"Mutual Core" is a song recorded by Icelandic singer Björk for her seventh studio album Biophilia (2011). It was written and produced by Björk herself, while programming and beats were made in collaboration with Matthew Herbert and the English dubstep band 16bit. "Mutual Core" is an uptempo experimental song. Its music includes Pipe organ, electronica-tinged sounds and features the Choir Graduale Nobili, the choir featured on Biophilia. The song's lyrics are a metaphor for human relationships, compared to the structure of the Earth and Plate tectonics. The song was well received by contemporary music critics, who praised its production and beats, moreover appreciating Björk's voice on the track.
As with all the songs on Biophilia, an app was made for the song, which features a video game in which the player have to move geological layers as an accordion to play chords. Though the song wasn't released as a single, a music video was produced, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang. The video was critically applauded and received further attention when it got projected for one month in Times Square in 2013, and then across the 7 continents. Björk promoted the song by performing it throughout her Biophilia tour.
Three remixes by Matthew Herbert, 16bit and These New Puritans were released as part of Biophilia Remix Series. The Matthew Herbert's and the These New Puritans remixes were later included on bastards (2012). In July 2012, the online music store Beatport announced a fan contest in which "Mutual Core" had to be remixed, to be released afterwards on a remix package.
Background
At the end of 2010, Björk confirmed she was working on a new album. In an interview published on Fréttablaðið, the singer stated that the project was midway through the completion and that she hoped to go on tour before the end of 2011. The project was officialised in March 2011, with the announcement of Björk performance at Manchester International Festival. The project, called Biophilia, comprises a series of live performances, a new website, a documentary and a series of apps, besides the release as a music album which is partly composed on an iPad. The Biophilia tour was said to be touring eight cities for three years and to be including a series of workshops for children in collaboration with local schools. The first details about "Mutual Core" came regarding its app, which was described to allow users to "arrange geological layers to form chords".
"Mutual Core" was written and produced by Björk, while the beat of the song was made in collaboration with Matthew Herbert and 16bit. The song was engineered by Damian Taylor and Sveinn Kjartansson, with mixing provided by Taylor and Björk. "Mutual Core"'s lyrics were inspired by human relationships and by Björk's family decisions, who had to decide where her daughter, Ísadóra, would go to school between New York City and Reykjavík. Björk felt that the song is "the most personal [on the album] for me". David Fricke of Rolling Stone noted that "Björk likens the human emotions – love, physical obsession, changing moods, violent hurt – in songs such as "Mutual Core", "Moon" and "Virus" to natural phenomena: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lunar phases and contagious disease".
Three official remixes of the song have been released. The first one was released on Biophilia Remix Series VI on 25 June 2012, and it is a remix by long time-collaborator Matthew Herbert. Björk stated about Herbert's remixes: "He has taken it full on and made it into his version but still true to the heart of the song and, more than once, improved it". RJ Cubarrubia of Rolling Stone commented that the remix "builds slowly with background bleeps and opaque textures before erupting into a cacophonous rumble". The second one is a remix by 16bit, which was released as part of Biophilia Remix Series VII on July 9, 2012. This version had already been released as part of a promo for Icelandair flights, playing the song in flights to Iceland during Björk's concert residency in Reykjavik in Summer 2011. Other two remixes of "Crystalline" and "Sacrifice" were played. The last remix by These New Puritans has been on November 12, 2012 on Biophilia Remix Series VIII. The remix includes samples from the Traditional composition "Funeral Song (Solomon Islands 1978)", as extracted from the album Spirit of Melanesia by David Fanshawe. On October 8, 2012, the track list for bastards was announced, and the Matthew Herbert's and the These New Puritans remixes were included. On late July 2012, Beatport announced a contest in which the participants had to remix "Mutual Core". The winner would have their remix released on One Little Indian Records in a remix package to be sold on the website. The winner was announced on 18 September 2012, as "Breakwave". This remix, later renamed "Waxx Crooks Remix", was released on December 10, 2012.
Composition
"Mutual Core" is an uptempo experimental song, which displays elements from electro, techno, glitch, breakcore and ambient, and includes also a choral part during the chorus. The rhythm of the song can be roughly divided into two distinct parts: the verses, which feature moderately sparse electronic beats and a time signature of 5/4, and the choruses, which display more upbeat sounds and a 2/4 time signature. According to Mark Diver of BBC Music during the shift from the verse and the chorus the song "slips from blissful ambience into bombastic electronic percussion, leaving the senses reeling, only to fade back into a comforting lilt".
The instrumentation of the verses includes a pipe organ. Sound designer David Paterson described the way Björk wanted the music on "Mutual Core": "Bjork described the sounds she wanted in a way that left it very open to interpretation. With the track "Mutual Core", for example, she described how it was about magnetic attraction – which doesn't really have a sound that springs to mind". Luke Turner of NME noted that "[Björk's] voice cracks against the increasing, insistent power of the electronic rhythms, as if recognising our human insignificance in the face of geology", citing the verse "As fast as your fingernail grows / The Atlantic ridge drifts" as an example, and, on a similar note, Odile De Plas of Télérama found the singer's voice "strong, acrobat, guttural and [...] crystalline".
The musical shift occurs when the singer pronounces the words "Core", during which, as described by Nikki Debben in her essay included in the Manual Edition of Biophilia, the "modality switches from minor to major". The lecturer noted that "the close, dark sound of the verse is partly due to the minor mode which has a flattened third degree, compared to the brighter sound of the chorus in the major mode which has the "normal" third degree of the chord". This part of the song uses a Plagal cadence, which involves a movement "from a chord built on the fourth degree of the scale to one built on the first degree of the scale". The chorus of the song features a vocal crescendo performed by the choir, which juxtaposes with breakcore-influenced beats, which display elements from dub. Chris Chafin of Capital compared the sound of the chorus to the work of The Chemical Brothers and stated that tracks like "Crystalline" and "Mutual Core" recall previous works from Björk's discography, especially Post (1995) and Homogenic (1997).
Critical reception The song was generally well received by music critics, who cited it as a highlight of the album. According to Mark Pytlik of Pitchfork, the song "may be the album's best track overall", citing "its satisfyingly filthy electro skronk", while giving the album an average review; on a similar note, Arnold Pan of PopMatters defined the song as "the album's most viscerally powerful number" citing that "that's music that sounds just as at home in the sacred place of a vast cathedral as it is in the virtual vacuum of cyberspace". Gareth James of Clash praised the album and stated that "when the machine-gun beats do break through on "Mutual Core", they're augmented by a hymnal organ riff and a soaring, unprocessed and unleashed vocal which will leave you breathless".
"Mutual Core" was described as "best" and "climactic" by Helen Brown of The Daily Telegraph, which elected Biophilia as the CD of the Week, and "literally volcanic" by Heather Phares of Allmusic. Jim Fusilli of The Wall Street Journal stated that the track is "earthbound". According to the Daily Mirror review, the track "adds angry rebuke and glitchy distorted power chordings to the shimmering, ringing percussion and natural awe that feature on the astonishing tracks "Virus" and aptly named "Crystalline"". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian praised the composition of the album and stated "There's something audacious and impressive about the way "Hollow" attempts to strike a weird balance between menace and calm, the vocals as lulling as the staccato backing is unsettling. Or "Mutual Core"'s repeated shifts from a wheezing keyboard – it was doubtless built in a laboratory by the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and professor Brian Cox, but it sounds like a 13th-century portative organ – to electronic bombardment". Möhammed Choudhery of Consequence of Sound analysed the use of Björk's voice in the album, stating: Her unique utility of the English language gives her words a quirky, idiosyncratic edge, allowing lines like "if you forget my name, you'll go astray/ like a killer whale" to ring somehow striking. Said masterstrokes and quirks are well intact here, as is evident in the asteroid-bass volley of "Mutual Core" and lead single "Crystalline"'s apocalyptical breakbeat coda. Biophilia's finest moments are its most subtly captivating, many of which are (admittedly) almost forgettable on first listen. The aforementioned "Mutual Core" and "Crystalline" can be assured a spot on any and all future Best of Björk compilations, compelling in how they blend archaic instrumentation with blistering electronica.
Despite this, some critics dubbed the song as "tedious" and "interesting but not surprising". Andy Gill of The Independent gave a negative review of the album, praising only the choral elements, stating that: "they're a constant delight as she reflects upon her desire for the "dangerous gifts" of elemental nature, the lightning-flash of creative inspiration ("Thunderbolt"); muses about being a bead threaded upon a DNA chain ("Hollow"); explores the ethically neutral, natural attraction of parasite to host ("Virus"); admires the creative force of volcanic energy ("Mutual Core")".
App
As with all the songs on Biophilia, "Mutual Core" was released as an app for iPhone or iPad. "Mutual Core" app features a video game in which the player arranges geological layers in the same way as an accordion to play chords. During the verses, the player tries to unite the hemispheres, because the energy keeps them apart while during the chorus the app shifts to a cutaway of a planet, and the player can touch the layers of the planet's interior to open it up and touch the core. The player may also change the resistance of the chords to increase the difficulty. The app was released on October 10, 2011, along with the rest of the apps from Biophilia. On January 17, 2012, Björk uploaded a video tutorial explaining the app on her official YouTube channel, commented also by Biophilia app designer Scott Snibbe. As Björk explains on the video: This app is called 'Mutual Core' and it's about taking the tectonic plates and pushing them together with effort until you create a mutual core beneath them. In musicology-wise this is to teach you about chords, and you can use [..] the tectonic plates, the strata inside them, and it sorta operates like accordion so you can change the chords and push them together and [...] create a mutual core.
Credits Björk – creative director John Simon, Jr. – creative director, software engineer