“You simply can’t underestimate the size and significance of this project” interactive media artist Scott Snibbe opens. “It has evolved over something like three years to become this highly important new platform for the consumption of music; it really does have the potential to change everything.”
Snibbe is talking about his work on Bjork’s long awaited seventh album Biophilia – the world’s first ‘app album’. For whilst Biophilia will earn itself a standard CD release on September 27, it is the album’s more radical multimedia elements that should catch people’s attention. In fact they already are, and that is where Snibbe comes in.
“Bjork wanted to get away from her personal experiences with the new album; she wanted to focus on something music bigger, the relationship between nature, technology and, of course, music” he explains. “She originally envisaged Biophilia as an interactive installation – a house – that would tour around the world. She also considered a 3D-movie with director Michael Gondry, but then he got busy with other films and the iPad came out which, as a portable, interactive multimedia tablet, hugely excited her. She approached me and a few other developers last June with this big long email explaining the concept of what she wanted to do. We all said yes.”
Snibbe, renowned iPad developer Max Weisel and interactive publishers Touch Press (led by Theo Gray) – some of Bjork’s favourite app developers - were given plenty of freedom in terms of interpreting her ideas, but the artist had much to feedback. On occasion, she would email the team over 100 times per day; at other times, they were invited to attend random, inspiring locations such as an abandoned lighthouse in Iceland and work for long, uninterrupted stretches.
The first fruits of the project have finally been released this month. A Biophilia ‘mother’ app is now free to download on iTunes which will, over time, generate ‘in-apps’ for each of the album’s 10 songs. Customers access and purchase in-apps by flying through a 3-D galaxy accompanying Biophilia’s sweeping theme song Cosmogony; each one explores the relationship between the universe, musical structures and technology in different immersive ways – hence, fans can use Biophilia to make and learn about music (with new instruments Bjork has specially commissioned), broaden their knowledge of natural phenomena, play cleverly integrated games, or simply listen to the songs (supported by animated scores, rich sleeve notes and details of lyrics).
The app sits alongside Bjork’s heavily-animated and stimulative new website. In due course, these two channels, and the physical album itself, will link to a series of unique live concerts and educational music workshops (backed by more of Snibbe’s connective visual designs) at interesting venues in eight major international cities. A “beta” show was recently unveiled during the Manchester International Festival to considerable acclaim; footage from it will form part of a 90-minute documentary capturing the whole, riotously creative adventure.
“Around 90 per cent of the ideas came from Bjork,” Snibbe suggests. “She offered kind, thoughtful feedback throughout the process but there was always an immense pressure to live up to the groundbreaking nature of her music. There was also the pressure of time; a project like this would normally take around two years, but we had one. It was very, very intense and a lot of components would regularly go back to drawing board and need to be built again.”
There have been one or two comments on online forums that Snibbe and co.’s Biophilia app, despite being at an early stage of life, offers little flow between its several categorised sections and fails to fully connect and unify the various interactive experiences of its users. The app, they say, remains ‘promotional tool’ – albeit an engaging one – rather than anything culturally seismic.
Snibbe disagrees: “I think we’ve arrived at a highly significant moment in music; more so, in entertainment. This is the birth of a new media, where lots of existing media channels have properly joined together in an explosion of interactivity. It’s like the birth of opera, or cinema; it’s on a huge scale. So many of today’s music apps are about marketing and building the fan relationship; and they’re fantastic for that. But Biophilia is a work of narrative art; it stands on its own two feet as a solid artistic creation that people will be interested in. That was always what Bjork intended.”
Many of today’s contemporary artists – clubland or otherwise – have long proven receptive to the concept of music as multi-media, multi-sensory experience. Their releases are gradually incorporating more relevant and engaging digital content; their shows, everything from radical new costume and lighting ideas to bold, highly atmospheric visuals. Multimedia compositions like Biophilia have to be a natural progression for today’s change-minded record industry.
It isn’t as simple as that, however, according to Snibbe, who argues that it is the record companies, not artists, who hold many of the keys to musical progression: “The straightforward music industry is dying thanks to services like Spotify. Digital revenues are increasing rapidly; app sales in general will eclipse worldwide music sales this year which is a staggering thought. Of course app developers are being stifled by the contracts and legal processes most record labels still employ. Many highly original app projects are dead in the water before they even leave the drawing board because label contracts don’t allow for any kind of money to go to the developer.”
Bjork had a different approach. Owning the rights to all of her new material, she was able to approach rival developers and bring them together with an empowering business partnership. The app and in-apps would be self-funded but profits, crucially, would split 50-50.
“I was like ‘yah, it’s like the punk days’” Bjork comments in her press materials. “[It’s] multi-tasking as far as [I’ve] ever taken it. I have a feeling it’s not only going to be 10 songs. I might make it into a double album or just use this same set-up and every three months – or whenever I feel like it – I’ll add another song. The apps [paired] with the subject matter of nature meeting sound… I mean you could do 5000 songs!”
In the meantime, Snibbe has enough on his plate completing the various in-apps for Biophilia’s remaining tracks. That will take him and his team through to autumn, at which point he hopes to return to previous hit project, OscilloScoop – an app allowing users to make electro, house and techno grooves simply by gliding fingertips over spinning animations.
“The whole point of OscilloScoop is that you’re getting the same music-making tools professional DJs and electronic musicians use but being given a simple, intuitive video game-inspired interface with which to make your tracks” Snibbe enthuses. “After we originally launched it, we had great feedback from a number of professional musicians wanting various tweaks and upgrades. We think we can revisit the app and make it even more of a platform for people.”
Snibbe, a computer programmer for 30 years whose first forays into music interactivity stretch back as far as the mid-1990s, remains amazed at the pace of audio-visual change. “Music and multimedia will only get closer and closer to one another; there are obstacles but that process will keep rolling… keep surprising and exciting us. These really are exciting times.”
Words: Ben Lovett
