Released: 2011
Essentials: 2011

Biophilia Educational Project: http://biophiliaeducational.org/ Biophilia is the musical project and eighth full-length studio album from Icelandic singer Björk. The album was released on October 10, 2011, over four years after her last original studio effort Volta (2007). The album is "partly recorded" on an iPad and will be released in the form of a series of apps. Biophilia will be the world's "first app album" in collaboration with Apple. Björk has described the project as a multimedia collection "encompassing music, apps, internet, installations and live shows". Material from the album was debuted during a concert series which was held in the summer of 2011 at the Manchester International Festival. Music from Biophilia first appeared in the iPad app "Solar System". The app, developed by Touch Press and Faber and Faber and written by author Marcus Chown, is an eBook with interactive 3D objects, movies, animations, and diagrams "based on real scientific data", along with images from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. From June, every song in the album will be released as a single app for iPad, twice a month. The first song to be released as an app (which is also considered the first single) is "Crystalline". The video was directed by long-time collaborator Michel Gondry and shot on May 26. "Biophilia" for iPad will include around ten separate apps, all housed within one "mother" app. Each of the smaller apps will relate to a different track from the album, allowing people to explore and interact with the song's themes or even make a completely new version of them. It will also be an evolving entity that will grow as and when the album's release schedule dictates, with new elements added. Scott Snibbe, an interactive artist who was commissioned by Björk back in the summer of 2010 to produce the app, as well as the images for the live shows (which will combine his visuals with National Geographic imagery, mixed live from iPads on the stage), describes how Björk saw the possibilities of using apps, not as separate to the music, but as a vital component of the whole project. For one song, "Virus", the app will feature a close-up study of cells being attacked by a virus to represent what Snibbe calls: "A kind of a love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it." The interactive game challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if the player succeeds. In order to hear the rest of the song, the players will have to let the virus take its course. Using some artistic license, the cells will also mouth along to the chorus. It's this determination to fuse different elements together, be it juxtaposing a female choir from Greenland with the bleeps and glitches of electronic music pioneers Matmos during the Vespertine tour, or meshing soaring strings and jagged beats on Homogenic, that "helps explain the power and success of Björk's collaborations". Read more on Last.fm.