SONGS FROM TOMORROW

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

We often tend to imagine the future as something less human than the past. The years ahead seem populated with clones and robots and aliens, as well as the erosion or perversion of the things that connect people with other people, like families and friendships and religion. Perhaps the best thing about the music of the British trip-hop group Portishead, and the Icelandic pop diva Bjork, is that it sounds futuristic but never inhuman. Portishead's new album, Portishead, and Bjork's latest CD, Homogenic, echo with sounds that could belong to the next millennium. But both are also suffused with a soulfulness that is timeless.

Portishead's groundbreaking debut album, Dummy (1994), along with producer-rapper Tricky's Maxinquaye (1995), helped define the nascent genre of trip-hop, an arty European variant of hip-hop characterized by dreamy lyrics and lounging, lulling song structures. Portishead is another stellar work. While Dummy's sound was sweetened with recognizable melodic flavors drawn from R. and B. and gospel, the new album is stranger, more unsettling, more sour. Vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice is distorted on many of the tracks, stretched thin and left floating high and parched over shards of melody and jagged bits of rhythm. One song, All Mine, has a sound that might be described as big-band noir, with blaring horns and desperate, almost manic vocals. Another, Half Day Closing, ends with Gibbons' eerie wail twisting wraithlike into the ether. And Humming opens with a portentous Moog-synthesizer solo that seems borrowed, in mood, from a '50s sci-fi film. The songs on Portishead have one unifying feature: they all seem constructed on a wasteland of despair. Producer-songwriter Geoff Barrow, who, along with Gibbons, forms the core of Portishead, says simply, "I'm not a very optimistic person, really."

Bjork's work, in contrast, has been characterized by an insistent sprightliness. Yet that upbeat temperament should not be mistaken for shallowness or lack of guile. Throughout Homogenic, there is a current of danger and violence. On the driving Bachelorette, Bjork sings, "I'm a fountain of blood, my love/ In the shape of a girl." And on the high-voltage, techno-infused Pluto, she sings, "Excuse me/ but I just have to explode." The album's sound is a collision of classical style (violins and cellos) and bruising electronic beats.

Bjork's voice, like Gibbons' on Portishead's CD, unifies and personalizes her album. Bjork shrieks and moans and hits strong, fresh notes, or does whatever is required to convey the emotions raging inside her. The seeming spontaneity of her performance is what's exciting. In the video for Joga, the first single from Homogenic, we see computer-generated images of landmasses, as if from a great height, and then Bjork herself, standing on a high hill, a gap in her chest exposing her swirling insides. The camera plunges within. In a future world of computer images, what still attracts us is the heart.