Mother’s Ode to Mother Mushroom

Graphic by Mo Krueger

By Nathan Hilyard

The past years have been a Björk fan’s nightmare. Five years of relative silence, two remix songs with Fever Ray, several Orkestral tour dates scattered across Europe, and a whole lot of waiting. In this great pit of emptiness, there is only rewatching old music videos and a £500 birdcall set, so for solace you must rely on the never-tarnishing allure of her older works. Each of her albums can be read as a reaction to the prior. The string-filled and emotionally introspective Vulnicura (2015) serves as an answer to Biophilia (2011)’s intense rhythms and world scope, with Vulnicura being a think-piece on the nature of wounds and the human ability to latch onto heartbreak. Where Biophilia deals with the global tragedy of climate change, Vulnicura narrows the scope into the personal tragedy of heartbreak. Then in 2017, she released Utopia, a wildly positive airy piece of work, which twists Vulnicura’s logic on its head, now creating an untouchable fantasy world where Björk can exist without the burdens of man and his rigidness. Utopia is up in the clouds, positive, untouchable joy, so where could she go from here? 

Now five years later, after her longest hiatus yet, Björk has returned to bring the joys of Utopia back down to the real world through fungal ponderings on the un-pin-downable emotions tied up within lineage. Fossora is her attempt at reasoning through ancestry and motherhood, equipped only with a myriad of woodwinds and her reliable innovation and quirk. 

Fossora lays its roots with the lead single and opening track: “Atopos.” “Atopos,” which pulls reference from land slugs and a Greek word meaning “unusual,” is an amalgam of slamming bass beats and clarinets contorting in unison. The song’s mantra chants, “Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect” whilst various chords and a deep unignorable pulse create a pseudo-dance sound. The song is full of vibration and power, an ode to love as something that digs deep and grows into the earth. “Atopos” is an anthem for subterranean rave, a literally “dirty” club, and consequently it introduces much of the major sonic and lyrical themes to be seen in the rest of the album. 

Two tracks later, she introduces the next sound idea: large webs of voices all chopped and spliced into various chords and rhythms. “Mycelia” glitters with some of the best arrangements in her career. The chords are dynamic yet digestible, and an entire sonic scape is created solely with the voice. Songs like “Mycelia” and the following “Sorrowful Soil” push choral instrumentation to their ideals, highlighting Björk’s genre-pushing creativity and deeply expert musicianship. In these songs, lyric and instrumentation are completely one, reflexively moving and contorting, undivorcable from the other. The songs depict artistry and motherhood as complex webs of meaning, integrated into life through channels so deep their removal would prove lethal. 

“Sorrowful Soil” also points towards the album’s main theme of motherhood. Much of the album was an ode to both her children and late mother. She sings on “Sorrowful Soil,” “Woven with a mother’s life force / Emotional textile.” To Björk, motherhood is an intricate expanse of love, a web which binds us all together through long moving lines of lineage. She continues to explore lineage and its ability to simultaneously interact with the past and present in “Ancestress,” a final goodbye reconciling the impacts of both the life and death of her mother. “Ancestress” discusses the generational movements between mothers and their children. She sings, “There’s fear of being absorbed by the other / By now, we share the same flesh,” and traces these deep connections which lay root into family systems and beg for remembrance. Mothers create children, and the children grow to create children who grow to create children, and all the while this family lineage is perpetually born and forgotten. Each family member slowly moves into the positions of its former, roots being furrowed deeper and deeper. 

These testimonials to her lineage and her mother are the most prominent references in the project, but she also calls back to her previous works as loving homages to herself. A few of the many instances include the brief interlude “Fagurt Er í Fjörðum” with its gentle electronic organs á la Vespertine, or the bright flute arrangements at the opening of “Allow” calling back to the instrumentations on Utopia, or the endings of “Sorrowful Soil,” which sonically and lyrically call back to Medúlla’s “Oceania,” and the closing of the final track, which repeats “Undo / Undo / Undo” as does the iconic final track of Vespertine. Throughout all the references to her mother and the legacy she left, she subliminally leaves love notes for herself. Remembering her rich catalog of work and the artistic legacy she has, and continues to, create. 

This final track, “Her Mother’s House,” is a beautiful synthesis of Björk’s ideas and sonic developments. The track opens with vocalesque electronic chords, soon to be joined by her singing: “The more I love you / The better you will survive / The more freedom I give you,” and harmonies by the voice of Björk’s daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardòttir Barney, in gentle sinking arpeggios. The song is quiet and soft, with lighter woodwind flumes darting around the melodies. Björk gradually relinquishes control and Ísadóra sings the final verse alone. The mother has stepped back and progress continues. The entire piece gives a sense of sinking into the ground, moving down into the past as a means for the next generation to step into place. 

In many ways, Fossora operates as a deeply loving and deeply reflective piece. In her latest installment, Björk sings directly to the women in her life who have laid the deepest roots of impact, while moving sonically into fresh mixtures of club beats, woodwind chord structures, and spliced acapella patchworks. And while all of her 10 albums work as a reaction to the prior, Fossora feels incredibly content simply being as itself. Fossora understands independence not as a lack of peers, but as a contentness to exist in the present within both history and the future that's to come.