‘With my songs I teach myself to become the person I want to be’

The lockdown? Björk (56) had no problem with it. For two reasons, she says. ‘Iceland is an island. To prevent the spread of the virus, the most important measure was to close the borders. The catering industry did not have to close rigorously as in the rest of Europe. We were not nearly as hard hit as other countries. And I loved that after years of wandering the world I could just stay in one place. I don’t think I’ve been sitting at home that long since I was 16.’

In addition, Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra (or Doa) had left the nest for good. The 19-year-old had finished school in Brooklyn and went on to devote herself to her own film and music career. Björk’s mother, Hildur Rúna, had died a few years earlier after a long illness. A new phase had begun in the life of the Icelandic singer, the uncrowned queen of alternative pop since her debut album debut (1993). A phase that left her plenty of room to warm herself to her covid bubble in Reykjavik. ‘You know, hanging out at home with friends, surrendering yourself to all those simple domesticities. As a musician you only get a glimpse of that when you drive from an airport into a city and you look into the houses.’

She calls her new, tenth album, fossora, then also a soundtrack to clubbing in your own living room, as she used to do during the lockdown. ‘In a small group, because that was allowed, to a restaurant, to have a drink. Then we left early and ended up at my house.’

There was usually an hour of conversations and background music, after which everyone was allowed to play a DJ. Techno and gabber blared through the Björk house during the pandemic.

‘I was in bed at half past eleven. I love such an atmosphere where you can organize your own compressed party according to your own whims. I don’t want to dance until 3 am. Between 8 and 10 am is much better, then you still have plenty of energy.’

But whether fossora is that also a party album? There are collaborations with the Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi that mix traditional Indonesian sounds with, yes, gabber. That causes some hard blows here and there. But Björk has largely maintained 80 bpm, the pace at which she walked on Reykjavik beach during lockdown.

An album in earth tones

Then there’s the smell of damp ground rising from the album, which is also what the title refers to. Björk has fossora colored in the earth tones of six bass clarinets. The word fossora is therefore related to the word fossil, and an invented feminine form of the Latin word for digger.

On the record, wind players or strings weave melodic structures that repeat themselves over and over without paying much attention to song structure. Rather they serve as the embedding of that oh so recognizable, driven, exalted vocals. Underneath this is the angular rhythm in which electronic beats and clarinets provide the bass and base.

Lyrically, a tendency to earthiness can also be detected: the longing for homeliness in Her Mother’s House or the plea for more connection in the music graced by slow gabber beats atopos. And the low-level scrambling in the music also has to do with a personality trait of Björk.

‘I tend to look for musical extremes for each album and get lost in them. Because I’m on Utopia, my previous album, used so many flutes it had no bass, no bottom. Everything was in the air. Then I wanted to go completely the other way. It often goes no deeper than a child who has discovered a red crayon, colors everything with it until it gets bored and then starts obsessively with blue.’

But that musical obsessiveness does not exclude the expression of a deeply felt desire for connection. on atopos she sings that our differences are too irrelevant not to bond and that we should not use them as an excuse. Followed by the warning: ‘If we don’t grow outwards towards love, we’ll implode inwards towards destruction.’

Eternal Optimist

But there she rather lectures herself than the rest of the world. The message from Björk to Björk. Because, ‘writing songs is sometimes the way to get to know myself better and grow spiritually. It’s like trying to teach myself to become the person I want to be. My way of self-improvement.’

Listen to Victimhood. A song that came about after listening to a psychology podcast on one of her beach walks. Björk literally sings that she is ready to throw off the victimhood.

“I always learn something from those podcasts. I’ve always known myself to be an eternal optimist. The kind of person who takes it upon himself to cheer up the other no matter what. If it didn’t work out, I felt shortchanged and slipped into the victim role.’

But she’s learned that someone with a manic glee can be a source of annoyance to friends and family. “You can’t cheer someone up with depression with, ‘Come on, everything is great.’ That is counterproductive. Then you are an optimism fascist.’

She has tried many times with her mother Hildur Rúna, who suffered from gloomy moods and passed away in 2018 at the age of 72. That mother has now been given a prominent place on fossora,.

Björk sang in 2011 in the song quick sand already about her mother, who then had a heart attack and whom she tried to save from the darkness.

Our mothers’ philosophy
It feels like quicksand
And if she sinks
I’m going down with her

‘My mother was actually a black eye with ideals. Someone who pursued goals, but also said that it would all end badly. And when she was in such a negative mood, we always did a ritual dance of arguments with her in the role of pessimist and with me as optimist.’

The daughter has now dedicated two songs to the mother, the woman Björk says she has benefited from the freedoms her mother fought for. She was a maverick, a hippie homeopath who divorced Björk’s father when her daughter was 1 year old.

Björk: ‘She was expected to have no ambitions outside the home and to become a housewife. But she refused and withdrew from the patriarchy by renting an apartment in suburban Reykjavik with two small children on her own.’

sorry soul, subtitled ‘A funeral oration for Hildur Rúna’, was written a year and a half before her death. When it already became clear that she had entered ‘the last chapter of her life’.

In addition to the comforting words ‘you did well, you did your best’, the singer also mentions a rather formal biological fact: that ‘a woman produces about 400 eggs in her life, but often two or three of them eventually settle. ‘

‘That was born from the association I had with a well-known but curious Icelandic folk song in which the life of the deceased hero is summed up very formally. Not poetic or romantic, as you’d expect, it’s more of a list of factual statements than from the Civil Registry: he was born and then got such and such a job. It sounds corporate and patriarchal. I wondered how I could make a funeral oration for my mother but from a biological matriarchal point of view. I thought it was funny, but I have a strange sense of humor that no one understands.’

pagan funeral

ancestress (‘foremother’) is called ‘an epitaph for Hildur Rúna’. It has the stately, progressive harmony of a hymn, accompanied by strings and bells. It’s Björk’s attempt to pay proper tribute to her mother after she had conflicting feelings about the funeral.

‘My dissatisfaction with that stemmed from the fact that I looked at it with an entertainer’s eye and saw all kinds of shortcomings. Not that my mother’s funeral had to be a perfect show, but I wanted it to be the way my mother wanted it to be.”

And a priest in Norse mythology—”You know, from Thor and Odin”—was specially hired for a ceremony befitting her unchurched, maverick mother.

‘But a priest is also often someone who has never met or even knows the deceased and who in his speech just randomly quotes things from her life. It had all so little to do with her. And then the service was also in the church. Not even out in the open, as it should be at such a pagan funeral.’

ancestress was her way of redoing the ceremony. So now she sings:

When I was a girl she sang for me
In falsetto, lullabies with sincerity
I thank her for her integrity

Whether the loss of her mother and growing up her daughter influenced her as a songwriter?

“So that’s kind of a question about how your image of your parents has changed after having kids yourself, isn’t it? That reflection of your parents in yourself and of yourself in your children. Phew, I guess one album isn’t enough for me. Awareness of this is an ongoing process. I don’t think I can answer that until the end of my life.’