The Icelandic singer returns with Fossora, a daring collection of songs that search for common ground between fungi and family

What ‘-ism’ is Björk? This was the question the Icelandic singer posed to the writer and philosopher Timothy Morton in a letter published in 2015. With the question, the musician wrote that she hoped to root herself in theory while honing in on the motifs that had defined her work up until that point (and continue to do so): the ‘untouched nature’ of Iceland, as she put it, and the country’s ‘green techno internet age’ of the late twentieth and twenty-first-century. Björk hoped to create this ‘-ism’ in a way that wasn’t ‘naive and cute’ (like ‘dolphins and shit’) but which had a mature voice, ideally incorporating the ‘woman matriarch factor’.

That Björk should seek to define herself like this is totally understandable. Since the early days of her career, she has had identities foisted upon her by critics and journalists alike – often a childlike nymph in thrall to a fantastical vision of nature; sometimes a calculating pop chameleon who carefully chooses her in-vogue collaborators. In an effort to describe herself with an appropriate ‘-ism’, Björk suggested posthumanism (‘not exactly what I was looking for but the closest yet’) before Morton eventually countered with ‘paneroticism.’ Her pen pal’s justification: ‘In your art, it seems that non-you entities take the lead and you merge. Not the same as being passive at all. More like making love with them.’ Now, with the release of Fossora, Björk is back defining herself and her work again. She has described it as both ‘matriarch music’ and her ‘mushroom album’. Each is accurate and yet neither tells the whole story. As ever with Björk’s work, the magic is in the merging that Morton identified.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.