Hidden Places: Hyper-realism in Björk’s Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark

Abstract

Björk’s collaboration with the director Lars von Trier on the film Dancer in the Dark was marked by well-publicized personal and aesthetic differences. Their work nevertheless shares an intense preoccupation with the nature and quality of sound. Björk’s soundtrack systematically explores the boundaries between music and noise, and the title of von Trier’s film itself presupposes a heightened attention to aural detail. This paper proposes a theoretical context for understanding Björk’s music in the light of her work with von Trier. Whereas Björk’s soundtrack responds to the visual and narrative stimuli of von Trier’s film, the use of sound in her album Vespertine thematicizes more familiar Björk subjects: the relationship between music, landscape and the natural world, and Björk’s own (constructed) sense of Nordic musical identity. By placing Vespertine alongside Björk’s music for Dancer in the Dark, the sense of ‘hyperreality’ that defines both also emerges as a primary characteristic of her work.

Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla

“…Also interested in embodied experience, Nicola Dibben (2006) investigates formations of intimacy and subjectivity in two other songs from Vespertine, "Jóga" and "Unison." Daniel M. Grimley (2005) examines how sound is used in Vespertine in light of Björk's collaboration with Lars von Trier in the film Dancer in the Dark. Charity Marsh and Melissa West (2003) argue that Björk deconstructs the nature/technology dichotomy in Homogenic through the recorded music on the album, her performances of songs from the album, and its cover art.…”

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland

“…What notions of the natural world does music help construct, given a situation in which the environment can be both a particular place to which music might pertain (with implicit connotations of ownership), and an Òecological commonsÓ (the natural resources shared by humans)? While popular music studies, and musicology more generally, has a long history of investigating representations of and relationships with landscape, especially in the Nordic region (Grimley 2005(Grimley , 2011Korsgaard 2011;Mitchell 2009;Richardson 2012), it has only recently begun to explore the relationship with the natural world from an environmental perspective (Dibben 2009a, Pedelty 2011. Where this chapter differs from other approaches in nordic popular music studies, is in understanding the environmental crisis as a failure of culture as much as it is a failure of engineering, science and politics (Allen 2011a).…”

“…Popular musicÕs construction of the Icelandic landscape, and the way this relates to and helps construct Icelandic national identity have been discussed elsewhere (Dibben 2009a(Dibben , 2009bGrimley 2005;Korsgaard 2011;Mitchell 2009;Richardson 2012;Webb 2010). That scholarship shows how musical material and its reception inside and outside Iceland and the Nordic region, is inspired by and expresses particular views about the natural environment as Òpure wildernessÓ through its visual, sonic and linguistic representation.…”

Sigur Rós's Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography

“…One might add popular songs such as Jacques Brel's "Le plat pays" ('The Flat Country', 1962) or the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" (1967) among innumerable other examples of songs in which the lyrics are the prime carriers of a sense of place. It goes without saying that places and landscapes have been a major inspiration for a plethora of songs and compositions throughout Western musical history, from Beethoven to the British pastoral tradition of Vaughan Williams and others, to the expressions of landscape in Grieg, Sibelius and the Nordic classical tradition that Daniel Grimley has analysed (Grimley 2006, Knight 2006.…”