{"id":84013,"date":"2022-10-01T18:38:07","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T18:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/an-album-uprooted-by-its-ambitions\/"},"modified":"2022-10-01T18:38:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-01T18:38:07","slug":"an-album-uprooted-by-its-ambitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/an-album-uprooted-by-its-ambitions\/","title":{"rendered":"An Album Uprooted by Its Ambitions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bj\u00f6rk has described her 10th studio album, Fossora<\/em>, as being \u201cabout bass, heavy bottom-end\u2026and punchy sub.\u201d But despite the suggestion that she might be returning to dance music, or something like it, the closest thing to clubby here is the adoption of gabber, the percussive hardcore techno subgenre defined by its furious assault of distorted kickdrums.<\/p>\n

You hear the influence on the album’s opening track, \u201cAtopos,\u201d which features Kasimyn of Indonesian electronic duo Gabber Modus Operandi. Bj\u00f6rk and her collaborator curiously tweak gabber’s typical breakneck tempo so that it almost resembles reggaeton, at least until a final intense stretch that speed-ramps the song’s beat and ping-pongs it against a drunk-sounding sextet of bass clarinets. Elsewhere, the brooding \u201cVictimhood\u201d sets a bossa nova beat adrift\u2014for a little while at least\u2014amid dark, cascading synths, until it’s eventually displaced by more bass clarinets playing a countermelody and chaotically arranged choral vocals.<\/p>\n

All of this is to say that any appropriations of familiar music forms on Fossora<\/em> are at best fleeting. The Icelandic iconoclast’s compositional sense is as unbound as ever, her songs amoeba-like organisms transfiguring from one second to the next across the album, an in line with a logic that’s defiantly hers alone, both for better and worse.<\/p>\n

It’s useful to map out some thematic terrain in order to understand what the increasingly pop-averse Bj\u00f6rk is up to. for one, Fossora<\/em> (a made-up feminization of the Latin word for \u201cdig\u201d) is her fungal album, which means not just toadstools and psychedelics, but the thoughts and feelings that begin to creep in when you’re rooted in place. These are thoughts very much tied to the album’s pandemic-era recording. And the response is valuing interconnectedness, specifically the role of matriarch\u2014a preoccupation emphasized here on a pair of songs dedicated to the memory of Bj\u00f6rk’s mother, who died in 2018, and by having both of her children, Sindri Eldon and Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney, appear as featured vocalists on the album.<\/p>\n