Who needs verses and choruses?
Bridges, too. Who needs ’em?
Recognizable melodies? Passé.
Björk, as much as I love her,
as much as I find her
absolutely irresistible as
a creative force of singular vision
and equally singular persona,
gets weirder and weirder with
each new album. Fossora,
an album consisting instrumentally
of woodwinds, horns, drum machines,
some synthesizers, voice choirs,
and Björk’s otherworldly warbling,
is the weirdest thing I’ve heard
from her, if not for the record
consisting (I forget its title)
of no other instrumentation
than mouth noises. That one, too,
super strange. I often think back
longingly to the days of
The Sugarcubes and then those
first two or three solo albums,
when Björk was still interested
in “songs” as opposed to these
kinds of meditative mood pieces,
trippy trance music about eggs
and mushrooms. I challenge anyone
to try singing along with any of
this music, even after repeated
listenings. The songs on this album
kind of defy familiarization, as
if she doesn’t want us to know
this music, only to experience it.
Okay, I’m game for that, but this album
never made it into a regular
rotation, and likely never will.
I will get it out every once in
a blue moon, next time I go
through the entire alphabet again,
or when I’m feeling
Icelandic, or after I’ve forgotten
how hard it was to listen to
without kind of crawling out
of my skin a little bit, or because
I feel, sincerely, that as difficult as
this music is, it is somehow,
nevertheless, good for me.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Fossora, One Little Independent Records, 2022, 180 gram black vinyl double record. Given the meditative nature of the music on this album, I would hope that the pressing would be pristine, but this one is messy, places intermittently when there’s noise and distortion. At first I thought it was my headphone amp–and it was. I don’t recommend battery powered headphone amps. When the battery goes everything sounds like shit. But then, listening on the speakers, still, intermittent distortion–and the record and stylus are clean. I don’t know why I didn’t take this one back to the record store after I bought it. If this is an album on your list, I’d recommend buying the CD–but for the album art. One of the most beautiful album covers ever. The only Björk album I have on vinyl. Maybe that’s why I kept it.
In case you’re just joining me: I am listening to (almost) every record in my collection in alphabetical order and writing a poem-like-thing in response to each artist represented there. It appears that my collection in the letter B is pretty vast! I will “be” here for a while!
michael jarmer 