Tonight, I saw Björk live at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City, on her “Biophilia” tour. She played in the round, with a vocal ensemble of twenty women backing her up, all below eight large video screens. I did not expect that within the first minute, I would have been wondering whether something of what I saw tonight is a possible future for religion, or a religion of the future.

The opening and closing images on the screens were of constellations of stars, somewhere between computer-invented and computer-enhanced, spinning in slow revolution, posing unexpected shapes of natural gorgeousness, in the way only the night sky seems capable of doing. Björk performed ninety minutes of music, almost without breaks, and with the most minimal vocal interaction with the audience. The energy was all about what was happening on the stage, and above it on those screens — and, I must add, to the side of it, where a giant Tesla coil had been lowered, in a wire cage, to about twenty feet above the audience’s heads. In the careful attention to space, costume, sound, light, and bodies, all opening out to a biophilic “more” — this is one of those live shows that reminded me that the capillaries of “secular” music and “sacred” liturgy are so entwined as to evaporate those simplistic oppositional adjectives.

Björk has transcended most genres of contemporary popular music, although I still wish she would reach back and cover an old rock and roll tune from her early band, The Sugarcubes. Nowadays, her music consists mostly in her distinctive voice and her vulnerable, hymn-like, otherworldly melodies and vocal phrasings that manage to be both rococo and guileless at the same time, surrounded by musical arrangements that are part postmodern choir, and part house music with big drum breaks and thumping bass.

And there is that Tesla coil, which has somehow been linked to a synthesizer-type device, so the electric charges produced tones that anchored a couple of the songs. It is one thing to see it on a video, but quite another to see the thing working up close, and to experience those flashes of electricity as bass rumbles under the floor and in the air.

You can see it, and more to the point, Björk herself in this video of her performance of “Thunderbolt” from the current tour:

And the video below is the song “Possibly Maybe” from her show a few nights ago in New York, where you see and

hear her singing and the coils going off, though the video is shot from a ways back…

“Biophilia,” life-loving, or as it was more often rendered in the pre-recorded vignettes that often introduced songs, “nature”-loving, seemed a timely symbol. Björk showed this love of nature through songs and videos that explored the multiple natural placement of human life, suggesting, in song and dance, light and video, that humans are the event-place in which the cosmic and the microscopic reside.

(For an important summary of her ideas about “biophilia,” check out her spoken-word introduction to the concept of “biophilia” at her website here.)

In theology, we would call this nature mysticism, and it has a lot going for it these days, not least because it can both situate humans in this life-space, but in doing so, can relativize humanity into the larger question of “life” (or for Björk, “nature”). So Björk’s show gave promise of a theological orientation in keeping with an important theological trajectory that runs at least from Francis of Assisi through contemporary eco-theologies: that theology must finally become “non-anthropocentric,” something other than another religious way of putting humans at the center of the universe.

In Björk’s strangeness, her patient but relentless artistic inventiveness, her capacity to picture a persuasive claiming power that stands for “love of life/nature,” hers is the kind of world that fits that expired but still useful term: religious. Or if you like it better: spiritual. That she attracts so many to this world, that she so often displays a deep spirit of new invention and reconsideration with every new project, that her work searches out new ways to plumb the mystery of existence, and that she does not spoil her musical gifts by overexplaining what they are supposed to mean for everyone, that is, that she recognizes the deep consanguinity between the aesthetic and the spiritual power of her art — of living, of life — all this makes me wonder not only if Björk gives us a taste of the religion of the future, but also, for many of her fans here in New York tonight, of a religion of the present.

Tommy Beaudoin, New York City

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