Bjork - Drawing Restraint 9 (Vinyl LP) * * *

Bjork's Soundtrack Composed for Matthew Barney's Film Drawing Restraint 9 on LP.

An 11 track soundtrack composed by Björk with minimal vocals for celebrated contemporary visual artist Matthew Barney's film Drawing Restraint 9, in which she also appears. Barney is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, five films made over ten years. He is the youngest living artist to be honored with a retrospective at The Guggenheim Museum (New York).

Unlike her soundtrack for Lars von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark which drew on the tradition of theatrical and cinema musicals (and won her Best Actress at Cannes), this is a collection of delicate single instrument studies, for harp, harpsichord and celeste, large orchestral masses scored for trumpet, trombone and oboe, electronic basslines, children's choir and, in a manner recalling the all-vocal Medulla album, Björk's singular voice, treated as an instrument of astonishingly flexible texture. The soundtrack orientates itself around the traditional music forms of Japan as the film was shot in Nagasaki Bay onboard a whaling ship. The opening sequence, sung by Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Billy), sets out the folk-culture roots of whaling, and the barbed political history in which those drowned.

Björk has written a suite of haunting music for the sho, one of the oldest instruments in Japanese culture with seventeen reeds and fifteen distinct pipes. It is performed by Mayumi Miayata, one of the world's foremost sho players. Björk also worked with scholars of the Noh theatre to produce new musical settings, incorporating the low, growling vocal techniques of traditional Japanese court entertainment. As a counterpoint to the ancient, Björk's collaborations with her close circle of electronic producers continues - Mark (LFO) Bell, Valgeir Sigursson, Akira Rabelais and Leila.