It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before Björk, that great musical nature writer, worked her way round to the living world’s weirdest kingdom: the life-from-death forms of fungi. One of the most beautiful tracks on her 10th album, Fossora, is Mycelia, named for the fine fungal threads that form colonies to break down dead matter.
Björk imagines the march of these cottony filaments as staccato vocal chorales, a kind of underground birdsong that grows faster and harder. It calls to mind the work of Dr Suzanne Simard, the Canadian scientist who discovered the role of mycorrhizal networks in resource-sharing between trees – the “wood-wide web”. “Fungal cities subterranean… sunken mystery!” cries Björk on Fungal City, imagining new love mushrooming up from the activity of the soil beneath, her voice coiling around that of US singer-producer Serpentwithfeet.
