Hey remember Björk? Yes, well the Icelandic oddball has a new album — Biophilia — coming out on September 27 and “Crystalline” is the first single off of it. The video for the song, which takes place in outer space with Björk’s face overseeing gold meteorites filling giant craters and crystals bursting out of the ground, was released today and is a collaboration between the singer and French director Michel Gondry — perhaps best known for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Gondry directed the video for Björk’s breakout hit “Human Behaviour” in the 90s and has since directed videos with inventive visuals for the like of Kanye West, the White Stripes, Radiohead, Beck and many others.
Here’s Gondry describing the making of the video to Billboard:
We shot it frame by frame, and we shot it by recranking the camera and re-exposing the film many times. I decided for this that the shower of meteorite would hit the ground and produce a sound… The idea that a beam of light can have the impact to make these things move is something that intrigued me. Later on, they create some ripples-like rain. At the third verse, they create bubbles in which the metallic objects appear. All of those are the result of multiple conversations with [Björk] that were going in many directions.
So yeah, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Michel Gondry/Björk video collaboration.
