Biophilia

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.