Finding Björk’s 'Biophilia' After My Grandmother's Death

Gateways: How My Grandmother’s Passing and Björk’s Biophilia Fostered My Love for Music

On Valentine’s Day in 2012, my grandmother passed away. Born Eleanor Joy Sumner Meyer in Sumner, a small town in the Mississippi Delta founded by her grandfather, she was known to me simply as Grand. I’m a born and raised New Orleanian, but Grand had lived upstate in Alexandria, Louisiana. After her funeral, my mom and dad were tasked with her estate—including her Alexandria home, which we dismantled and eventually sold as a family over a three-year process. I was almost 12 at the time of her passing, on the cusp of puberty and in the throes of self-invention.

Being as young as I was, I tagged along in the backseat for the three-and-a-half-hour car ride to Alexandria to sort through her mail, take care of her furniture and, finally, let go of the house itself. Naturally, the space in between my headphones became a mental sanctuary away from dealing with grief and the somber atmosphere of my surroundings during those many, many road trips. Little did I know that those car trips would prove most formative for my eventual career path as a music journalist.

I became obsessed with a number of artists and albums, but chief among them was Björk’s 2011 album Biophilia. It was the first album that truly captured my imagination. I often combed through iTunes when I was bored, so I’m 99% sure that’s how I found it. I spent countless hours listening to Biophilia over and over, determined to figure out its singular music that couldn’t be further away from the cultural tapestry of Louisiana. (Björk has a long standing dislike of using traditional instruments, such as guitars, and that’s only scraping the surface of Biophilia’s originality.) Looking back on that time, I now find Grand, and her home in little Alexandria, in the strange time signatures and abstract poetry of the album. Biophilia is an album about the natural world, but it’s also a record imbued with preternatural emotions that go far beyond mere scientific facts.

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In hindsight, Biophilia is perhaps the most inaccessible Björk album to introduce me to her work (and music at large). It’s a bizarre record, but a wonderfully bizarre record at that. The simplest way to explain the conceit of Biophilia is right there in the title: a love (philia) for nature (bio) in all its forms. Each of the 10 songs on the standard album is devoted to a particular scientific concept. (Well, mostly, but we’ll get back to that later.) Song titles read like exhibits in a museum of natural history: “Crystalline,” “Moon,” “Virus.” Then there’s the iPad app suite: Biophilia, marketed as “the world’s first app album” with each song having its own corresponding app. “Semi-educational,” and designed for kids to learn about music, nature and technology simultaneously, the suite of apps was a means for Björk to manifest her idea of a more natural way to teach music, in a way similar to how she often composes her own melodies, walking among nature in Iceland.

With the Biophilia project, Björk hoped for children to learn about music and explore it further. In a sense, I was one of those kids, but in the most roundabout way possible. I never fully understood the app suite, so it wasn’t a part of my fascination with the album. It was the music, and Björk herself, which kept my interest. Biophilia was an escape hatch to unknown places, away from the arduous task of going through Grand’s things. When Björk sang “crystals grow like plants” as a hologram in a strobe-lit orb sending green laser beams onto the moon in the “Crystalline” music video, my brain chemistry was permanently altered. Like crystals growing from arranged molecules, my love for music grew from Biophilia.

Truthfully, it wasn’t just Biophilia that hooked me on music. It was also Grimes’s Visions and Glasser’s Ring and St. Vincent’s Actor. (There was one night particularly on the way back to New Orleans when I gleefully spent my time in the backseat silently—I thought—lip synching to Visions, and my parents told me to keep it down.) But I found all of those records more or less after Biophilia. I had to understand Biophilia in all its artful abstraction of hard science, displacing my grief onto a difficult (but comforting) and jarring (but cohesive) album. “May I or can I or have I / to offend now / craving miracles,” goes the refrain of “Thunderbolt,” voicing in the politest of terms my youthful boredom with the tedious aftermath of devastating loss. Grief is never easy, and so I unconsciously sought similarly complex music.

Looking back, there are strange cosmic coincidences between Biophilia and Grand. At the surface level, the first connection is hair. Grand used to wear her curls in a dark orange coif atop her head. On the cover of Biophilia, Björk dons a massive blood-orange wig, a signature feature of that era. But, there’s something deeper still between Grand and Biophilia. In the foyer of her house, an old chime doorbell would ring out in deep brassy tones whenever someone was at the front door. The song “Sacrifice” is built upon an arrangement of the bizarre, ghostly stainless steel sharpsichord, one of the many instruments Björk commissioned for Biophilia. That sharpsichord, while it is silver stainless steel, sounds just like the golden brass chimes of Grand’s doorbell. Out of all the bespoke instruments on the Biophilia, the sharpsichord is also the only one not specifically made for the album.

“Sacrifice” is a peculiar song for a number of reasons beyond its idiosyncratic central instrument. On an album nominally about capital-n Nature, “Sacrifice,” as Björk has described in interviews, is about divorce. Not her own divorce (Vulnicura, her next album, would come in 2015), but the divorces of her friends. It’s a dirge mourning broken romance in the third person, anticipating the heartache of Vulnicura. “With clairvoyance / she knew what you needed / and she gave it to you,” Björk intones over the sharpsichord’s clock-like machinations. The lyrics recall the single “Mutual Core.” On a song viscerally about tectonic plates, Björk belts out “You’d know / I gave it all.” It’s just one of many examples of Biophilia veering wildly away from its stated subject of literal nature into cosmic abstraction.

Many lyrics across Biophilia betray an elusive moodiness, despite the album’s celebratory premise. “Sacrifice,” in its refusal to tie itself down to a specific ‘natural’ concept, is the culmination of those melancholic tremors underneath many songs on Biophilia. Despite fitting the album sonically, on a conceptual level, the inclusion of “Sacrifice” is puzzling. Apparently, the song is inspired by mating rituals, but its lyrics are so deeply human that they are hard to assign to something so impersonal as the rituals of animalistic procreation. For its corresponding app in the Biophilia suite, “Sacrifice” is the only song without an obvious natural connection to its musical mini game, simply giving players a keyboard with letters and music notes to tool around with, as opposed to a cluster of crystals or lightning bolts or strands of DNA.

“Cosmogony” nearly falls into the same category as “Sacrifice,” but it fits the record if only because the song is centered around creation myths and the Big Bang Theory. I wouldn’t necessarily call my relationship to “Cosmogony” another “cosmic coincidence,” but the song is also deeply connected to Grand in my mind. And I don’t mean the version of “Cosmogony” on the standard Biophilia album either. I specifically mean the Serban Ghenea Mix, which I latched onto for whatever reason at that time. It’s breathtaking.

More than the shifting tectonics of “Mutual Core,” and the Tesla arpeggios of “Thunderbolt,” and the geometric jingle of “Crystalline,” the Serban Ghenea Mix of “Cosmogony” represents best that formative time in the wake of Grand’s death—capturing the awe of looking up at the stars and recognizing how small you are compared to the cosmos above. You can practically hear Saturn move past in the planetarium-sized brass horns. There’s also the heavenly accompaniment of Graduale Nobili (the 24-piece Icelandic women’s choir and the undersung backbone of much of the album) who elevate “Cosmogony” to a wide screen, cinematic quality. (Björk herself has cited Kubrick as an inspiration for the song.) The song is nothing less than sublime. Grand, I know you’re up there reading this. I hope this essay reaches you like God breaking out of the cold black egg and the silver fox’s song that formed the world we know.

Fast forward to today, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing this piece on an iPad, which is fitting for Biophilia’s technological ambitions. The app suite itself is no longer available on the American App Store. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) I have now listened to the album more than I ever did in 2012, but I’ve found new life in it through the plethora of remixes, which I would be remiss not to include here. In typical Björkian fashion, the companion remix album, Bastards, is wryly subversive, warping songs almost beyond recognition with a characteristically eclectic group of remixers. It’s an uneven and disorienting, but ultimately thrilling rework of Biophilia—and it’s arguably more interesting than the original album itself. In my opinion, the best remixes of the Biophilia series are: both Death Grips remixes, respectively of “Thunderbolt” and especially “Sacrifice,” Hudson Mohawke’s astonishing IMAX-ready rework of “Virus,” and Matthew Hebert’s Teutonic Plates Mix of “Mutual Core.” The underrated bonus track, “Nátturá,” a collaboration with Thom Yorke not mentioned enough, also deserves a shout out. After hearing the album in one iteration for so long, these remixes reinvigorate the songs in exciting ways—radically reimagining them from their original dirge-like forms into new ones entirely. While I imagine Grand would possibly be open to Biophilia as it is, I think the remixes would be totally off limits, with the exception of maybe Hudmo’s “Virus,” if it accompanied a documentary about, say, cells.

I come from a family of lawyers, but Grand was an artist and interior designer with an MFA under her belt. My mom likes to credit her for my artistic tendencies, with no precedent for my career path as a critic from either of my parents. Grand was plucky, resourceful, and kind. She was staunchly resolute in who she was and what she stood for, always putting others before herself. Biophilia was born out of a need to simplify and create new opportunities after the Icelandic banking crisis. I’m not trying to compare Björk or Biophilia to my grandmother, but there’s an alignment in ideals between the album’s modus operandi and Grand’s—an idiosyncratic ability to adapt and provide for others, like she did for her family and for my mom. My own memories of Grand include painting Easter eggs at her house and sitting in her lap in the driver’s seat of her van when she was baby-sitting me once.

Arriving home, my mom, unable to find me or my grandmother, understandably panicked. My mom called her, and after Grand explained where we were, she said as she always did, “Oh Mary! You worry too much!” Another time when I was a bit older, I was playing The Beatles: Rock Band. I was singing “Come Together.” When I got to the part with the lyric “shoot me,” Grand retorted “gladly.” I gave her a blank stare. I was maybe eight or nine and didn’t know how to reciprocate her teasing humor. She had a mischievous streak that never let up even in her later years. Grand passed before I became a full person with interests and thoughts of my own, but I’m grateful for what time we did have together. She lives on in writing, like this, and Biophilia is the bridge that connects me back to her.

Peyton Toups is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared at Pitchfork and SPIN.

Gateways: How My Grandmother’s Passing and Björk’s Biophilia Fostered My Love for Music