When Björk began the process of creating Fossora, she decided that her tenth studio album would be her “mushroom album.” In recent interviews preceding the album’s release, the Icelandic singer-songwriter and composer kept pushing this concept forward, insisting that Fossora (the made up feminine form of the Latin word for “digger”) was an album about returning to the earth. The full weight of that metaphor only comes into focus when you sit down and dig deeply into Fossora’s rich and fertile soil. Only then does the odd network of bass clarinet symphonies, sylphlike choral arrangements, and random bursts of gabber techno begin to reveal what it truly is: a stunningly realised rumination on the inevitable cycle of life and death. For Björk, it’s a device to process the experiences of loss and motherhood.
It makes sense that Björk should turn to nature in order to understand grief in all its forms. The natural world has always been a place of safety for the singer, which in its unpredictably and abjection, she has found ways to express her point of view more succinctly than anything man made might allow. The jagged and razor sharp glacial ice peaks of her home Iceland became feminist icons on Homogenic, the process of a virus infecting its host the ideal love story of two soulmates on Biophilia. Now on Fossora, the psychedelic nature of fungi, twisting into invisible communities beneath the ground, being both poison and food, decomposing and recomposing all above ground, becomes the ideal metaphor for matriarchy, with Björk exploring motherhood through her own experiences and the experience of her own mother’s death. All of Fossora’s thematic threads (rebirth, interconnection in isolation) can be traced back to its core: the mother, for Björk, is the ultimate mushroom; caregiver, protector, healer, and destroyer all at once.
Fossora itself can be interpreted as a mycorrhizal network, branching from a middle where two songs in particular function as its nucleus. Ancestress is an epitaph to her mother, the late environmentalist Hildur Rúna, which takes shape as a seven minute epic poem loosely based on the Icelandic ‘grafskrift’ tradition. “my ancestress’s clock is ticking, her once vibrant rebellion is fading,” Björk muses, as she launches into an account of the history of her mother’s life backed by grandiose strings, a mutant reggaeton pulse, and harmonies from her son Sindri. “For 20 years i have not been able to attend funerals as something in them rubbed me the wrong way,” Björk shared about the song, “Ancestress is written just after [Hildur’s] wordly funeral and is probably an impulse common with musicians : to make your version of the story.” It easily joins the ranks of Björk’s masterpieces, as layered as it is humble. Then there’s Victimhood, a song Björk has alluded to as the final remnants of her mourning her broken relationship with ex-husband Matthew Barney, which doubles as a chilling exploration into trauma. “I sacrificed myself to save us, I rejected myself,” she laments in snatched echoes. It’s the darkest moment on Fossora, the rot of the album, scored by shuddering waves of industrial dread and bass clarinet moans, claustrophobic and horrific. Ancestress and Victimhood are connected by a short interlude of Björk reciting the Icelandic folk poem Fagurt Er í Fjörðum, which describes how the beauty of the valley turns to horror in the winter. Both these songs catalyse the process of grief into acceptance; death, decay, renewal, and the corpses at the centre of these songs act as the fertiliser for the rest of Fossora, which for the most part is full of hope.
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“Even though the ground is burnt, underneath monumental growth,” she sings on the album’s title track, a clarinet-gabber banger that sounds a bit like an improved Earth Intruders. There’s the promise of new love on Ovule, and the comfort of community on Atopos, which sits at the top of Fossora like its own acid coloured fly agaric. Lyrically, this is Björk at her best. The simplicity of the lines “she gets four hundred eggs, but only two or three nests” is poetry in motion on Sorrowful Soil, which finds Björk contemplating the pain of empty nest syndrome. Her love songs, as always, are visceral with vivid imagery like “his body calligraphs the space above my bed,” on Fungal City with serpentwithfeet or “our solar systems coalesced softly surrendered into itself formed a nebulous cloud,” on Freefall. Fossora makes the most of her collaborators, particularly Gabber Modus Operandi’s Kasimyn. Together, he and Björk have sowed a sonic language for Fossora which uses the regular time thud of gabber and decaying dembow as a leitmotif for a shared, interconnected pulse. This makes for some of Björk’s least deliberately dissonant music to date, with the singer working in tandem rather than opposition.
Björk’s instinct to weave the heaves and grunts of the bass clarinet into Fossora’s DNA is alarmingly perfect. The rotund earthiness of the instrument’s sound is also somewhat impish, echoing the absurdity of the fungal lifeforms Fossora takes its cues from. On both the title track and Atopos, they dance with muddy gabber throbs like a forest sprite happening upon a festival in the midst of her home grove. Also on these songs, everything tumbles into overdrive in the final thirty seconds, pushing for overwhelming and urgent moments of transcendental release. It’s her most sonically adventurous outing since Biophilia, in total contrast to Utopia’s airy, woodwind led symphonies or Vulnicura’s spatial ambient collages. The qualities of the human voice, an echo to her explorations on Medúlla, are also essential to Fossora’s membranes. Hearing her distinct and often caustic vocals dance with the contrasting tonality of serpentwithfeet on Fungal City is stirringly urgent, as Kasimyn’s piston like beats begin to fire at hyperspeed in the distance. The acapella interludes Mycelia and Trölla-Gabba use the voice to create what Björk might imagine a fungal network to sound like, bent ever so slightly by filters and vocoders in a way that uses the technology not to distort, but to transform.
As she did with its nomenclature, on Fossora Björk looks to feminise the otherwise patriarchal tradition of familial history. She connects the generations and stories of her own family from her mother, through herself, to her daughter Ísadóra, a matriarchal mycelial queendom that is ultimately the setting of Fossora. Her Mother’s House ends the album by converging these three generations of women. Björk remembers and mourns not only the loss of her mother’s house, but her own, as her children grow up and prepare to leave her. Sung in harmonic call and response with Ísadóra, who co-wrote the song, the stunningly arranged ballad is set to nothing but the flutter of a bass clarinet, the voices of mother and daughter entangling and repelling in the otherwise empty space. It’s a bittersweet goodbye to both her mother and her child, but one that Björk treats as the due course of nature. “The more I love you, the better you will survive,” she sings to Ísadóra. Then, as if singing for both her mother and herself, she explains the whole pseudo biology of Fossora’s organism in the most strikingly human, and simplest, of ways: “When a mother wishes to have a house with space for each child, she is only describing the interior of her heart.”
Watch the music video for Ancestress from Fossora below.
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