2022 - Iceland
Art Pop, Electronic, Post-Industrial, Gabber
When Björk recorded Utopia six years ago, it was her way to escape from the grief of Vulnicura. She build an aerial and safe place of bliss, feminine energy and healing melodies. Utopia was Björk’s lightbeam after the deep darkness of her previous album. The Icelandic composer was well aware that this period of bliss wasn’t meant to last. There’s no point drifting away from reality and building a utopia for yourself if you never come back to the ground to face the reality of the world and try to share the knowledge you acquired through this experience. Like Plato’s cave, Björk saw the sun in Utopia after living in Vulnicura, and now she comes back and transforms her world into Fossora. Mostly composed during the pandemic, while walking near her cabin a few miles away from Reykjavik, next to a beautiful lake and the volcano Skjaldbreidur, this rooted spiritual retreat through a mycelium network gathers every elements from her previous albums (Utopia, Homogenic, Vespertine, with Medulla on top). Icelandic summers nurture the rhythms of an album where “even though the ground is burnt, underneath monumental growth.” Björk’s psyche lies underground, and she lets us glimpse the beauty of it. A beauty of renewed feminine energy.
While still acknowledging the past scars of Vulnicura on the splendid Victimhood, Björk creates an interconnected map between all the things that constitute her being. At the crossroads of nursery rhyme, pop songs and atonal symphonies, and with influences from Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek, Public Enemy, Louise Bourgeois, Arca and even Beyoncé, Fossora appears to be an album without spinal column, quick and lively, just like a mushroom. Psychedelic, psychological, Carl Jung’s influence is obvious in several tracks like Ovule where Björk builds an image of love where the muddy reality is a middle ground between the ideal and the shadow (a very Jungian word). Structuring love as a place of all possibilities and durability, this song is the final lesson she learned about “how the ideal of love you carried from your childhood can be a heavy architecture that gets in the way, but heartbreaks perhaps rid you of that”. Chromatic and irregular, or in Björk’s words “earthy”, Fossora is a complex album due to its structure, but the Icelandic composer put in it everything we need to decrypt its structure, while our emotions keep simmering in a cosmogonic microcosm. Highly addictive, this is a party album you never heard before.
Collaborators always helped Björk introduce new sounds into her music. I use the word help very consciously because Björk arranges all her music and will always remain the meeting point between every instruments, musicians and ideas inside her music. Here it’s the Indonesian artist Kasimyn that shares the spotlight. Appearing in the Atopos video, Kasimyn brings his craftsmanship in an album full of gabber influences, a kind of techno with a very quick tempo that appeared in the Netherlands during the nineties. The opening song off Fossora is thereby the perfect place to start, because its angular beats shape the frame wherein Björk evolves. In this song, she affirms that perfectionism and obsessions are easy excuses not to connect. Facing others means loosening up to find a middle point wherein lies harmony. “We need hope to live. The eternal pursuit of happiness can only lead to a burn-out”. By withdrawing the ideal of absolute happiness from her reasoning, Björk focuses on a less-interested perception of life where humanity has to listen to the sounds other people make in order to understand how to grow together. It’s a way of existing not only as a human being, but as a body full of life living in a natural and digital environment completely taken into account, never rejected.
Her ability to grow is motivated by Björk’s unconditional optimism. She accepts unthinkable surprises may happen, whether they are good or bad (like in Vulnicura), but both implement transformation. Two songs focus on hope in death, with Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, both quieter and more straightforward melodic compositions about Björk’s mother, the environmental activist and “nihilist” Hildur Runa Hauksdóttir who died in 2018. The first song is the eulogy. “Nihilism happening cuts through this / Nihilism happening / You did well, you, you did your best.” This eulogy is set like a traditional Icelandic eulogy with melodramatic melodies and dry biographical elements. But here Björk counters the patriarchal side of this tradition with her woman point of view. With Ancestress, she builds an epitaph alongside her son Sindri Eldon, still with a feminine approach. “When I was a girl, she sang for me / In falsetto lullabies with sincerity / I thank her for her integrity.” Now her mother is buried in the ground, the same ground in which Björk’s mushroom feet are slightly rooted. And instead of denying her emotions and turning over a new leaf, she learns how to grief from the soil and transforms once again in order to assemble the matriarch
architecture of her house. A xenofeminist architecture.
Xenofeminism is a way of feminism coined in 2018 by Helen Hester. To put things shortly, xenofeminism is a « technomaterialist, anti-naturalist and gender abolisionist » approach of feminism. If this political and social philosophy can be quite complex to explain, the most important dynamics totally fit Björk’s discourse. Xenofeminism tends to emancipate women thanks to technology and the embrace of anti-capitalist reasonings, which means, by extension, environmentalism. One of the most famous formula by Helen Hester is « Biology is not a destiny », creating a whole new field for post-gender theories but also adding a transhumanist point of view to feminism. In her book, she talks about how technology can help women give birth, saving their lives and sparing them pain. But Björk embraces this side of xenofeminism in her aesthetic. Since Debut, she always was this machine-nature-women body always morphing into multiple shapes. With Fossora, these metamorphosis continue so she can feel even closer to the Earth, just like with every music video she released, from Sorrowful Soil to Atopos and Ancestress. Björk ultimate quest always has been searching for a feeling of unity between herself and her peers, herself and the world, and with this album she definitely reaches it. Björk becomes a total xenofeminist being.
In an interview with Pitchfork, journalist Jazz Monroe told her that the “cross-generational appeal” of her music allows it to be warmly welcomed by young people and queer communities. She answered with a question, “Do you think something of it has to do with the world finally being ready for matriarch music?” It’s impossible to separate Björk’s music from her feminine identity, and with Fossora she gives birth to a world where interconnectivty, hope, femininity and motherhood (for her children as much as for her relationship to nature and musical ideas) are the main ingredients of this “love-woven membrane” beating to the rhythm of her Icelandic heart. Recorded with her daughter Ísadóra Barney, the final song Her Mother’s House is an ode to love and care. “The more I love (The more you love me) / The stronger you become (The stronger I become) / The less you need me (And the less I need you).” Mother and daughter understood the feelings and reasoning radiating from the previous songs and undo their hearts in a new safe place freely settled in the ground. Björk’s utopia becomes a reality woven with traditional and futuristic sounds. Now all of us can access this earthly territory to connect with ourselves and others. “If we cling to what we used to be / It will burn our soul / We will get hurt / Unless there is absolute trust / Then we will become one”.
While still acknowledging the past scars of Vulnicura on the splendid Victimhood, Björk creates an interconnected map between all the things that constitute her being. At the crossroads of nursery rhyme, pop songs and atonal symphonies, and with influences from Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek, Public Enemy, Louise Bourgeois, Arca and even Beyoncé, Fossora appears to be an album without spinal column, quick and lively, just like a mushroom. Psychedelic, psychological, Carl Jung’s influence is obvious in several tracks like Ovule where Björk builds an image of love where the muddy reality is a middle ground between the ideal and the shadow (a very Jungian word). Structuring love as a place of all possibilities and durability, this song is the final lesson she learned about “how the ideal of love you carried from your childhood can be a heavy architecture that gets in the way, but heartbreaks perhaps rid you of that”. Chromatic and irregular, or in Björk’s words “earthy”, Fossora is a complex album due to its structure, but the Icelandic composer put in it everything we need to decrypt its structure, while our emotions keep simmering in a cosmogonic microcosm. Highly addictive, this is a party album you never heard before.
Collaborators always helped Björk introduce new sounds into her music. I use the word help very consciously because Björk arranges all her music and will always remain the meeting point between every instruments, musicians and ideas inside her music. Here it’s the Indonesian artist Kasimyn that shares the spotlight. Appearing in the Atopos video, Kasimyn brings his craftsmanship in an album full of gabber influences, a kind of techno with a very quick tempo that appeared in the Netherlands during the nineties. The opening song off Fossora is thereby the perfect place to start, because its angular beats shape the frame wherein Björk evolves. In this song, she affirms that perfectionism and obsessions are easy excuses not to connect. Facing others means loosening up to find a middle point wherein lies harmony. “We need hope to live. The eternal pursuit of happiness can only lead to a burn-out”. By withdrawing the ideal of absolute happiness from her reasoning, Björk focuses on a less-interested perception of life where humanity has to listen to the sounds other people make in order to understand how to grow together. It’s a way of existing not only as a human being, but as a body full of life living in a natural and digital environment completely taken into account, never rejected.
Her ability to grow is motivated by Björk’s unconditional optimism. She accepts unthinkable surprises may happen, whether they are good or bad (like in Vulnicura), but both implement transformation. Two songs focus on hope in death, with Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, both quieter and more straightforward melodic compositions about Björk’s mother, the environmental activist and “nihilist” Hildur Runa Hauksdóttir who died in 2018. The first song is the eulogy. “Nihilism happening cuts through this / Nihilism happening / You did well, you, you did your best.” This eulogy is set like a traditional Icelandic eulogy with melodramatic melodies and dry biographical elements. But here Björk counters the patriarchal side of this tradition with her woman point of view. With Ancestress, she builds an epitaph alongside her son Sindri Eldon, still with a feminine approach. “When I was a girl, she sang for me / In falsetto lullabies with sincerity / I thank her for her integrity.” Now her mother is buried in the ground, the same ground in which Björk’s mushroom feet are slightly rooted. And instead of denying her emotions and turning over a new leaf, she learns how to grief from the soil and transforms once again in order to assemble the matriarch
architecture of her house. A xenofeminist architecture.
Xenofeminism is a way of feminism coined in 2018 by Helen Hester. To put things shortly, xenofeminism is a « technomaterialist, anti-naturalist and gender abolisionist » approach of feminism. If this political and social philosophy can be quite complex to explain, the most important dynamics totally fit Björk’s discourse. Xenofeminism tends to emancipate women thanks to technology and the embrace of anti-capitalist reasonings, which means, by extension, environmentalism. One of the most famous formula by Helen Hester is « Biology is not a destiny », creating a whole new field for post-gender theories but also adding a transhumanist point of view to feminism. In her book, she talks about how technology can help women give birth, saving their lives and sparing them pain. But Björk embraces this side of xenofeminism in her aesthetic. Since Debut, she always was this machine-nature-women body always morphing into multiple shapes. With Fossora, these metamorphosis continue so she can feel even closer to the Earth, just like with every music video she released, from Sorrowful Soil to Atopos and Ancestress. Björk ultimate quest always has been searching for a feeling of unity between herself and her peers, herself and the world, and with this album she definitely reaches it. Björk becomes a total xenofeminist being.
In an interview with Pitchfork, journalist Jazz Monroe told her that the “cross-generational appeal” of her music allows it to be warmly welcomed by young people and queer communities. She answered with a question, “Do you think something of it has to do with the world finally being ready for matriarch music?” It’s impossible to separate Björk’s music from her feminine identity, and with Fossora she gives birth to a world where interconnectivty, hope, femininity and motherhood (for her children as much as for her relationship to nature and musical ideas) are the main ingredients of this “love-woven membrane” beating to the rhythm of her Icelandic heart. Recorded with her daughter Ísadóra Barney, the final song Her Mother’s House is an ode to love and care. “The more I love (The more you love me) / The stronger you become (The stronger I become) / The less you need me (And the less I need you).” Mother and daughter understood the feelings and reasoning radiating from the previous songs and undo their hearts in a new safe place freely settled in the ground. Björk’s utopia becomes a reality woven with traditional and futuristic sounds. Now all of us can access this earthly territory to connect with ourselves and others. “If we cling to what we used to be / It will burn our soul / We will get hurt / Unless there is absolute trust / Then we will become one”.