystyrene foam, private collection

essay

by BJÖRK

artwork by CHIE AOKI

Pioneering Icelandic singer and musician Björk is known for breaking the boundaries of electronic, pop, and avant-garde music. Her distinctive voice and fearless experimentation with sound and technology have made her an enduring influence in contemporary music and art.

I have been asked to describe magic in music. This is, of course, the most elusive of all things mystical. To even try to describe how Olivier Messiaen’s improvisational celestial goth was concocted or how the inner biological rhythms of Nobukazu Takemura were amalgamated would be blasphemy on my part. How could Ravel express the unspeakable grace and elegance of Pavane pour une infante défunte without music?

What I can humbly try to describe is how musicians have rituals to get closer to this magnificent miraculous thing called music. Most of us musicians have extremely private and idiosyncratic methods that somehow include both strict disciplinarian repeated flag-posts, but also a fanatic freedom and the opportunity to evade every single rule that we set ourselves … because it needs to be slippery…

I will try to share some of my magical recipes towards music. Of course, I will both overshare and undershare, for all should be both carefully hidden and fully available at the same time.

elusive — delusive is the word

My own relationship with magic started from walking to school as a child in nature. When you walk for periods longer than an episode on Netflix … you start to hum to yourself … and after twenty minutes or so, the spatial intelligence gathered by scanning the territory covered starts expressing its information through sounds. They start as delicate gentle noises, and then, as the voice gets warmer, higher notes come. The fuel is usually daily emo, or whatever happened that day. As your senses merge, body, mind, and heart form a sonic mutual ectoplasm, an equalizing of all three towards a place where it all makes sense.

I would like to add to this recipe the satisfaction of singing … it is deeply sensual … a kind of upper body sex, and the breathing and the similarities of images of vocal chords and reproductive organs are not lost to me. The territorial behaviour of birds claiming space by singing is a deeply mystical thing.

Sonic flamboyance is in our dna

we sang before we spoke

monkeys played flutes before we found words.

If there is a recipe to this magical ceremony, the main ingredient would be oxygen

it is an oxygen festival

the celebration of.

eden knew

about oxygen that is

but these paradises can be reached with breath in all homes everywhere

through Kundalini yoga

making love

or just walking for an hour or so

the catharsis is ours

For most musicians, these solitary experiences help us enter the songwriting headspace. Playing concerts is the opposite spectrum, not the private but the universal, and therefore often more complex to align. Walking on stage, you close your eyes and an act of selflessness fills the room. You tilt your head and aim for the halo of the room and that your skull and ceiling align … effortlessly…

Warming the voice up is a sacred ritual that I would like to add to this magical recipe. To align it with the room and location is an impulsive and instinctual manifestation, and the total acceptance of repetition and an absolute refusal of it at the same time. It’s a delicate balance, as in the spiritual discipline of Japanese tea ceremonies. You must accept that the method is everything yet absolutely nothing at the same time. Do it in such a mechanical deliberate manner that it is invisible … and accept that warmups are after all ONLY spiritual and about connecting with the moment in the room, as you have never done it before.

Group weaving intelligence is something that most musicians learn early on and that is essential for protecting magic in concerts. You prepare with musicians at home and hope that the connection you have woven is genuine and that it glows in live performance … the inner workings become grander than the participants. Because when you walk on that stage, it doesn’t matter which fantabulous ingredients you have.

When push comes to a shove, this communal fiber is all you got.

The binary in the humility of intention is a vital ingredient in the magic of live performance, too. The potion is strongest when you don’t expect anything but humbly want everything as well. You must be willing to die for tonight’s concert but also absolutely must not give a fuck.

Working with which cards you get dealt is a main ingredient in music ceremonies. In an I-CHING-ian way, it’s a sublime exercise in working with accidents. To work out the muscle in you that can connect the dots and find synchronicity in all situations. In my humble opinion, I-CHING is not about prophecy or divination; it is about your openness to the magic in the world, to see if you are ready. Because a performance gives you both what you intended, but also the unknowns that you will have to surf, at all cost, and this dare-devil gung-ho spirit is probably why live performance is so addictive.

You just never know

everything can break and sublimity emerges

nothing breaks and dullness rules

or a dull breakdown

or a sublime perfection

you will never know

but can you dance with it?

I feel sound is the single most effective element there is. Scientists have proven that when we hear a new song, our brain
writes a new pattern, and every time you hear it, it becomes a different neurological experience, each time more familiar. And then a new territory is formed in our brain. It helps it to grow.

Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia documented beautifully how music accesses the brain, even when nothing else can. The inner structure of a song is extremely important. There is hidden magic in the spatial shape of each section of a song … like corridors in a building or angles in different road junctions. The tension between the walls in each sonic room has a deep profound ancient meaning. The audio feng shui of each song affects us strongly. If it is tight or open, hopeful or demanding, rhythmic or liquid can change us. These shamanic rituals have been performed by us for us since before us.

we all know

and not only spatial intelligence in music but also vibration of sounds is essential

a sub-bass can vibrate our organs into orgasms

a violin is like a replica of our nervous system, and stroked well makes our empath feeling cry

synths harness electricity that we have lived with in our bodies since thunders and lightnings were invented

and we all recognise the rumbles in the magnetism of solarwinds

electronic music can express this

rhythms are like our heartbeat and connected to our feet

and by walking or dancing it has an immediate change on us

all the way up to the heightened elegance of tango or the tribal trance of raves

For me, sound is a more natural place to live in than houses with concrete walls. I know how to live inside a song, settle in its warm form, colour, timbre, and texture, nest in its bass, and get aroused by its abstract sonic storytelling.

But words are vital, too. And I believe that in our shamanic past, certain mantras repeated would become part of the audio sculpture. All musicians know how different words can alter potential in songs, and not only in their literal meaning. The vowels and the consonants and the structure of the words have a deep impact on us. In this way, language and music are not two separate things but the same, a magical wisdom we have developed since the beginning of time.

we know our magic

we do

I believe melodies have an inner magic written into them. Their snakelike shapes have inner tantric meanings. The spaces between the notes and the difference in length and rhythm have their own identity that we all recognise when we hear it. By just moving one note in a divine chorus melody, it can totally alter its character and purpose. Musicians who write music know this and play with the simplicity and the space in the inner magnetism between notes. It can have a dramatic effect. And isn’t it wondrous that when we hear a melody we all agree on how it feels? And we feel it immediately. This feels magical to me. This is the chess of note-moving, which is a profound ritual that all musicians know.

Through the history of mankind we have expressed identity and tribes in different vocal stylings 

it is an ID that echoes bomb-like through generations

from throat-singing to opera

it is an oral alchemy to explain who we are.

I also feel it is essential to keep fertility and vibrant magic in recordings, like in the documentation of world music. Field recording is truly an art form, both in communicating in the moment with the performers, and how the recording can still cast a spell a hundred years later. It is a ritual in itself. And for listeners to be able to hear theme songs of ancient festivals centuries later is magic. You are taken right there into an atmospheric trance. It has been a precious way to document humanity in all states, from Himalayan children’s lullabies to drug travelogues. Or how the call of the voice in fado shows the longing of a lover at sea. You can feel the tilting of the body towards the window at that very moment.

music has captured all states of humans

like the speaking in tongues of Billy MacKenzie

or the grand euphoria of choral music

it has been a capsule of long-forgotten erotic teenage love

or the elevation of feet in 200 bpm footwork from africa to chicago

let’s not forget the importance of architectural sonic dissonance in music

it has been an excellent tool to assault audiences in all kinds of revolutions around the world

and we all know how the precise bpm of lust can open us to our desires

I have always felt that when people are silenced, often music-making becomes the only way to be recognised. In extreme historical conditions, writing music or inventing new genres has been the only way to be heard. A way to cast a spell. And by luring the nation into dance, they would have to accept our identities. I was lucky enough to be a fly on the wall and witness the birth of drum and bass in London. By mashing up the breakbeats of industrial tech with half-speed dub from Jamaica on the turntables, they wrote their own passport into the UK.

It goes back and forth between 80 bpm and 160 bpm

describing the tension of an immigrant and the pain in merging of cultures

but also celebrating it and in this way luring a whole generation of locals into dance

the news were full of unsurmountable racial problems

but on the dancefloors we were uniting

this is an ancient ritual that has been performed repeatedly.

For example, Flamenco: that was made with the tension in the music between the blues of Egyptian Roma people and fast happy Spanish guitars, going between two speeds nonstop. Sometimes this expresses itself in all sorts of complicated cross-cultural ways, like when the universal zeitgeist of Motown hit Siamese soul in the 1960s, or in remixes, or when musicians do intercontinental mashups, or in the tradition of a million jazz covers, or in the nostalgia of Martynov’s take on Mahler’s Der Abschied.

It is all shamanic handshakes

to bridge the unbridgeable

cross classes cross cultures cross time.

And then the explosive issue of gender. Millions of times it has been a sacred ritual to express femininity where it couldn’t find respect in its own culture otherwise. The majority of my favourite recordings are of repressed singers who still found space in sound despite all.

The miracle of music is so magnificent that it has housed all genders

always

at all times

hosted lgbtqia+ dancefloor anthems all the way

and to bring us to our times

the digital textile in well-programmed techno informs us of who we are today

we have been able to reach areas in us which we couldn’t access before.

laptops have given underdogs voices,

concocting sonic remedies in bedrooms.

we have documented the dark mystery of malfunction of technology, too,

like the scratched CDs of oval,

while the precision of computers express the gliding rhythms of planets on orbit

the passing of time in symphonies can express sunsets and sunrises

we still manage to connect to the sacred with sound

like that: we are rooted into the moment

as beings we pick up a plant-reed of our territory and blow into it.

in this way, we collaborate with nature

like in the behaviour of church-bells

or the effect gravity has on pendulums

the movement of sound connects us to being habitants on this planet

connect our persona simultaneously to the earth’s core and to the skies

places our souls into context with the universe

and we will keep this sorcery going forever

let´s conjure up some magic

let’s play some music.

END