“Hyperballad (Brodski Quartet Version)” – Björk
(Words/music: Björk, Nellee Hooper, Marius De Vries, available on Telegram, One Little Indian 1997)

In “Hyperballad,” Bjork’s narrator leaves her lover every morning, goes to a cliff, and tosses objects over the edge in some type of personal cleansing ritual.  This narrator also contemplates her own mortality by wondering what types of sounds she’d make as she lands against the jagged rocks.  She returns to her lover and says that she goes through this “so I can feel happier / to be safe up here with you.”  It’s romantic in the sense that she’s confronting personal demons – materialistic obsessions, a fear of death, or whatever – in order to break down any barriers between her and her lover.  It’s also kind of crazy; we might expect our partners to go for an early morning jog or a drive around the neighborhood to clear their mind rather than throwing carburetors and discarded dishware off a ledge.

This clash of emotions (put bluntly – the romantic meeting the weird), captures the experience of listening to a Bjork album; enjoying the beautiful moments means accepting (and occasionally finding beauty) in the strange quirks.

The Brodsky Quartet remix of the song only heightens both extremes.  The original starts as a shadowy echo and swells along with the narrator’s storyline.  However, the string quartet treatment gives the song an ironic ultra-modern feel.  If the original felt like a cold autumn sunrise, this sounds like the sparsely decorated flat the couple shares.  At times (perhaps when the light shines in the window), the strings and Bjork settle on a beautiful chord, only to find the strings take a quick turn toward something more dissonant.  When compared with the version on Post, Bjork sounds less settled on this version.  If the album cut is Bjork finding peace in her sunrise tosses, the string quartet version feels like the unsettled version that drove her to throw things in the first place.  Still, both arrangements have these moments of clarity where everything locks in, Bjork sounds heavenly, and the arrangement follows suit.  I suppose this is how littering off of a cliff ends up even vaguely romantic.

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