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.
Biophilia may have been the title of her 2011 seventh album, but the Icelandic composer’s penchant for irrepressible life forms has had an ongoing life of its own in her work. Fossora, she says, is a feminisation of the Latin word for “burrower” (badgers are “fossorial” mammals). The life of the soil, nesting and burial are just three themes that grow directly out of this fertile loam. Terroir is another. Conceived during lockdown, when anyone in their right mind would have hastened back to their native island home, Fossora found Björk on Icelandic turf for an extended period, hosting micro-raves in her house. All she wanted to play was gabber – the pounding 90s Dutch variant on techno.
So Fossora has proper beats on it, a kind of holy grail for longtime Björk fans who remember her clubbier past. And you can, just about, dance to some of these songs – although it would probably look more like headbanging. The title track offers up a particularly extreme cocktail of punishing percussion and swirling vocals. The beats throughout come in association with Indonesian gabber merchants Gabber Modus Operandi.
Björk’s intention was to react against the airy themes of her previous album, Utopia (2017). Many wind instruments remain, but these tend to be bass clarinets – often six of them – alongside trombone, oboe and cor anglais, hooting and groaning.
Where Björk occasionally breaks with this lower tone palette on tracks such as Allow, it’s to let an army of flutes unleash a ravey melody to lub-dub beats. Part of this album is devoted to new romantic relationships, fantasias in which love can take root again after 2015’s anguished Vulnicura, which dealt with the breakdown in Björk’s relationship with her daughter’s father. The slight downside is that, like some Walt Disney cartoon bluebirds, these trilling flutes and whimsical clarinets break the mood of majestic ache that makes Fossora one of Björk’s hardest-hitting albums.
Björk’s mother died in 2018 after a long illness; a number of these songs are tributes to Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. Ancestress is explicitly billed as an epitaph. Forgoing the more rigid Icelandic tradition in which a priest lists facts about the deceased, Björk celebrates her mother’s idiosyncrasies – her dyslexia, her homeopath’s cantankerous disregard for doctors. Details such as the smell of her passing are set to brittle strings and dissonant beats, with Björk’s son, Sindri, on backing vocals. An epic video follows a funeral procession that re-enacts Hildur’s death in fantastical form, a “matrimort” with the earth.
When Björk describes her mother, she is often also describing herself (“She had an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm… she invents words and adds syllables!”). There’s more mother-daughter slippage, too, on the elegiac Her Mother’s House, the closing track. Björk describes her mother’s voice, and likens her house to the chambers of her heart. The guest here is Björk’s own daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkadóttir Barney, whose move away from home at 19 is reflected upon here, another crank along the gearwheel of life.
If it’s possible, Sorrowful Soil is even more emotional. In this eulogy for Hildur, set to a distant bassline, massed choirs follow Björk’s lead as she sings about the quantity of eggs produced by a woman’s body, her “emotional textile”. The way she sings “emotional” recalls the “emotional landscapes” of 1997’s Jóga.
“You did your best, you did well,” insist the voices, digitally persistent: “did, did, did!” It’s pretty much the best thing a child can say to their mother – or vice versa – particularly when the two women didn’t always have an easy relationship.
Less obviously, the exquisite Atopos finds Björk emphasising the importance of persevering with relationships; it also partially addresses her mother. The track captures the wonders of Fossora in miniature – hammering beats, a thicket of tense clarinets, and Björk’s unmistakable vocal in didactic mode, upfront and emphatic.
