Essay Björk - Sonic Magic

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 flagposts, 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.

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 behavior of birds claiming space by singing is a deeply mystical thing.

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.

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.

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.

For me, sound is a more natural place to live 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 an audio sculpture. All musicians know how different vowels and consonants 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, above all, a magical wisdom we have developed since the beginning of time.

I believe melodies have an inner magic written into them. Their snakes-like shapes have inner tantric meanings. The spaces between the notes and the difference in length and rhythm have their own identity that we all recognize 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.

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 the 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.

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.

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 non-stop. 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.

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.