Bjork The Music from Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 LP

Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.

It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk's musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.

The liquid quality of Drawing Restraint 9 (as material, as allegory, and as setting) allows Björk a unique opportunity to draw upon the full range of her manifold talents, and the result is a stunning new collection of music: delicate single instrument studies for harp, harpsichord, and celeste, large orchestral masses scored for trumpet, trombone, and oboe, sinewy electronic basslines, children's choir, boiling cauldrons of noise, and, throughout, her singular, elemental voice.

Fittingly, Björk's soundtrack primarily orients itself around the traditional musical forms of Japan. Effortlessly sidestepping any attempt at cheap pastiche or ethno-fusion clichés, Björk has instead written a suite of haunting new music for one of the culture's oldest instruments, the sho.

The music Björk has written for sho is performed by Mayumi Miyata, one of the world's foremost sho players who has premiered compositions for the instrument by, among others, John Cage and Toru Takemitsu; she appears in the film playing her instrument.

In order to come up with a primal, direct musical equivalent to the operatic climax of the film's flensing ritual, Björk has worked with scholars of the Noh theatre to produce new musical settings of a Matthew Barney poem which is sung in the intonation patterns and low, growling vocal techniques of traditional Japanese court entertainment. Punctuated by woodblock percussion and high-keening tones, the result is a powerfully felt music with an elemental, invocatory power.