{"id":82893,"date":"2022-09-30T15:41:03","date_gmt":"2022-09-30T15:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/bjorks-fossora-is-bjork-at-her-absolute-bjorkiest-and-thats-a-good-thing-rolling-stone\/"},"modified":"2022-09-30T15:41:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T15:41:03","slug":"bjorks-fossora-is-bjork-at-her-absolute-bjorkiest-and-thats-a-good-thing-rolling-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/bjorks-fossora-is-bjork-at-her-absolute-bjorkiest-and-thats-a-good-thing-rolling-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Bj\u00f6rk’s ‘Fossora’ is Bj\u00f6rk at Her Absolute Bj\u00f6rkiest, And That’s A Good Thing \u2013 Rolling Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tIt’s been three<\/span> years since Bj\u00f6rk premiered the maximalist cornucopia<\/em> in New York, a psychedelic environmental cautionary tale that climate change has made permanently resonant (the ongoing tour is slated for Japan next year). If that project looks at our troubled planet with a macro lens, her new album Fossora<\/em> <\/em>zooms in Google Map-style, looking at people on the ground and in the room, measuring distances between them. The sonic landscape is still huge \u2014 awesome, as alien as it is familiar, full of otherworldly arrangements, tectonic beats, and craggy melodies that conjure the terrain of her native Iceland. The artist described it as something of her \u201cmushroom\u201d album, using metaphors about burrowing in the dirt. In short, it’s Bj\u00f6rk at her absolute Bj\u00f6rkiest.<\/p>\n

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\tMeaning 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 \u201cgracefully authentic balinesian [sic] rhythms and techno\u201d as Bj\u00f6rk describes it on her Instagram. Fossora <\/em>also insists on occupying space. \u201cAtopos,\u201d the album’s opener and debut single, is an argument against the devaluation of music into lo-fi streamed wallpaper \u2014 in a post, she instructs listeners to \u201cplay it loudly\u201d because of \u201cthe enormous importance of bass in this song \u201d Indeed, its cannonfire drums, which veer between dembow reggaet\u00f3n and gamelan-tinged gabber, feel illogical on laptop speakers. 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. Yet lines like \u201cour differences are irrelevant\u201d and \u201cif we don’t grow outwards towards love\/we’ll implode inward destruction\u201d also suggest Bj\u00f6rk addressing the human race, poised for extinction unless it get its shit together and cooperates.<\/p>\n

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\tThe album title riffs on the Latin fossore<\/em> \u2014 someone who digs \u2014 and there’s a sense of Bj\u00f6rk digging into her past here, musical and personal, which she’s also done with her expansive new podcast, Sonic Symbolism<\/em>.<\/em> The album’s bass clarinet arrangements recall the layered reeds on \u201cThe Anchor Song,\u201d a highlight of her 30-year-old debut, debut<\/em>; the heavy beats flash back to \u201cArmy of Me\u201d and the percussive attack of volta<\/em>; the string and choral arrangements to vulnicura <\/em>and her teenage music-student love for composer Olivier Messiaen. Fossora <\/em>is also about digging into family roots. \u201cSorrowful Soil,\u201d a stirring choral piece underpinned by a lonely bassline, and \u201cAncestress,\u201d shimmering Indonesian\/Icelandic-flavored chamber music, pay tribute to Bj\u00f6rk’s mom, the late climate activist Hildur R\u00fana Hauksd\u00f3ttir, paired praise songs leavened with more complicated emotions. The latter features every ending, Sindri Eldon; the album ends with \u201cHer Mother’s House,\u201d an ethereal duet with her daughter Isadora Bjarkard\u00f3ttir Barney, a testimonial to love, \u201cmatriarchal architecture,\u201d an empty nest, and \u201cthe four chambers of the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tLike everything Bj\u00f6rk’s done as a solo artist, Fossora<\/em> is also about its visual components, its accompanying videos and other visuals, which are as maximalist as cornucopia<\/em>, full of the same spectacular ornamentation that’s on display in the music. The melodies and arrangements get diffuse at times. But the album’s \u201cheavy bottom-ended bass world\u201d is grounding, and another pitch for art that affects the physical body, conjuring club revelry just as recent albums by Beyonce and Drake have, albeit maybe for a more unusual club. It’s a welcome, necessarily ecstatic response to a couple of years of lockdown \u2014 the remixes should be heady \u2014 and therapy to prepare for whatever comes next. As Bj\u00f6rk incants on \u201cAtopos,\u201d as the song crests its peak, \u201chope is a muscle,\u201d and it needs to be exercised.<\/p>\n

\n\tEditor’s Note: You may have noticed that we got rid of the stars on our reviews. If you’re an engaged music fan in 2022, your opinion isn’t going to be defined by some random number. We’ll tell you right away (with some new labels) when a new album is a must-hear or, in rarer cases, an instant classic. After that, our critics will help you make up your own damn mind.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n