When music just ain't enough

It’s hard these days for the music industry (if the term “music industry” still applies). Music tracks have to be packaged with products, sold in tandem with sponsorships or movie promos, included with your box of Rice Krispies. You can barely give away music these days (people are too busy stealing it anyway), so the way to survive seems to be for musicians to take a multifaceted approach: designing something more resembling an art project than a simple CD or MP3 release.

Bjork and The Flaming Lips are two such musical entities. Both have a tendency towards more “arty” inclinations than, say, Justin Bieber or Ke$ha. The Icelandic songstress has always paid obsessive attention to her album designs — even down to CD singles (remember those?) back in the ‘90s. Wearing funny swan dresses may be another manifestation of this attention to packaging.

Now she’s designed, with Apple and a group of programmers, a new album of songs that are actually separate iPad and iPhone apps, each one containing an intriguing level of interaction and possibilities for play. “Biophilia” is downloadable as a series of MP3s, but it’s an even more fun as an application package. The idea of “remixes” has long been a big part of the Bjork experience: you’re encouraged to listen to the same song — say Hyperballad — in a dozen or so different remix environments. With “Biophilia” (partly recorded on an iPad), listeners can actually “play” each song on a touchscreen device, changing pitches, beats and parameters while navigating an app space that begins as a custom-made constellation. Each star cluster contains a song with different instructions, though you can just as easily play the whole thing as an MP3 album.

Some of the tunes are a gas to interact with, showing the influence of Michel Gondry, her frequent collaborator (they’re also planning a 40-minute 3-D IMAX movie they’re calling a “scientific musical”).

Thunderbolt allows you to hear the song while touching a Tesla coil on the screen, forming patterns and electric light combinations that change the arpeggios of the song. Virus develops with visuals of tightly conjoined cells being invaded by virus cells, a metaphor for “fatal relationships” with game rules that allow you to stop the song by defeating the viral intrusion. My favorite app might be Sacrifice, which allows you to isolate the various instruments of the song and create your own tune, which then can be saved and shared in a library. Another feature renders each song as a musical score, though the score can also be viewed as a series of lines, dots and shapes of various sizes, recalling Brian Eno’s early attempts at visually “scoring” such random pieces as Discreet Music.

Does the album work on its own, as just plain music? Well, granting that the groundbreaking days of “Post” and “Vespertine” are now way behind her, with Bjork now seemingly more interested in releasing vocalized streams of vowels, gamelan patterns and minimal dubstep beats, and “Biophilia” can be a passively enjoyable experience. But it’s designed for much more than that.

Bjork was not the first to go interactive, of course. Radiohead let the consumer decide how much (or how little) to pay for their download album “In Rainbows” a few years back; it turned out the band earned more on that experiment than they did going through a record label. One also recalls Arcade Fire’s last album which included a song (We Used to Wait) whose website invited you to type in the street address where you grew up. The program then gathered satellite images of your hometown from Google Maps and wove them into a video narrative, so your life was effectively inserted into the band’s video. Clever.

Meanwhile, the Flaming Lips are no strangers to advanced musical (not to mention drug) experimentation. Their latest project is called I Found A Star on the Ground, a ponderous six-hour song divided into three two-hour chunks, currently streamable on Soundcloud. For those who thought “Embryonic” was verging on unlistenable “Bitches Brew”-style jazz fusion, I Found A Star… goes even further into the mystic, constantly mutating over the course of minutes, hours, alternating moments of atonal sonic water torture with passages of heavenly beauty which expose themselves nakedly and unexpectedly to the world. It certainly is a different way of listening to music, one in which we are asked to simply throw the track on in the background while going about our day, surfing the Net or (as they suggest) gobbling down various pharmaceuticals. (The Lips also threaten to release a 24-hour song early next year.) At their best, the Lips require no illegal substances to fully enjoy their music, and parts of I Found A Star… are well worth putting on repeat. Just not every 21,300 seconds of it.

The Lips, headed by Wayne Coyne, have often veered into unconventional packaging. “Zaireeka” (1997) was a four-CD affair that the band suggested should be played simultaneously on four separate CD players: a kind of quadrophenia for the mind. Then they went one better, getting fans to participate in “boombox experiments,” deploying 40 or so volunteers to play various cassette tapes simultaneously over their car stereos in a parking lot.

Just a bunch of drug-addled hippies? Or musical art poseurs? Well, this kind of experimentation does require a certain mindset. This year, the Lips ventured into more exploratory packaging, releasing “Gummy Bear Skull,” an EP buried inside a seven-pound skull made of — you guessed it — gummy bear material. Break it open and there’s a flash drive containing four new songs.

Other packaging includes “The Soft Bulletin: Live la Fantastique de Institution 2011,” a live-in-studio performance of their classic album “The Soft Bulletin” contained on a flash drive inside a — get this — marijuana-flavored brain within a strawberry flavored gummy skull. Another gummy bear project is called “Gummy Song Fetus,” an EP containing three songs on a flash drive embedded in a bubblegum-flavored gummy bear fetus. (They obviously are addicted to gummy bears.)

“I Found a Star on the Ground” was released late in 2011 with contributions from Sean Lennon and his band Ghost of a Sabertooth Tiger. There were no gummy bears involved.