Bjork Post Wallpaper

[Giordano Thibault]

Bjrkhas always, to my ears, made music that reminds me of church, but not the tabernacle of the temple as much as the tabernacle of the wild, the unbidden church of the earth, which testifies by mushroom and geological layers and tectonic movements and the churning immortal tides of the ocean. Fossora enjoins its partner albums in the same way that a new symphony from Beethoven or a new opera from Mozart or a new etude from Chopin sits among its peers; a nuanced shift of the lens but ultimately revelatory concerning the center invisible pillar, the organizing mind that seems more at times like an interlocutor of the angels than a composer.

To get the obvious out of the way: The new Bjrk record is, once more, a superlative work, as deeply imaginative as any of her records, capable of inspiring the same kind of fawning admiration we give to peak-era Stevie Wonder or Prince or Miles Davis. On Fossora, Bjrk has seized up the latent contemporary classical composer that has always lurked within her, who reared its mighty shiny-scaled head proudest on Medulla, her magical 2004 record purely comprising vocal arrangements. This seized up form, taking up chorales, brass instruments and wielding bass clarinet sextet Murmuri, is then rendered in post-Kanye form, digitized in places, chopped and screwed, passed through the filter of Aphex Twin and his children, be they SOPHIE or Arca. There is clearly no desire in Bjrk to resolve these tensions between the electronic and symphonic, the digital and the analog, largely because she clearly sees no tensions.

This in turn mirrors the existential thrust of the record. Freed, at least temporarily, of the pain of her very complex divorce from avant-garde director Matthew Barney, Bjork lets her musical and lyrical focus drift to both her mother and her children. We can see mirrors of the orchestral and the digital in that pair, the old and the new in a crass way. What, then, does this render Bjrk? A mere dividing line between, the liquid tension between two seeming infinities? This is emblematic of the root existential-ne-nihilistic tension of human experience. Behind us, a seeming infinite, the past and all our lineage, how all of the universe conspired for 14 billion unbroken years and god knows what before the Big Bang to give birth to us, this specific sperm reaching this specific egg. And then, beyond, the infinitude of the future, where we are no longer subject but background, context, one little marble piece in the growing mural, whose shape and position dictate that which next pieces can be placed but by nature is precluded from ever seeing how our presence altered the overall mural let alone the full mural of space and time itself. It renders life an unanswerable riddle, a confusion of coffin dust and star dust, where we sit pondering these twin riddles on either side of us that feel like one great riddle in a conjecture that is ultimately unprovable.

Essaying comes easy with Fossora; it gently unweaves it from you, asks you to divest yourself of those thoughts, to share them with your mother. Not Bjrk; she too is sharing thoughts with her mother here. It is another, vaster thing, like prayer. What does this album mean? Ask me again in a year, in five years, in ten, in twenty. There will be thousands more words to write down. Bjrk erects mansions, labyrinths of glass and sand and mushroom and wallpaper and photographs from your childhood home. There is always more.

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