Hidden Place

At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine:

I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make conventional ideas sound strange. “Hidden Place” is a perfect example. Is it a pop song? An art song? A dance groove? A work of experimental ambient music? The answer is, yes, all of the above. The basic structure is pop boilerplate: verse-prechorus-chorus form, a looped bassline and ostinato-based groove organized into four or eight bar phrases. But on top of that standard foundation is a lot of weird stuff.

I would have guessed that the harmony and melody are based on some exotic scale, but no, the whole tune is in regular old D Dorian mode.

This is the same seven pitches as Björk uses for “The Anchor Song.” These two songs could not sound more different from each other, but I guess they do share an unresolved and angular quality.

Here’s my transcription:

I made a guitar tab version too.

The drum part is extraordinarily intricate in its layering. It mostly consists of non-standard drum sounds. There is a regular kick drum, but that’s reversed a third of the time. Otherwise, the drums sound like they’re heavily processed found sound or synthesizer blips. To write this beat out in Noteflight, I had to map everything to the components of the standard drum kit, and I know it sounds silly. For example, I mapped the quiet rattling sound to the ride cymbal, and the metallic squink to the high tom. I tried to at least get the relative pitches right.

I have no idea what instrument is playing the main loop. Maybe it’s heavily processed strings? Whatever it is, the mysterious timbre matches the mysterious melodic figure that it’s playing. The first half of the loop use the notes B, A, and F. It is totally unclear what harmony might be implied here. If B is the tonic, then A is b7^ and F is b5^. If A is the tonic, then B is 2^ and F is b6^. If F is the tonic, then B is b5^ and A is 3^. None of these are stable sonorities. The second half of the loop uses these same notes, along with a brief jump up to E. That doesn’t clarify anything. I guess it all implies Fmaj7(#11)?

The vocal melody in the verse gives no further clues as to where the tonic is. The first phrase (“Through the warmthest cord of care”) is a pair of major seconds a minor third apart: E and D, then B and A. The rhythmic pattern is a simple short-short-short-long, short-short-short-long, but the notes fall on strange subdivisions of the bar. The next phrase (“your love was sent to me”) walks up the scale from A to E in a broken rhythm, then falls back down to B and concludes by stepping up to C. So, maybe this implies A natural minor? Or C major? The next two phrases mirror the pitch structure of the first two, and the rhythms continue to be mostly unpredictable.

In the prechorus, the vocal melody does finally start revolving around D as its central pitch. However, the line “calling you up” lands emphatically on B, playing up Dorian’s similarity to the diminished scale. The choir destabilizes D’s centrality by mostly repeating E and A. In the chorus, the bass enters and finally puts a harmonic floor underneath everything, playing a somewhat conventional electronic dance music bassline in D Dorian. But now the first half of the vocal melody seems to center around G, and the second half centers around A. The chorus melody carefully avoids the notes F and C, the color tones. The choir sings a lovely arpeggio that sounds to me like G7sus4 resolving to G7, yet another facet you get from turning the jewel of D Dorian mode. (Update: a guy on Twitter informs me that this arpeggio is a quote from Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Live and learn.)

After the chorus, there’s a break, which the choir fills with an eerily skeletal Bø7 chord, just B, D, and A. The chord sustains for three entire measures, which makes me think that it’s sampled, but maybe the choir just sang it; it’s impossible to tell through all the reverb. There’s a male choir (or the same female choir pitched down) muttering obscurely underneath. And then the break ends with a descending chromatic figure on an ethereal bamboo flute that you never hear again for the rest of the album. Amazing.

A French fan site has a note from Björk about the production of Vespertine – all idiosyncratic spelling and capitalization is hers:

i guess the first stage is i decided what the instrumentation was going to be ,

then i did about 80% of the beats with the help of programmers ( which means you bring noises or describe what kind of noises you want and then place them maticulously , sound by sound , in the places you want them to be in .) song structure decisions .

then i did the harp arrangements that zeena played adding her own arrangements in the songs where it is credited

then i did scetches of string arrangements that vince mendoza completed some and then orchestrated .

then i asked people like marius de vries and matthew herbert and matmos to add stuff after i had descibed to them what i was after .

the last stage is mixing , then you have perhaps up to 80 channels of stuff and the work of a producer is to pick what ends up in the song and what not .

on vespertine a lot off stuff was thown out . roughly i would guess about 60% .

i tried to be as brief as possible

i hope that answers your question

warmth

björk

In an interview, Björk describes writing everything out in Sibelius, including the beats. So maybe my Noteflight drums aren’t as far away from her conception as I thought.

Here’s a live version, featuring the great Zeena Parkins on harp. Check out the guy from Matmos shuffling cards for percussion!

Matmos also did this fairly wonderful remix:

There is some controversy among listeners about “Fun Björk” vs “Art Björk”. The manic pixie dream girl who recorded “It’s Oh So Quiet” is not much in evidence on Vespertine, or on any of her subsequent albums, really. Some people are mad about that. I don’t know. I was drawn in by Fun Björk too, but Art Björk is the person who has put out most of the music, and while I haven’t found all of that music to be easy listening, it rewards all the attention I am able to give it.

Update: Don’t miss the response post by Wenatchee. Good quote:

[I]n the hands of capable composers, songwriters and musicians the floating symmetricality of dorian can let you either groove ad infinitum as though you’ve left earth as we know it or show that you’ve got control of a scale that predates the major and minor key systems by centuries and that you know how to write melodies with it that exploit its ambience.  You can write a song full of harmonies that, as many Renaissance era composers demonstrated, were written with overlapping melodic lines in a shared mode that had plenty of harmony but it was not chordal harmony, not chordal harmony as we would be taught it in theory courses.

The simultaneous modern-ness and ancientness of Dorian is a big part of the appeal for me.