Pitchfork

Forget about the records for a second. You know them, and you know they're amazing. What I want to ask is this: Is there any other artist in the world who isn't dead, 25 years past their prime, or bankrupt that has released, re-released, re-mastered, re-issued, re-packaged, re-bundled and re-offended more than Björk? It's ridiculous, it really is. But it's not until you trundle through the pages and pages of her back catalog that you realize just how brazen she's been. Back when people still bought CD singles, she was one of the worst offenders; not content with being a proponent of the standard two-part CD5 set (remember those?), she'd frequently roll out triple-disc releases, and issue them in packaging purposely made to feel incomplete unless you had them all. Then, inevitably, three months later she'd release a Ugandan Maxi-EP of the same single with most (but not all) of those B-sides plus a rare Fluke/Alec Empire/Mark Bell re-edit and it'd be robbery with a smile all over again. It would have been faster just to burn my money.

In this decade, Björk's release schedule has ballooned from excessive to patently opportunistic. Since 2000, she's augmented her usual stream of full-lengths, CD singles, DVD singles, 12" singles, bobbleheads, pudding spoons, and pogs with (deep breath): the Cambridge, MTV Unplugged and Live at Shepherd's Bush DVDs; the Inside Björk documentary DVD; four separate live CDs spanning Debut, Post, Homogenic, and Vespertine; the Vessel, Later With Jools Holland, and Miniscule DVDs; three additional iterations of her 1999 video omnibus Volumen (Volumen+, Greatest Hits: Volumen 1993-2003, and Volumen II); Livebox, a repackaging of those four aforementioned live CDs with a bonus DVD thrown in for kicks; the Live at Royal Opera House DVD; the 6xCD Family Tree box, which contained a sum total of 90 minutes of rare and unreleased material spread out across five mini 3" CDs as well as a best-of compilation; a single-disc Greatest Hits compilation with a completely different tracklisting; the Medulla Videos DVD; a Medulla documentary DVD; the Live DVD Archives and Live Television DVD Archives boxes and, probably the piece de resistance and ultimate harbinger of her total and utter lack of quality control, the 20-track Army Of Me: Remixes and Covers, on which Patrick Wolf and 19 musicians you've never heard of offered their unique and highly fast-forwardable interpretations of "Army of Me". That's right. One CD with the same song 20 times in a row. (It sold at full price.)

Where to go from there? Surely not into hiatus-- not when there's royalties to be made. Instead we get Surrounded, a 7xCD box containing DualDisc remasters of each Björk full-length. Don't get too excited: The remasters don't extend to the regular CD audio portions of each disc (which are heard here exactly as they are on their original pressings), but rather, to new Dolby 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound mixes. Then, presumably in an effort to further infuriate those who've dropped a small fortune on the Volumens, Björk's gone and parceled all her videos across the DVD portions of each album as well. What you end up with are seven full-lengths containing CD mixes, 5.1 mixes and videos from each era. And since Vespertine and Medulla have previously been released in 5.1 iterations, not even the surround stuff is entirely new.

One last thing about Surrounded merits mention: It is, of course, packaged beautifully. Like most of Björk's stuff, there's a real fetishization of the physical artifact at play here. That makes sense: If you're going to cash in on variations on a theme, you may as well elevate those variations to the stuff of high art. If the Ramones were the ultimate working-class band, Björk's the ultimate art director's crush. But despite the presentation, do you really need to drop $100 on this? Probably not. And even if you did, you'd kick yourself for it eventually, 'cause she's pretty much guaranteed to come back with another one that's bigger and better in a few years' time anyway. Built in obsolence-- it's not just for hardware anymore. And they wonder why people stopped buying CDs.