Noise Diary 006: Björk's Lost Pierrot Lunaire

I just got around to digesting my friend Ian McCowan's last tweet:

Björk sang Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" and only 1:14 of recordings are extant. This makes me sad. http://tinyurl.com/2g899nd

It makes me sad too! The quality is just awful, the audio equivalent of your phone taking a picture of the inside of your pocket. But the site is almost like a case file, trying to track down scraps of the past and figure out what exactly happened there in 1996.

Björk - Mondestrunken


Björk - Galgenlied


I myself have a lost hard drive filled with Björk mysteries; in the filesharing heyday of the early aughts I downloaded anything I could get my hands on. I have mixes never seen before or since, and recordings I have no clue the origins of. Though I am sad that there may be no record of this performance, in our increasingly pinned-to-the-corkboard world, I do appreciate some mystery.

Sunday Song Set

These two songs are Björk-related, at least in my head.

Télépopmusik - Love Can Damage Your Health (2002): This quickly reaches out brain tendrils and grabs hold of the Deodato Mix of Isobel.


For comparison, here is Björk - Isobel (Deodato Mix) (1997). (Apparently there are no humans who wanted to rip and host Telegram mp3s, only Post, so you get a damn video.)


And then DJ Shadow - Mutual Slump (1996) because I literally just pieced it together this week that he's sampling Possibly Maybe. I am docking myself so many goddamn points for that.


Björk - Possibly Maybe (1995)