Returning to Iceland, BJÖRK discovered herself placing down roots, reconnecting along with her ancestry, shedding her mom and turning into a grandmother. The result’s Fossora – the ultimate a part of her personal post-divorce pagan comedy that’s taken her from America, through heaven and hell, again to Reykjavík once more. Within the newest challenge of Uncut journal – in UK outlets from Thursday, Sept 15 and in the stores from our on-line retailer, stand by for revelations involving mushrooms, Icelandic obituary songs, headbanging and “punching dinosaurs within the abdomen!” “I simply needed to land on planet Earth and dig my toes into the soil,” she explains to Stephen Troussé.
“The true drawback with climbing in Iceland is the climate,” laughs Björk, telling Uncut in regards to the pleasures of strolling round her homeland. “To plan any massive journeys, you actually need a gambler mentality. You both go to Las Vegas otherwise you turn out to be an Icelandic climate forecaster. In truth, a well-known mountain climber just lately died out right here. He was a veteran of Antarctica and the North Pole, and he went climbing within the Icelandic highlands. He checked the forecast earlier than he set off, was all ready for his hike, however then the climate went utterly bonkers.”
It’s arduous to actually seize the magnificent gusto and relish with which Björk says the phrase “bonkers”. However in the absolute best method, and with out wanting to put her within the kooky pigeonhole writers have been fashioning for over 40 years, it’s her signature phrase – describing the whole lot from headbanging to Indonesian techno to the networked exercise of forest mycelium.
She doesn’t use it within the typical English sense to explain one thing a bit, you recognize, wacky or daft. Reasonably you get the sensation it’s the closest phrase she will discover to render some huge, unknowable, absurd power – a type of primal Loki trickster spirit – behind all of the important, seething mess and thriller of cosmic, planetary and human behaviour.
In recent times she’s been via her personal share of bonkers climate. Along with the gathering environmental collapse, Covid and financial disaster we’ve all endured, on a extra private stage she’s needed to steer her method via divorce, dying and turning into
a grandmother.
On high of that she managed to document a sensational cameo as The Seeress in Robert Eggers’ savage Viking epic The Northman (“Now keep in mind for whom you shed your final teardrop!” she hisses, petrifying even Alexander Skarsgård) and proceed her Covid-delayed Björk Orkestral tour, enjoying with orchestras and choirs from Iceland, America and Europe. One way or the other, she’s emerged from all of it with Fossora, her tenth solo album since Debut 30 years in the past, and a document as daring, good and – sure – bonkers, as something she’s ever recorded.
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