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.
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.