![]() The album title riffs on the Latin fossore - someone who digs - and there’s a sense of Björk digging into her past here, musical and personal, which she’s also done with her expansive new podcast, Sonic Symbolism. Yet lines like “our differences are irrelevant” and “if we don’t grow outwards towards love/we’ll implode inward towards destruction” also suggest Björk addressing the human race, poised for extinction unless it get its shit together and cooperates. But a good-sized woofer will, by the song’s finale, transport you to 5AM at a mid-‘90s Midwest warehouse rave, while the singer tries to repair a fractured relationship, perhaps between a child and a parent, or between two lovers. “Atopos,” the album’s opener and debut single, is an argument against the devaluation of music into lo-fi streamed wallpaper - in a post, she instructs listeners to “play it loudly” because of “the enormous importance of bass in this song.” Indeed, its cannonfire drums, which veer between dembow reggaetón and gamelan-tinged gabber, feel illogical on laptop speakers. Meaning that, as always, it asks you to meet it on its own terms, which here include a clarinet sextet, a flute battalion, an Icelandic new music choir, and ferocious hardcore beats co-created with Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO), an Indonesian electronic group combining “gracefully authentic balinesian rhythms and techno” as Björk describes it on her Instagram. In short, it’s Björk at her absolute Björkiest. The artist described it as something of her “mushroom” album, using metaphors about burrowing in the dirt. ![]() The sonic landscape is still huge - awesome, as alien as it is familiar, full of otherworldly arrangements, tectonic beats, and craggy melodies that conjure the terrain of her native Iceland. ![]() If that project looks at our troubled planet with a macro lens, her new album Fossora zooms in Google Map-style, looking at people on the ground and in the room, measuring distances between them. It’s been three years since Björk premiered the maximalist Cornucopia in New York, a psychedelic environmental cautionary tale that climate change has made permanently resonant (the ongoing tour is slated for Japan next year). ![]()
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