So now mushrooms. Seriously: mushrooms as a concept, mushrooms as a theme, mushrooms as textual content. Plus clarinets. trombones. Rhythm tracks that sound more like a shack than four-four time. And in the videos, masks and costumes like something out of a Cronenberg horror film. Well, you’ve gotten used to the fact that Björk likes to take unusual paths, and that she sometimes does so very demonstratively. The swan costume on the red carpet in Cannes, the Fitzel-Fatzel experiments with still younger, hipper techno people, the live performances, over time more Kabuki theater than concerts.
But to say it straight away: It is of course great that Björk Guðmundsdóttir, now 56, is doing exactly that with unbroken energy – pushing boundaries, crossing boundaries, breaking boundaries. Who else wants that today? Who dares what? Every second pop star keeps claiming “I’m completely reinventing myself” – and then only changes the color of their hair. Björk, on the other hand, keeps building new windows just to lean further and further out. It’s in the nature of things that it’s sometimes a bit up in the air.
Their musicians have steel drums half-buried in the ground so that the sound of the earth is reflected in the music
She could also be quite annoying in recent years. Their groundbreaking debut “Debut” was released 29 years ago, techno plus Icelandic pop plus alien charm. Very peculiar, very big. After that, their music and their appearance became more cerebral, artificial, aloof with each album. In some phases of their work you felt underdressed if you didn’t wear thick horn-rimmed glasses as a listener.
Now it’s getting a little closer to Earth again. Also in terms of content. Björk’s tenth album is called “Fossora”, the title should be understood as the feminine form of the Latin word fossor, the graves. So the artist as digger, digger, seeker. Key word: mushrooms. We’ll get to that in a moment.
First of all, “Fossora” is cautiously described everywhere as “more accessible”, there is even talk of a “return to pop”. It’s still too early to take out the dancing shoes that have been in the closet since “Debut”. When Björk pushes around sample snippets of her voice for minutes in the third piece, it sounds more like the avant-garde tape of the 1970s, one intuitively wants to reach for the program booklet. But right after that, in the warm, pastoral choral movements of “Sorrowful Soil,” she just does the same thing right again: no layering of samples, just vocals, languishing and embracing. The song is one of two dedicated to her late mother: “You did well / you did your best / you did well”. One would wish for every mother that one day her daughters would sing that to her, right?
Björk rediscovered the connection to family and origin because she temporarily moved back to Iceland during the lockdown. She had only come by there sporadically in the previous thirty years. The songs on this album were written there. She grounded herself a bit again, she says in interviews. Back to nature. Accordingly, she finds mushrooms seriously exciting, as plants, as a form of life, as a metaphor. They brought together, she says, “the themes of survival, death, and ecological meditation.” In the play “Fungal City” Björk sings “We walk on this forest floor / sunken mystery / trunks bursting through the moss / from our love”. The forest floor, the moss and from there straight into love, into the heart, into people.
Björk describes the music as “biological techno”. For one of the pieces, their musicians even buried steel drums halfway into the ground and then played them there, so that the sound of the earth had an effect on the music, so to speak. (Reminds a bit of Lee Scratch Perry, who once blew the tapes of his recording device full of smoke from his joints in Jamaica, so that the right spirit was really in the music, etc.)
In any case, it doesn’t even sound like pop in the traditional sense in terms of composition. Björk is supported by two Indonesian techno producers and a bass clarinet sextet. She asked the clarinetists to imagine while playing that they had drunk exactly one and a half glasses of red wine in a northern Scandinavian jazz bar in the year 2050. Also present: her son Sindri (36 years old – with him in his stomach, heavily pregnant and half-naked, Björk danced in the 1980s when she made her first scandalous appearance on Icelandic television) and her daughter Ísadóra (from her relationship with the New York artist Matthew Barney; Björk dealt with the traumatic end of this relationship with the 2015 album “Vulnicura”).
And above all, the most unique of all instruments, her voice. No one sings like Björk, no one whoops like Björk, no one belts out like Björk. Complete unique selling point for almost forty years, since her beginnings as a singer of the Sugarcubes. Squeak, breathe, snap. Björk controls her vocal cords like others do with their electric guitar – including all the effects that guitarists can only achieve with amplifiers and pedals. She even understands how to use an accent: after all the years she has been living in England and America she can of course pronounce the English lyrics of her songs fluently, but with a word like “bloodred” she rrr rolls the R so Nordic, so viking ferocious that the blood glows red twice.
The melodies remain rather brittle, in favor of the radio they obviously never want to go back. But little by little there are songs on “Fossora” that are a bit more welcoming than the previous albums. “Freefall” is a tender meditation with string quintet. “Fagurt Er í Fjördum,” Björk’s version of an Icelandic folk song, smolders dreamily (now just avoid all comparisons to geysers-before-erupting). And in the comparatively harmonious “Ovule”, perhaps the most beautiful song on the album (trombones!), Björk is closest to the point where her music sounds like it’s being sung to the wind on the coast, majestic and impulsive and weatherproof.
As she herself puts it, the text deals with the idea that every human being carries within himself three “eggs”, filled with ideals, realities and darkness”.
Nevertheless, she definitely does not want “Fossora” to be understood as a nature-mystical project. With all the rediscovered joy in the Icelandic mother earth – she recently told an American magazine, refreshingly annoyed: “Never mind elves and all that shit, people have been trying to pin that on me my whole career.” So earth yes, mushrooms too, Iceland anyway – but otherwise the woman remains wonderfully removed from our worldly ideas and projections. Planet Björk, lonely and unique, way out there. It’s nice that the orbit is so close to Earth this time.