“We do whatever we want and if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus.” What has long been a cliché when uttered by generations of indie heel-draggers is a concise career précis when it comes to Björk.

Her last album, Medulla, was a densely textured affair that sounded all the more otherworldly for being comprised of vocals and vocal samples. Far from dropping her avant guard, Björk’s seventh album is a collaboration with her partner, Matthew Barney, whose recent film is soundtracked by these “pieces”. The subject here is whaling — hence the album’s audible debt to Japanese classical instrumentation on Pearl and Shimenawa. On Gratitude, the guest singer Will Oldham and some children sing a letter sent 59 years ago by a Japanese man to General MacArthur thanking him for lifting the US moratorium on whaling off Japan’s coast.

Except this being Björk, it’s more complicated. We are exploring the relationship between — pay attention at the back — “self-imposed resistance and creativity” and the relationship of form to meaning. Twelve years ago, this would have meant Björk singing a pop ditty called “Cor! The Relationship of Form to Meaning, Innit?”, with mixes by Underworld and the Grid. Instead, written to accompany footage of Björk and her partner embracing while they cut away at each other’s feet to reveal sprouting whale tails, Holographic Entrypoint is a more austere affair — nine minutes of the Japanese classical vocalist Shiro Nomura singing explanatory couplets such as, “External resistance freeing/ Internal relation emerging.” If you find you can’t overthrow mental images of Gabriel the Bagpuss toad attempting to extricate a pretzel from his oesophagus, you ’ll want to veer closer to the songs that feature Björk herself.

Alas, there are only two: the interweaving harmonies of Bath, and Storm, which achieves an exhilarating sense of vertical take-off when she lets rip over the sound of the creaking, rain- lashed hull of the Nisshin Maru. For fans of Matthew Barney, that won’t present a problem; for people who feel Björk’s appeal lies in her voice, it may be. And for an artist whose only creative compass is her instinct, the world won’t stop turning, whatever we think.

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