In 2017, Björk Guðmundsdóttir closed a painful chapter in her life. To set the tone for the next one, she wrote a manifesto in the form of her work UTOPIA, her “Anohni album.” The most aesthetically progressive artist of our time entered into a correspondence for the Musikexpress about her most advanced music to date.
Not far from Reykjavík, just about 40 minutes’ drive west, is the Þingvellir National Park. The Viking people’s meetings used to take place in this plain, which is relatively pleasant by Icelandic standards, and it was here that the Republic was ceremonially proclaimed in 1944. Björk Guðmundsdóttir wrote UTOPIA looking through five floor-to-ceiling windows and beyond the wooden terrace to the silvery surface of the lake, beneath which runs the rift valley between the European and American land masses. The cabin is really just a better cabin and was built in 1965. There are two bedrooms, a large living room and a cute kitchen. Nothing special. Nothing distracts you from looking out at the landscape. And nothing suggests that the most aesthetically progressive artist of our time was working on her most advanced music to date.
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Maybe that’s how it has to be. “The place is not my paradise,” writes Björk. The place is not important if you are looking for the non-place, the utopia. The place of longing lies elsewhere. We actually wanted to talk to Björk on the phone. But a few minutes before the appointment she contacted us with a cancellation. She had a bad night and wanted to protect her voice. She is welcome to answer the questions in writing. The disappointment quickly changes. Björk answers our questions perhaps more freely and precisely than she would have been able to verbally.
“When someone starts new, some kind of manifesto is essential to formulate a utopia.”
And there are many questions about UTOPIA, which she recorded together with Arca, the Venezuelan producer of highly refined, galvanized, sharp-edged sound surfaces – here reduced and almost pushed into the ambient, into a slightly enchanted mildness that suits him very well. Björk and Arca must have had a good time. In the South American jungle. At the lake in Iceland. In New York. You can hear the parrots. The splashing. The wind between the skyscrapers. Above all, Björk has once again brought Iceland into her music. Iceland: What Bob Marley is to his island, Björk is to hers. She was actually supposed to be district president, honorary, for life. It’s true that you don’t want to read anything about all this geyser shit, the elf kitsch anymore. Nevertheless, she has never allowed “the country”, so to speak, so deeply into her art.
“It was an adventure arranging the flutes for this album. I formed an ensemble of twelve girls and we rehearsed and recorded on Fridays for two months. It was quite a job fine-tuning it all and changing the timbre to pack as wide a sonic palette as possible into all 13 songs,” writes Björk. In addition, there is a choir to be heard, the same choir that “I sang in as a teenager, it is one of the most renowned in Iceland. You hear it in ‘Body Memory’, along with Icelandic birds, nature, wind. It should be like a person’s own utopia, as if they are already living in it – and the song should be their national anthem.”
The organic is required if one strives for the utopian. And utopia is needed when something organic has died. For Björk, it was her relationship with the artist Matthew Barney that gave birth to her daughter Isadora. After the separation and an ugly custody battle, which was also reflected in VULNICURA in its emotional brutality and coldness, Björk sees UTOPIA as her soundtrack to a new beginning. “I feel like a dramatic chapter has ended. Now it’s time to start a new one,” she writes. “When someone is starting out, some kind of manifesto is essential to formulate a utopia. For me, this is a place where you can listen to a song, cook something for your loved ones and turn everything negative into something positive.”
There must be an underlying urgency to what is new
In a sense, UTOPIA is also something like their “Anohni album”. Björk had long conversations with the transgender activist, and they both share the view that society’s treatment of women reflects how people deal with their environment. And of course, in stormy times, an artist like Björk cannot retreat. Otherwise she could have called her album “Refugium”. Utopia is never private, but always contains a social perspective. Björk is convinced that utopia “is an absolute necessity, especially when it comes to environmental issues. Invent and use technologies to clean our oceans of plastic! Introduce green energy! In many ways, my album is, so to speak, a non-violent, matriarchal statement. Because pollution is a violence directed against us all.”
“The idea is that the apocalypse has already happened. And it’s up to us to assemble the remnants into something new. Clean up. Change course. Let nature and technology work hand in hand.”
She doesn’t want to talk about politics; she doesn’t see that as her job. Isn’t everything private still political? “Absolutely. As a pop musician, I feel that personal politics and public politics often coincide. That’s why pop is such an exciting art form to express yourself in. Pop simplifies in a good way and gives some things more weight. Everyday life can often be chaotic and the clarity of a song is so helpful.” The utopia, the manifesto, the plan is always an emergency.
There must be an underlying urgency to what is new, otherwise there is no need for anything new. If UTOPIA is political, then precisely in the radical narrowing of the intimate and the public. Björk explains what she is about using an old song, “Declare Independence” by VOLTA, as an example. Even back then, she “had a lot of fun playing with the words in such a way that it could be heard both as a song about the struggle for independence between Greenland or the Faroe Islands with Denmark – but also as the inner monologue of a person who is oppressed in a relationship and is now standing up for his rights. So it was political and personal at the same time. I wish everyone had their own little utopia to define their dream. Even if only half of it became reality, a lot would already have been achieved.” She has never read the fictional report about a fictional island by Thomas More, to whom we owe the concept of utopia in its current form. And she prefers not to say anything about Helmut Schmidt – who recommended that anyone who has visions should “go to the doctor”. Politics is not her profession, and if it is, then only body politics.
Her favorite series of recent years is “Drag Race,” a drag queen spectacle with a high trash factor. The queer not only has something liberating for Björk, it also suits the transgressive character of her work. Crossing borders not only works in their music, but also in the visual implementation. After several incarnations, Björk looks like a happy corpse in the current images of the record – and in the video. Everything new, she knows, also has something repulsive and frightening about it, but has always been “an elementary need of humanity. There are so many different ways in which people wanted to achieve this goal. Monasteries, for example, are particularly long-lasting examples of this. But so are thought structures such as capitalism or communism. Whenever we as a society experience an upheaval, it is frightening and frightening and hardly possible to even imagine a new world.”
With its transcending potential, music can not only help to imagine a new world. You can also create such a place of longing yourself. UTOPIA is “written from the perspective of having already reached that desired place. I describe plants and birds and sounds that no one has ever heard before. I found that exciting. The idea is that the apocalypse has already happened. And it’s up to us to put the remnants together into something new. Clean up. Change course. Let nature and technology work hand in hand.”
The possibility of an island of bliss
This attitude is the key to the special atmosphere of an album that, although not at the peak of light-heartedness or euphoria, shows Björk as optimistic and light-handed as rarely. No angry stomping, no triumphant roar – but with seductive, quiet radiance. When formulated in UTOPIA, one accepts nothing less than the possibility of an island of bliss, similar to the one that Thomas More tried to sketch 500 years ago. “The utopias we have and the utopias we strive for” coincide in this place of timelessness.
The thing about the apocalypse that has already happened and the absolute need for a new beginning makes sense if you immerse yourself in the view that Björk enjoyed from her living room in Þingvellir. It is a unique landscape, comparable only to one on another, much younger planet. However, it is also typical that this view has now had its day. The hut, the refuge, the place of desire on this island, which can still be viewed on the real estate dealer’s website, has already been sold. It is in the nature of the avant-garde. It points to what we want to get to – and is itself always further and away.