Do you want to climb inside Björk’s mouth for a while? Inside Vulnicura VR, a virtual reality companion to the Icelandic musician’s eighth studio album, just released on Steam, you can actually get inside her mouth for six minutes at a time.
Vulnicura is Björk’s eighth studio album, the story of – amongst other things – her heartbreak and emotional journey following the end of a relationship. Things got off to an unexpected start when Vulnicura leaked online in January 2015, leading to a digital release two months early with no accompanying singles. Almost five years on, she’s only just stopped mixing it.
“I’ve mixed the sound of this album a million times now,” she says. “Oh, there’s a new format, new mastering software or now we have to mix it for 360. Now I have to listen to everything again and make sure the balance is right. The amount of work and the amount of tech and the amount of money... I would have to say it’s the most labour intensive of anything I’ve ever done.”
The way Björk tells it, the journey to get Vulnicura VR to where it is now, a fully fledged work of virtual reality art, is the story of “seven VR videos with seven different companies, in the beginning it was seven different formats” and “everybody is wearing seven different hats”. It didn’t just take a million mixes but “a million and one Skypes” to get it produced. Now it's out, she feels like she's got "50 per cent of my headspace back."
Björk predates the current generation of VR enthusiasts and first dabbled with the medium in the 1990s. In 2013, she released the Biophilia app, which combined the music of that album with, well multimedia science lessons.
Back then, there was still the possibility that so-called virtual experiences would be confined to ipadss. It wasn’t until after the release of Biophilia that Björk and her creative director and collaborator James Merry got their first taste of how far the technology had come with demos of the Oculus Rift.
The journey towards a true VR album, the kind that could be experienced on Rift-like headsets, started with an installation in 2015, though it wasn’t until over a year later that Björk became committed to seeing it through.
After the release of the Vulnicura album, the first track Björk and her team turned to was Black Lake, the music video for which initially featured as an immersive but non-VR exhibit in an early 2015 Björk retrospective at MoMA, with designers recreating an Icelandic cave for the viewing. “Black Lake took us a really long time to crack, about two years. We changed everything ten times, including the concept,” she says.
As the VR experience it eventually became, it’s one of the most affecting tracks on Vulnicura, even though technically speaking it’s akin to Netflix’s mobiles VR app which places you in the seats of a 3D cinema app watching its 2D screen. Here the cinema is the wet, cold cave in 360 degrees. The viewer is trapped between two panoramic 2D pictures of Björk’s grief playing out, chest beating and everything. Compared to what’s in store elsewhere in Vulnicura it’s simple, but it’s all consuming and it works.
The most famous of her VR music videos Stonemilker, which features Björk singing very close to your face, was as simple as Black Lake was difficult to get right. It was shot on a cold, November day: Björk’s birthday. “Stonemilker could not have existed without Black Lake,” she says. “Almost like, why does it have to be so complicated? Just get a 360 camera, go to the beach where I wrote the song and film it in one take. Andrew [Thomas Huang, director] proposed a few other ideas but that felt right. The way I put the string arrangement felt very 360.”
Stonemilker is one of the most obvious showcases of the impressive binaural sound in Vulnicura VR - one of the many mixes the album has gone through - so that as you turn your head in a spatially tracked headset such as the HTC Vive, the sound appears to move around you. Björk worked with, amongst others, her engineer Chris Elms and another engineer, Chris Pike, who is based out of BBC Manchester and works on 3D audio projects there. “That was the core team but if you include brainstorming, I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up to 100 people,” she says.
More ambitious treatments of Vulnicura tracks required funding, one of the major challenges of the past half decade of her virtual reality experiments. Quicksand’s treatment was a collaboration with the Miraikan National Museum of Emerging bet365体育赛事 and Innovation in Tokyo, which came about following a month-long stint Björk took part in running music classes for kids as part of her Biophilia tour.
A performance of the song was filmed with a 360-degree camera and streamed live in June 2016. Not one to stop there, Björk wore a 3D printed mask, designed by Neri Oxman, which had projection-mapped, augmented reality graphics laid over the top. “The team we were doing it with in Japan was just incredibly, incredibly professional and quick too,” says Merry. “That one is kind of nuts that we pulled it off.”
Last week, Merry took his mask-making skills to an Instagram livestream with Björchid, a filter that “everyone who uses ends up looking like Björk.” You can try it out yourself by going to James Merry’s Instagram page and hitting the first ‘filters’ highlight.
Both Notget, and Family – the centerpiece of the VR album – were built in 3D game engines, but there’s no real comparison to VR games, beyond bioluminescent aesthetics. There’s no interactivity in most of the videos, with the exception being the ability to sew up a CG wound with the Vive controllers in Family. “One danger of it being sold on Steam is that if people are expecting a computer game, they’ll be disappointed,” says Merry. “But I’m proud of that. This world is all shooting games, which I love, but this is another option.”
Wearing the motion capture suit for the VR companion video to Family in 2016, and seeing the results, was what persuaded Björk that Vulnicura needed to become a full virtual reality album. Not least because it was the experience where people would tend to start crying, no matter which city they were in with the touring Björk Digital exhibition at the time.
“I was kind of obsessed with the action of sewing the wound,” she says. “It had to be this. It’s a really simple physical gesture but that was one of the reasons I became convinced that doing VR for this album was right. It has to be super, super simple and super, super symbolic to work.”
The honestly quite terrifying 360 version of the Jesse Kanda-directed Mouth Mantra followed later in autumn 2016. The more video game-style Notget was released in 2017, with the team having started that project with “very, very little budget” and then having to wait for eight months to get more funding, as was now the norm. It was always going to be a long-term, piecemeal approach with each year bringing new formats and headsets to contend with. “How this project was designed, we would always just do one thing at a time,” says Björk. “Now we’re gonna show it in some Rough Trade shops. Now we’ve got this offer from Australia, now from Japan.”
Merry suggests that since VR has clearly not gone fully, undeniably mainstream in the years since 2015, a suitable home for Vulnicura VR will be museums, galleries and arcade-style spaces like Otherworld in Hackney, London. Björk is adamant that there was never a moment in which she wobbled on her original mission. “I never knew if we could share this all with the punters out there, though,” she says. “What I was worried about was making it for this elite VIP, this chosen few. Whatever it is, it needs to be available to everybody whether it’s Beethoven or Justin Bieber. Sometimes you have to do this crazy experimentation and come out the other end.”
Björk: Vulnicura VR is available to download now on Steam and runs until 01/01/20 at Otherworld in Hackney, London. Björk’s Cornucopia UK tour starts on 19 November.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
