Vesper No. 8 | Vesper | Spring-Summer 2023
Guglielmo Bottin
Vespertine
Keywords
Björk, popular music, crepuscule,
Vespertine, electronic
Taking its cue from
the lemma ‘vespertine’, this contribution analyses the crepuscular
characteristics and the many antinomies in Björk's eponymous work. The 2001
album - recently adapted for music-theatre - deals with the theme of sensuality
in its multiple aspects, with narrative and sound modalities that range
from the celestial to earthly carnality, to a bewildering intimacy that opens
to the uncanny. Between declamatory singing and an instinctive, suffocated
vocal persona, Bjork alternates triumphant atmospheres with hypnagogic
soundscapes, authorship with appropriation, disjointed electronic rhythms with
thick and uniform layers of strings and choirs, paroxysmal performativity with
a sense of isolation in private, recondite spaces where physical and immaterial
worlds merge. These sound and narrative juxtapositions present a double
reflection that, like the threshold of twilight, alternately opens up to light
or darkness.
contacts
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