The first track on the album - the entry if you will - is titled “Atopos.” Luckily, Björk has built a perfect metaphor for beginning your Björk-ening into Fossora. That second point is, perhaps, an odd one to understand at face value - until I listened to Björk, I was unaware that when I listened to other music I was feeling for a structure.
Second, I stopped feeling for a structure that wasn’t there and simply lived inside what Björk was creating. First, I stopped expecting revelation upon first listen - even now, Björk’s music rarely hits me directly, and instead creeps up on me until I can’t imagine life without it. When I learned to love her work, the biggest factor in the change was a mind-set shift. So with Björk’s claim that she is for everyone in mind, here is a guide, for those interested, to getting into Fossora (if you don’t get Björk yet).Įven as someone who is a pop-music fan first and everything else (American, writer, gay) second, Björk remained a virtually impenetrable artist for me for much longer than her contemporaries.
#Dancing line music for dance remix the beginning archive
It’s a big ask, but Björk’s archive is the kind that warrants that kind of work. Fossora is not just a title, but a command, forcing the listener to dig into the album rather than simply listen. Esoteric? Perhaps, but not without intention.
It is based in bass clarinet and fungi, with a title that is sort of in Latin - “fossora” is an intentionally incorrect feminization of the word “fossor,” which means digger. “I’m a pop musician and I make music for everyone, not for VIP or educated people,” she said in a documentary about the making of her album Homogenic.įossora, her newest project, does not sound like most “pop music” of recent years. Also, Björk doesn’t think of herself that way. “Stupefying mini symphonies” is correct, but it makes listening to her sound like homework. “Björk, from Iceland, left her band the Sugarcubes to create stupefying mini symphonies that were entirely her own,” he says of her work. Given her opposition to the sounds that sound good (not a value judgment), it can be hard to imagine Björk as a pop artist, given that “pop” was, at least at one point, a shortening of the word “popular.” In critic Kelefa Sanneh’s book Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, she shows up twice: in a section on electronic dance music and in a section on singer-songwriters, not anywhere in the pop chapter. One of the most important musicians of the past 30-odd years, the Icelandic singer writes songs that eschew “structure” and “melody” in favor of “whatever Björk wants to do.” Listening to her music can sometimes feel like a feat of endurance. For someone who makes pop music, Björk can be a remarkably difficult artist to listen to.
0 kommentar(er)
