Björk and Gondry, Reunitedâ??And it Looks So Good!
By
July 26, 2011
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Michel Gondry, whose Green Hornet came out earlier this year and did not, we felt, garner the respect it deserved. But he’s been up to his old tricks! It wasn’t a surprise to learn he’d directed the video for the first single from Björk’s new multimedia album, Biophilia (“encompassing music, apps, internet, installations, and live shows”). This is the eighth video he’s directed for the musician; their collaborations began almost two decades ago with the memorable, teddy-bear-centric video for “Human Behaviour.”
The video itself shouldn’t be too surprising, either. It’s full of classic Gondry touches: stop-motion and hand-drawn animation; a slightly dreamy, otherworldly setting; and lots of inventive play with color and light. In “Crystalline,” lasers emitted from a fuzzy Björk satellite make cool, percussive craters in an alien landscape, while kaleidoscopic, abstract animations float through the sky. The song, too, is Björkness as usual: haunted vocals over what seems to be a xylophone melody, up until about three minutes in, when she’s joined by fractured drum machines.
Our favorite part, it should be noted, is when tiny Björk skips around in the bubbles at around 3:20.
[Hairpin]
