The perennially avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk has brought her entire 2015 album, Vulnicura, to virtual reality. Available today, headset owners can finally get to dive into a collection of immersive music videos that only previously graced museums worldwide via the Björk Digital Exhibition since late 2016, Pitchfork reports.

The Vulnicura Virtual Reality Album is now available Steam (Oculus Rift, Valve Index, HTC Vive) priced at $30. The album features a collection of live-action 360 video and real-time rendered experiences set to the album’s tracks.

The seven tracks that headset owners will get to experience with full VR visuals are ‘Notget’, ”Family’, ‘Stonemilker’, ‘Lionsong’, ‘Mouth Mantra’, ‘Black Lake’, and ‘Quicksand’.

“I am someone who absolutely loves music and gets so moved by the sensation of it,” Björk stated on Instagram. “When Andy [Thomas Huang] proposed filming ‘Stonemilker’  on the beach [in 360] it was perhaps him tapping into how spatial and connected to nature my songs are.”

“The themes for the digital animations were a collaborations (sic) of mine with James Merry and I would like to thank him for being my co-pilot for the visual art direction for this whole thing,” she continued.

Vulnicura isn’t the first occurrence where prominent music gets re-released in some form with VR visuals. Rhythm games like Beat Saber and Electronauts continue to show promise for VR as a medium for releasing music to be experienced in a brand new way, and most recently, Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 music video received a VR fan tribute.

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In addition to music videos, the Vulnicura VR album also includes dynamic 360-degree visuals that have been created by Stephen Malinowski, who invented the Music Animation Machine that visualizes musical notation and logic in sync with the rhythm of music.

The most recent musical release from Björk is her 2017 album Utopia, which is also the ninth studio release in her discography. After originally releasing Vulnicura in 2015, Björk followed it up with Vulnicura Strings, a redux of the original album without the electronica elements.

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Gabriel Moss
  • Harris

    Release a 5 minute demo! I like Bjork but I’m not dropping $30. Most VR ‘experiences’ are way too short for the money.

    • gigus

      You can find the 360 pieces on youtube to preview. It is the whole album so you can get the length from that. As far as price goes, if you bought the vinyl you would have spent close to $25.

  • Jarilo

    Cool, but how much of it is 360 3D video versus the real time rendered stuff? 360 video experiences have been underwhelming to me. I have no doubt a full album set in some VR set pieces you can explore and even participate in are going to be part of a music future to market an album (Just look at the awesome performances in WaveVR) but 360 videos with out any room spacial light field tech are just awkward and not really VR.

    • gigus

      “Stone Milker” and “Mouth Mantra” are 360 vid, the rest are 6-dof

      • Jarilo

        Thanks for that info.

  • Mateusz Pawluczuk

    And let’s not forget Sheaf – Together EP :)

  • sfmike

    If they want success lower the price. But we niche users are used to getting screwed by inflated prices. Then when things fail due to low sales they say it’s because of lack of interest.

  • Alan Harrington

    It’s a shame that Dream Theater’s DT 360 has never been released for VR. That would be awesome…