new album Bjork, 'Biophilia'

Bjork sings it like a sorceress sharing a recipe: "Nuance makes heat." That line in "Mutual Core" neatly captures the effect of the eerie details that suffuse her eighth album: organ, squishy electronics and the high sighs of a women's choir in stark fields of echo, like a haunted digital sister of Nico's 1969 album, The Marble Index. Biophilia was partly created on an iPad and is being released as a set of apps. But in the songs, human desires and foibles echo natural phenomena: the fatal passion in "Virus," the new worlds born in "Cosmogony." And when Bjork's supernatural voice soars in "Thunderbolt" – "Craving miracles" – soul easily trumps software.

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