I Really Landed And Loved It How Sadness House Stomping And Gambar Built Bj Rk S New Album Bj Rk

According to Björk, the Dutch techno style of the 90s is the perfect soundtrack for the life of Covid. “There’s always a BPM in our body, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting at home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we had a bit of brains, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow action, but then it doubles.” And that, he realized, is “a little absurd.” Iceland’s hardline response to Covid has protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let it come off as bragging, because we felt for you, but we weren’t really that life-changing,” he says. After all, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s idea of ​​a good time. Despite spanning the globe for nearly four decades, Björk still claims to be “such a house.” For her, the nadir of the pandemic was the day the local pool closed. In person – today in a fragrant east London hotel – Björk is always on the move. There’s a boisterous energy about the 56-year-old that seems innate and unchanging, as if her fame as a child singer gave her the confidence not to bother growing up. Maybe it’s something to do with the grassroots feminism of a country where grown women can be drinkers, rioters and prime ministers (more on her later) without much controversy. Leaping from her seat at intervals, Björk is dressed in an asymmetric dress in Kiko Kostadinov’s lipstick red (she obligingly pulls out the tag to check), a scale-covered jacket in shimmering blue silk and lace-up shoes, with streaks of bronze on her eyelids. Björk performs at the Bluedot Festival, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe Covid delivered Björk back to her homeland in a transitional time. Her nest was emptying. Her daughter, Ísadóra (who is also called Doa), was all grown up, studying, acting and making movies and music. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the scene as a child, had died in 2018 after a long illness. After two albums made in the throes of grief and divorce, Björk fell back to earth with a soft thud, thinking of her ancestors, her descendants, and the land of fire and ice that binds them. Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. On the cover, it’s a glowing elf forest, her fingers melting with the fantastic fungi beneath her hooves. Compared to the fuzzy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it’s organic and spacious, neighborly rather than dreamy, and full of warmth and breath. It’s also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent gabber bursts. There are moments of stunning virtuosity and mind-boggling complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody. Björk’s journey from ’90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than ’90s peers like PJ Harvey. Like all Björk albums, Fossora is a reaction to its predecessor. Soft and light as candy, Utopia was a “survival mechanism from the heartbreaking story” she told in her 2015 Vulnicura series, which marked her split from artist Matthew Barney in obscurity. What she calls the “emergency” album and the “rescue album” popped like airbags, just two years apart, despite the technical challenges Björk set herself (like the four months it took her to figure out the resonance in flutes of Utopia) . This time, he decided to take as much time as needed and “allow myself the luxury of not having any willpower.” Locking made it easier. “I don’t think I’ve been home that much since I was 16. “Guilty to admit it, but I ate chocolate pudding every day,” she says with a smile. Usually, on her trips back to Reykjavik, she wouldn’t even bother unpacking. This time, her empty suitcase went up on the shelf. “I was really down to earth and really enjoyed it, really.” Homecoming Queen … Björk on stage at Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavík, 2021. Photo: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Between bursts of gambrel, Fossora offers tender songs written for Björk’s mother, a poem by 18th-century fisherwoman Látra-Björg, the buttery voice of Serpentwithfeet, and backing vocals from Sindri, her son, and Doa , which lends a folksy tone to her mother’s home. “I asked her to write about the farewell to the nest and [said] it didn’t have to be just nice,” she says, visibly proud. “It’s me kidding myself for being a bit of a stickler.” (They also appeared together in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, with Doa playing an enslaved Irishman kidnapped in Iceland and Björk playing the Seeress, her eyes hidden under snail shells as she prophesies a violent death for the Alexander Skarsgård.) Despite the fact that Fossora is an album for “people who make clubs in their living room”, the rumors of Björk’s rave album are exaggerated. “I was trying to get the mickey out of me,” she says with a sigh, her accent still a pleasant mix of Scandinavian Rs rolls and cockney slang. “Here I am, this lady is stuck in my living room on lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s a minute from” – she gets up from her chair and starts clapping her hands to a silent beat – “WOO!” I’m just happy to be back home. I’m really Icelandic It gives me a visual description of Fossora. If Utopia was a magical refuge from the black lake of misery he plunged into in Vulnicura (“take out all the teeth, no violence – like a pacifist, idealistic album of flutes, slogans and birds”), then Fossora shows life in it the land of dreams. “Let’s see what it’s like when you get into this fantasy and, you know, have lunch and leave” – another happy R roll – “and do normal things, like meet your friends.” This earthiness is framed by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloom, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor for its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew , but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing,” she chirps, before squatting down to demonstrate the heavyweight attack of the meter-long instrument. Then there is the hard technique. Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who combine folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise, were on heavy rotation at Björk’s lounge parties. “They’re bringing the tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like no one else,” says Björk. Björk live in Norway, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe He had a feeling they would be on the same wavelength. When Ican Harem and DJ Kasimyn first spoke to her on a video call, she explained that she was making the ‘mushroom album’. It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time, I live with moles and real grounding. I don’t know if this is too far-fetched for you, but I have to talk to this kind of music,” he told them. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s funny you say that, but last week we took some gamelan drums and dug them up in the ground and played them there and recorded them. Well, yes, we know what you mean.” Laughs. “Literally! I was just speaking figuratively!” The duo emailed her beats, which they painstakingly edited into Fossora’s awkward time signatures, resulting in what the trio calls “organic technique” (also the name of the group’s their WhatsApp chat). Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are tributes to Björk’s mother, who divorced her electrician and trade unionist husband when Björk was a baby and went to live in a community of Hendrix-loving hippies. Trained in alternative medicine, she was not happy to be surrounded by white coats when she became ill towards the end of her life. “She didn’t agree with all of that,” says Björk. “She was in the hospital a lot and it was very difficult with her. It was quite a fight.” Björk is steely as she recounts those harrowing two years in and out of hospital. Her lyrics, too, are stark in their sadness: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rest / Revealed her resilience / And then it does not,” she sings over strings and gongs on Ancestress. Hildur Rúna was 72 years old when she died. “It is too early. I think me and my brother weren’t ready to… we thought she had 10 years left. So we were like, ‘Come on,’ and let’s make her fight and … and it was like she had an internal clock in her and she was ready to go.” Performing with the Sugarcubes in New York, 1992. Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images In 2002, the same age as Björk is now, Hildur Rúna went on hunger strike to protest against the American company Alcoa building an aluminum smelter and 11 dams for a hydroelectric plant in the highlands of Iceland. He said: “I have a famous daughter and I’ve never used her name, but in this case it was necessary.” Björk supported her mom’s activism, but was no doubt relieved when, after 23 days, weak and delirious from surviving on herbal tonics, Hildur Rúna ended her fast. The smelter and dams were eventually built. Since then, Björk has dedicated…

title: " I Really Landed And Loved It How Sadness House Stomping And Gambar Built Bj Rk S New Album Bj Rk Klmat" ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-22” author: “Gregory Ferguson”

According to Björk, the Dutch techno style of the 90s is the perfect soundtrack for the life of Covid. “There’s always a BPM in our body, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting at home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we had a bit of brains, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow action, but then it doubles.” And that, he realized, is “a little absurd.” Iceland’s hardline response to Covid has protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let it come off as bragging, because we felt for you, but we weren’t really that life-changing,” he says. After all, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s idea of ​​a good time. Despite spanning the globe for nearly four decades, Björk still claims to be “such a house.” For her, the nadir of the pandemic was the day the local pool closed. In person – today in a fragrant east London hotel – Björk is always on the move. There’s a boisterous energy about the 56-year-old that seems innate and unchanging, as if her fame as a child singer gave her the confidence not to bother growing up. Maybe it’s something to do with the grassroots feminism of a country where grown women can be drinkers, rioters and prime ministers (more on her later) without much controversy. Leaping from her seat at intervals, Björk is dressed in an asymmetric dress in Kiko Kostadinov’s lipstick red (she obligingly pulls out the tag to check), a scale-covered jacket in shimmering blue silk and lace-up shoes, with streaks of bronze on her eyelids. Björk performs at the Bluedot Festival, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe Covid delivered Björk back to her homeland in a transitional time. Her nest was emptying. Her daughter, Ísadóra (who is also called Doa), was all grown up, studying, acting and making movies and music. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the scene as a child, had died in 2018 after a long illness. After two albums made in the throes of grief and divorce, Björk fell back to earth with a soft thud, thinking of her ancestors, her descendants, and the land of fire and ice that binds them. Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. On the cover, it’s a glowing elf forest, her fingers melting with the fantastic fungi beneath her hooves. Compared to the fuzzy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it’s organic and spacious, neighborly rather than dreamy, and full of warmth and breath. It’s also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent gabber bursts. There are moments of stunning virtuosity and mind-boggling complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody. Björk’s journey from ’90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than ’90s peers like PJ Harvey. Like all Björk albums, Fossora is a reaction to its predecessor. Soft and light as candy, Utopia was a “survival mechanism from the heartbreaking story” she told in her 2015 Vulnicura series, which marked her split from artist Matthew Barney in obscurity. What she calls the “emergency” album and the “rescue album” popped like airbags, just two years apart, despite the technical challenges Björk set herself (like the four months it took her to figure out the resonance in flutes of Utopia) . This time, he decided to take as much time as needed and “allow myself the luxury of not having any willpower.” Locking made it easier. “I don’t think I’ve been home that much since I was 16. “Guilty to admit it, but I ate chocolate pudding every day,” she says with a smile. Usually, on her trips back to Reykjavik, she wouldn’t even bother unpacking. This time, her empty suitcase went up on the shelf. “I was really down to earth and really enjoyed it, really.” Homecoming Queen … Björk on stage at Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavík, 2021. Photo: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Between bursts of gambrel, Fossora offers tender songs written for Björk’s mother, a poem by 18th-century fisherwoman Látra-Björg, the buttery voice of Serpentwithfeet, and backing vocals from Sindri, her son, and Doa , which lends a folksy tone to her mother’s home. “I asked her to write about the farewell to the nest and [said] it didn’t have to be just nice,” she says, visibly proud. “It’s me kidding myself for being a bit of a stickler.” (They also appeared together in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, with Doa playing an enslaved Irishman kidnapped in Iceland and Björk playing the Seeress, her eyes hidden under snail shells as she prophesies a violent death for the Alexander Skarsgård.) Despite the fact that Fossora is an album for “people who make clubs in their living room”, the rumors of Björk’s rave album are exaggerated. “I was trying to get the mickey out of me,” she says with a sigh, her accent still a pleasant mix of Scandinavian Rs rolls and cockney slang. “Here I am, this lady is stuck in my living room on lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s a minute from” – she gets up from her chair and starts clapping her hands to a silent beat – “WOO!” I’m just happy to be back home. I’m really Icelandic It gives me a visual description of Fossora. If Utopia was a magical refuge from the black lake of misery he plunged into in Vulnicura (“take out all the teeth, no violence – like a pacifist, idealistic album of flutes, slogans and birds”), then Fossora shows life in it the land of dreams. “Let’s see what it’s like when you get into this fantasy and, you know, have lunch and leave” – another happy R roll – “and do normal things, like meet your friends.” This earthiness is framed by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloom, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor for its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew , but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing,” she chirps, before squatting down to demonstrate the heavyweight attack of the meter-long instrument. Then there is the hard technique. Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who combine folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise, were on heavy rotation at Björk’s lounge parties. “They’re bringing the tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like no one else,” says Björk. Björk live in Norway, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe He had a feeling they would be on the same wavelength. When Ican Harem and DJ Kasimyn first spoke to her on a video call, she explained that she was making the ‘mushroom album’. It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time, I live with moles and real grounding. I don’t know if this is too far-fetched for you, but I have to talk to this kind of music,” he told them. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s funny you say that, but last week we took some gamelan drums and dug them up in the ground and played them there and recorded them. Well, yes, we know what you mean.” Laughs. “Literally! I was just speaking figuratively!” The duo emailed her beats, which they painstakingly edited into Fossora’s awkward time signatures, resulting in what the trio calls “organic technique” (also the name of the group’s their WhatsApp chat). Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are tributes to Björk’s mother, who divorced her electrician and trade unionist husband when Björk was a baby and went to live in a community of Hendrix-loving hippies. Trained in alternative medicine, she was not happy to be surrounded by white coats when she became ill towards the end of her life. “She didn’t agree with all of that,” says Björk. “She was in the hospital a lot and it was very difficult with her. It was quite a fight.” Björk is steely as she recounts those harrowing two years in and out of hospital. Her lyrics, too, are stark in their sadness: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rest / Revealed her resilience / And then it does not,” she sings over strings and gongs on Ancestress. Hildur Rúna was 72 years old when she died. “It is too early. I think me and my brother weren’t ready to… we thought she had 10 years left. So we were like, ‘Come on,’ and let’s make her fight and … and it was like she had an internal clock in her and she was ready to go.” Performing with the Sugarcubes in New York, 1992. Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images In 2002, the same age as Björk is now, Hildur Rúna went on hunger strike to protest against the American company Alcoa building an aluminum smelter and 11 dams for a hydroelectric plant in the highlands of Iceland. He said: “I have a famous daughter and I’ve never used her name, but in this case it was necessary.” Björk supported her mom’s activism, but was no doubt relieved when, after 23 days, weak and delirious from surviving on herbal tonics, Hildur Rúna ended her fast. The smelter and dams were eventually built. Since then, Björk has dedicated…

title: " I Really Landed And Loved It How Sadness House Stomping And Gambar Built Bj Rk S New Album Bj Rk Klmat" ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-18” author: “Annette Bower”

According to Björk, the Dutch techno style of the 90s is the perfect soundtrack for the life of Covid. “There’s always a BPM in our body, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting at home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we had a bit of brains, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow action, but then it doubles.” And that, he realized, is “a little absurd.” Iceland’s hardline response to Covid has protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let it come off as bragging, because we felt for you, but we weren’t really that life-changing,” he says. After all, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s idea of ​​a good time. Despite spanning the globe for nearly four decades, Björk still claims to be “such a house.” For her, the nadir of the pandemic was the day the local pool closed. In person – today in a fragrant east London hotel – Björk is always on the move. There’s a boisterous energy about the 56-year-old that seems innate and unchanging, as if her fame as a child singer gave her the confidence not to bother growing up. Maybe it’s something to do with the grassroots feminism of a country where grown women can be drinkers, rioters and prime ministers (more on her later) without much controversy. Leaping from her seat at intervals, Björk is dressed in an asymmetric dress in Kiko Kostadinov’s lipstick red (she obligingly pulls out the tag to check), a scale-covered jacket in shimmering blue silk and lace-up shoes, with streaks of bronze on her eyelids. Björk performs at the Bluedot Festival, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe Covid delivered Björk back to her homeland in a transitional time. Her nest was emptying. Her daughter, Ísadóra (who is also called Doa), was all grown up, studying, acting and making movies and music. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the scene as a child, had died in 2018 after a long illness. After two albums made in the throes of grief and divorce, Björk fell back to earth with a soft thud, thinking of her ancestors, her descendants, and the land of fire and ice that binds them. Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. On the cover, it’s a glowing elf forest, her fingers melting with the fantastic fungi beneath her hooves. Compared to the fuzzy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it’s organic and spacious, neighborly rather than dreamy, and full of warmth and breath. It’s also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent gabber bursts. There are moments of stunning virtuosity and mind-boggling complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody. Björk’s journey from ’90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than ’90s peers like PJ Harvey. Like all Björk albums, Fossora is a reaction to its predecessor. Soft and light as candy, Utopia was a “survival mechanism from the heartbreaking story” she told in her 2015 Vulnicura series, which marked her split from artist Matthew Barney in obscurity. What she calls the “emergency” album and the “rescue album” popped like airbags, just two years apart, despite the technical challenges Björk set herself (like the four months it took her to figure out the resonance in flutes of Utopia) . This time, he decided to take as much time as needed and “allow myself the luxury of not having any willpower.” Locking made it easier. “I don’t think I’ve been home that much since I was 16. “Guilty to admit it, but I ate chocolate pudding every day,” she says with a smile. Usually, on her trips back to Reykjavik, she wouldn’t even bother unpacking. This time, her empty suitcase went up on the shelf. “I was really down to earth and really enjoyed it, really.” Homecoming Queen … Björk on stage at Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavík, 2021. Photo: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Between bursts of gambrel, Fossora offers tender songs written for Björk’s mother, a poem by 18th-century fisherwoman Látra-Björg, the buttery voice of Serpentwithfeet, and backing vocals from Sindri, her son, and Doa , which lends a folksy tone to her mother’s home. “I asked her to write about the farewell to the nest and [said] it didn’t have to be just nice,” she says, visibly proud. “It’s me kidding myself for being a bit of a stickler.” (They also appeared together in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, with Doa playing an enslaved Irishman kidnapped in Iceland and Björk playing the Seeress, her eyes hidden under snail shells as she prophesies a violent death for the Alexander Skarsgård.) Despite the fact that Fossora is an album for “people who make clubs in their living room”, the rumors of Björk’s rave album are exaggerated. “I was trying to get the mickey out of me,” she says with a sigh, her accent still a pleasant mix of Scandinavian Rs rolls and cockney slang. “Here I am, this lady is stuck in my living room on lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s a minute from” – she gets up from her chair and starts clapping her hands to a silent beat – “WOO!” I’m just happy to be back home. I’m really Icelandic It gives me a visual description of Fossora. If Utopia was a magical refuge from the black lake of misery he plunged into in Vulnicura (“take out all the teeth, no violence – like a pacifist, idealistic album of flutes, slogans and birds”), then Fossora shows life in it the land of dreams. “Let’s see what it’s like when you get into this fantasy and, you know, have lunch and leave” – another happy R roll – “and do normal things, like meet your friends.” This earthiness is framed by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloom, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor for its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew , but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing,” she chirps, before squatting down to demonstrate the heavyweight attack of the meter-long instrument. Then there is the hard technique. Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who combine folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise, were on heavy rotation at Björk’s lounge parties. “They’re bringing the tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like no one else,” says Björk. Björk live in Norway, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe He had a feeling they would be on the same wavelength. When Ican Harem and DJ Kasimyn first spoke to her on a video call, she explained that she was making the ‘mushroom album’. It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time, I live with moles and real grounding. I don’t know if this is too far-fetched for you, but I have to talk to this kind of music,” he told them. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s funny you say that, but last week we took some gamelan drums and dug them up in the ground and played them there and recorded them. Well, yes, we know what you mean.” Laughs. “Literally! I was just speaking figuratively!” The duo emailed her beats, which they painstakingly edited into Fossora’s awkward time signatures, resulting in what the trio calls “organic technique” (also the name of the group’s their WhatsApp chat). Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are tributes to Björk’s mother, who divorced her electrician and trade unionist husband when Björk was a baby and went to live in a community of Hendrix-loving hippies. Trained in alternative medicine, she was not happy to be surrounded by white coats when she became ill towards the end of her life. “She didn’t agree with all of that,” says Björk. “She was in the hospital a lot and it was very difficult with her. It was quite a fight.” Björk is steely as she recounts those harrowing two years in and out of hospital. Her lyrics, too, are stark in their sadness: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rest / Revealed her resilience / And then it does not,” she sings over strings and gongs on Ancestress. Hildur Rúna was 72 years old when she died. “It is too early. I think me and my brother weren’t ready to… we thought she had 10 years left. So we were like, ‘Come on,’ and let’s make her fight and … and it was like she had an internal clock in her and she was ready to go.” Performing with the Sugarcubes in New York, 1992. Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images In 2002, the same age as Björk is now, Hildur Rúna went on hunger strike to protest against the American company Alcoa building an aluminum smelter and 11 dams for a hydroelectric plant in the highlands of Iceland. He said: “I have a famous daughter and I’ve never used her name, but in this case it was necessary.” Björk supported her mom’s activism, but was no doubt relieved when, after 23 days, weak and delirious from surviving on herbal tonics, Hildur Rúna ended her fast. The smelter and dams were eventually built. Since then, Björk has dedicated…

title: " I Really Landed And Loved It How Sadness House Stomping And Gambar Built Bj Rk S New Album Bj Rk Klmat" ShowToc: true date: “2022-10-27” author: “Wilda Anderson”

According to Björk, the Dutch techno style of the 90s is the perfect soundtrack for the life of Covid. “There’s always a BPM in our body, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting at home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we had a bit of brains, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow action, but then it doubles.” And that, he realized, is “a little absurd.” Iceland’s hardline response to Covid has protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let it come off as bragging, because we felt for you, but we weren’t really that life-changing,” he says. After all, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s idea of ​​a good time. Despite spanning the globe for nearly four decades, Björk still claims to be “such a house.” For her, the nadir of the pandemic was the day the local pool closed. In person – today in a fragrant east London hotel – Björk is always on the move. There’s a boisterous energy about the 56-year-old that seems innate and unchanging, as if her fame as a child singer gave her the confidence not to bother growing up. Maybe it’s something to do with the grassroots feminism of a country where grown women can be drinkers, rioters and prime ministers (more on her later) without much controversy. Leaping from her seat at intervals, Björk is dressed in an asymmetric dress in Kiko Kostadinov’s lipstick red (she obligingly pulls out the tag to check), a scale-covered jacket in shimmering blue silk and lace-up shoes, with streaks of bronze on her eyelids. Björk performs at the Bluedot Festival, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe Covid delivered Björk back to her homeland in a transitional time. Her nest was emptying. Her daughter, Ísadóra (who is also called Doa), was all grown up, studying, acting and making movies and music. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the scene as a child, had died in 2018 after a long illness. After two albums made in the throes of grief and divorce, Björk fell back to earth with a soft thud, thinking of her ancestors, her descendants, and the land of fire and ice that binds them. Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. On the cover, it’s a glowing elf forest, her fingers melting with the fantastic fungi beneath her hooves. Compared to the fuzzy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it’s organic and spacious, neighborly rather than dreamy, and full of warmth and breath. It’s also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent gabber bursts. There are moments of stunning virtuosity and mind-boggling complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody. Björk’s journey from ’90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than ’90s peers like PJ Harvey. Like all Björk albums, Fossora is a reaction to its predecessor. Soft and light as candy, Utopia was a “survival mechanism from the heartbreaking story” she told in her 2015 Vulnicura series, which marked her split from artist Matthew Barney in obscurity. What she calls the “emergency” album and the “rescue album” popped like airbags, just two years apart, despite the technical challenges Björk set herself (like the four months it took her to figure out the resonance in flutes of Utopia) . This time, he decided to take as much time as needed and “allow myself the luxury of not having any willpower.” Locking made it easier. “I don’t think I’ve been home that much since I was 16. “Guilty to admit it, but I ate chocolate pudding every day,” she says with a smile. Usually, on her trips back to Reykjavik, she wouldn’t even bother unpacking. This time, her empty suitcase went up on the shelf. “I was really down to earth and really enjoyed it, really.” Homecoming Queen … Björk on stage at Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavík, 2021. Photo: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Between bursts of gambrel, Fossora offers tender songs written for Björk’s mother, a poem by 18th-century fisherwoman Látra-Björg, the buttery voice of Serpentwithfeet, and backing vocals from Sindri, her son, and Doa , which lends a folksy tone to her mother’s home. “I asked her to write about the farewell to the nest and [said] it didn’t have to be just nice,” she says, visibly proud. “It’s me kidding myself for being a bit of a stickler.” (They also appeared together in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, with Doa playing an enslaved Irishman kidnapped in Iceland and Björk playing the Seeress, her eyes hidden under snail shells as she prophesies a violent death for the Alexander Skarsgård.) Despite the fact that Fossora is an album for “people who make clubs in their living room”, the rumors of Björk’s rave album are exaggerated. “I was trying to get the mickey out of me,” she says with a sigh, her accent still a pleasant mix of Scandinavian Rs rolls and cockney slang. “Here I am, this lady is stuck in my living room on lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s a minute from” – she gets up from her chair and starts clapping her hands to a silent beat – “WOO!” I’m just happy to be back home. I’m really Icelandic It gives me a visual description of Fossora. If Utopia was a magical refuge from the black lake of misery he plunged into in Vulnicura (“take out all the teeth, no violence – like a pacifist, idealistic album of flutes, slogans and birds”), then Fossora shows life in it the land of dreams. “Let’s see what it’s like when you get into this fantasy and, you know, have lunch and leave” – another happy R roll – “and do normal things, like meet your friends.” This earthiness is framed by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloom, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor for its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew , but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing,” she chirps, before squatting down to demonstrate the heavyweight attack of the meter-long instrument. Then there is the hard technique. Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who combine folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise, were on heavy rotation at Björk’s lounge parties. “They’re bringing the tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like no one else,” says Björk. Björk live in Norway, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe He had a feeling they would be on the same wavelength. When Ican Harem and DJ Kasimyn first spoke to her on a video call, she explained that she was making the ‘mushroom album’. It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time, I live with moles and real grounding. I don’t know if this is too far-fetched for you, but I have to talk to this kind of music,” he told them. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s funny you say that, but last week we took some gamelan drums and dug them up in the ground and played them there and recorded them. Well, yes, we know what you mean.” Laughs. “Literally! I was just speaking figuratively!” The duo emailed her beats, which they painstakingly edited into Fossora’s awkward time signatures, resulting in what the trio calls “organic technique” (also the name of the group’s their WhatsApp chat). Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are tributes to Björk’s mother, who divorced her electrician and trade unionist husband when Björk was a baby and went to live in a community of Hendrix-loving hippies. Trained in alternative medicine, she was not happy to be surrounded by white coats when she became ill towards the end of her life. “She didn’t agree with all of that,” says Björk. “She was in the hospital a lot and it was very difficult with her. It was quite a fight.” Björk is steely as she recounts those harrowing two years in and out of hospital. Her lyrics, too, are stark in their sadness: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rest / Revealed her resilience / And then it does not,” she sings over strings and gongs on Ancestress. Hildur Rúna was 72 years old when she died. “It is too early. I think me and my brother weren’t ready to… we thought she had 10 years left. So we were like, ‘Come on,’ and let’s make her fight and … and it was like she had an internal clock in her and she was ready to go.” Performing with the Sugarcubes in New York, 1992. Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images In 2002, the same age as Björk is now, Hildur Rúna went on hunger strike to protest against the American company Alcoa building an aluminum smelter and 11 dams for a hydroelectric plant in the highlands of Iceland. He said: “I have a famous daughter and I’ve never used her name, but in this case it was necessary.” Björk supported her mom’s activism, but was no doubt relieved when, after 23 days, weak and delirious from surviving on herbal tonics, Hildur Rúna ended her fast. The smelter and dams were eventually built. Since then, Björk has dedicated…

title: " I Really Landed And Loved It How Sadness House Stomping And Gambar Built Bj Rk S New Album Bj Rk Klmat" ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-30” author: “John Harris”

According to Björk, the Dutch techno style of the 90s is the perfect soundtrack for the life of Covid. “There’s always a BPM in our body, you know? And I think through Covid we were all pretty lazy, just sitting at home reading books, so when we got drunk or partied it was like we had a bit of brains, then we just fell asleep before midnight. Slow action, but then it doubles.” And that, he realized, is “a little absurd.” Iceland’s hardline response to Covid has protected its tiny population from the worst of the pandemic. “Please don’t let it come off as bragging, because we felt for you, but we weren’t really that life-changing,” he says. After all, being confined to Iceland is Björk’s idea of ​​a good time. Despite spanning the globe for nearly four decades, Björk still claims to be “such a house.” For her, the nadir of the pandemic was the day the local pool closed. In person – today in a fragrant east London hotel – Björk is always on the move. There’s a boisterous energy about the 56-year-old that seems innate and unchanging, as if her fame as a child singer gave her the confidence not to bother growing up. Maybe it’s something to do with the grassroots feminism of a country where grown women can be drinkers, rioters and prime ministers (more on her later) without much controversy. Leaping from her seat at intervals, Björk is dressed in an asymmetric dress in Kiko Kostadinov’s lipstick red (she obligingly pulls out the tag to check), a scale-covered jacket in shimmering blue silk and lace-up shoes, with streaks of bronze on her eyelids. Björk performs at the Bluedot Festival, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe Covid delivered Björk back to her homeland in a transitional time. Her nest was emptying. Her daughter, Ísadóra (who is also called Doa), was all grown up, studying, acting and making movies and music. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, the hippie homeopath who pushed her onto the scene as a child, had died in 2018 after a long illness. After two albums made in the throes of grief and divorce, Björk fell back to earth with a soft thud, thinking of her ancestors, her descendants, and the land of fire and ice that binds them. Her new album is called Fossora, the feminine version of the Latin word for digger. On the cover, it’s a glowing elf forest, her fingers melting with the fantastic fungi beneath her hooves. Compared to the fuzzy electronics of 2017’s Utopia, it’s organic and spacious, neighborly rather than dreamy, and full of warmth and breath. It’s also a world of contrasts: the album’s two lodestones are bass clarinet and violent gabber bursts. There are moments of stunning virtuosity and mind-boggling complexity and, like much of her recent music, a resistance to easy melody. Björk’s journey from ’90s dance-pop to something more like surreal opera has more in common with Scott Walker’s graceful trajectory than ’90s peers like PJ Harvey. Like all Björk albums, Fossora is a reaction to its predecessor. Soft and light as candy, Utopia was a “survival mechanism from the heartbreaking story” she told in her 2015 Vulnicura series, which marked her split from artist Matthew Barney in obscurity. What she calls the “emergency” album and the “rescue album” popped like airbags, just two years apart, despite the technical challenges Björk set herself (like the four months it took her to figure out the resonance in flutes of Utopia) . This time, he decided to take as much time as needed and “allow myself the luxury of not having any willpower.” Locking made it easier. “I don’t think I’ve been home that much since I was 16. “Guilty to admit it, but I ate chocolate pudding every day,” she says with a smile. Usually, on her trips back to Reykjavik, she wouldn’t even bother unpacking. This time, her empty suitcase went up on the shelf. “I was really down to earth and really enjoyed it, really.” Homecoming Queen … Björk on stage at Harpa Concert Hall, Reykjavík, 2021. Photo: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Between bursts of gambrel, Fossora offers tender songs written for Björk’s mother, a poem by 18th-century fisherwoman Látra-Björg, the buttery voice of Serpentwithfeet, and backing vocals from Sindri, her son, and Doa , which lends a folksy tone to her mother’s home. “I asked her to write about the farewell to the nest and [said] it didn’t have to be just nice,” she says, visibly proud. “It’s me kidding myself for being a bit of a stickler.” (They also appeared together in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman, with Doa playing an enslaved Irishman kidnapped in Iceland and Björk playing the Seeress, her eyes hidden under snail shells as she prophesies a violent death for the Alexander Skarsgård.) Despite the fact that Fossora is an album for “people who make clubs in their living room”, the rumors of Björk’s rave album are exaggerated. “I was trying to get the mickey out of me,” she says with a sigh, her accent still a pleasant mix of Scandinavian Rs rolls and cockney slang. “Here I am, this lady is stuck in my living room on lockdown, and it’s a really serious song for four and a half minutes. And then it’s a minute from” – she gets up from her chair and starts clapping her hands to a silent beat – “WOO!” I’m just happy to be back home. I’m really Icelandic It gives me a visual description of Fossora. If Utopia was a magical refuge from the black lake of misery he plunged into in Vulnicura (“take out all the teeth, no violence – like a pacifist, idealistic album of flutes, slogans and birds”), then Fossora shows life in it the land of dreams. “Let’s see what it’s like when you get into this fantasy and, you know, have lunch and leave” – another happy R roll – “and do normal things, like meet your friends.” This earthiness is framed by the album’s sextet of bass clarinets, an instrument chosen not for its gloom, as in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, nor for its smoky luxury, like Bennie Maupin’s playing on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew , but for its potential as percussive artillery. Björk wanted them to sound “like Public Enemy, like duh-duh-duh-duh, like boxing,” she chirps, before squatting down to demonstrate the heavyweight attack of the meter-long instrument. Then there is the hard technique. Gabber Modus Operandi, two Indonesian punks who combine folk styles such as Balinese gamelan with abrasive western gabber, footwork and noise, were on heavy rotation at Björk’s lounge parties. “They’re bringing the tradition into the 21st century, which I really respect. They do it like no one else,” says Björk. Björk live in Norway, 2022. Photo: Santiago Felipe He had a feeling they would be on the same wavelength. When Ican Harem and DJ Kasimyn first spoke to her on a video call, she explained that she was making the ‘mushroom album’. It’s like digging a hole in the ground. This time, I live with moles and real grounding. I don’t know if this is too far-fetched for you, but I have to talk to this kind of music,” he told them. “And they said, ‘Oh, it’s funny you say that, but last week we took some gamelan drums and dug them up in the ground and played them there and recorded them. Well, yes, we know what you mean.” Laughs. “Literally! I was just speaking figuratively!” The duo emailed her beats, which they painstakingly edited into Fossora’s awkward time signatures, resulting in what the trio calls “organic technique” (also the name of the group’s their WhatsApp chat). Two songs, Sorrowful Soil and Ancestress, are tributes to Björk’s mother, who divorced her electrician and trade unionist husband when Björk was a baby and went to live in a community of Hendrix-loving hippies. Trained in alternative medicine, she was not happy to be surrounded by white coats when she became ill towards the end of her life. “She didn’t agree with all of that,” says Björk. “She was in the hospital a lot and it was very difficult with her. It was quite a fight.” Björk is steely as she recounts those harrowing two years in and out of hospital. Her lyrics, too, are stark in their sadness: “The machine of her breathed all night while she rest / Revealed her resilience / And then it does not,” she sings over strings and gongs on Ancestress. Hildur Rúna was 72 years old when she died. “It is too early. I think me and my brother weren’t ready to… we thought she had 10 years left. So we were like, ‘Come on,’ and let’s make her fight and … and it was like she had an internal clock in her and she was ready to go.” Performing with the Sugarcubes in New York, 1992. Photo: Steve Eichner/Getty Images In 2002, the same age as Björk is now, Hildur Rúna went on hunger strike to protest against the American company Alcoa building an aluminum smelter and 11 dams for a hydroelectric plant in the highlands of Iceland. He said: “I have a famous daughter and I’ve never used her name, but in this case it was necessary.” Björk supported her mom’s activism, but was no doubt relieved when, after 23 days, weak and delirious from surviving on herbal tonics, Hildur Rúna ended her fast. The smelter and dams were eventually built. Since then, Björk has dedicated…