Quotes

Avec une intensité et une délicatesse rares, Björk y conte la rencontre amoureuse de deux nerds par le biais de la musique.

She sings about “two music nerds obsessing,” falling in love by “sending each other MP3s.”

Body Memory, is about how your body can get you through trauma when your head and heart can’t. It was sparked by another day she spent at her cabin, this time by herself. She wrapped herself in loads of coats, lay down on the moss, and listened to an audiobook of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She’d been aware of the book for a long time but had dismissed it as “a bit goth”. This time, though, she found it stimulating, especially the final part. “It’s about having people who are experts in dying,” she says, “who have physical practice to help you to die. Like yoga exercises. Breathing exercises… Like death doulas. I was so impressed by this.”

Body Memory, la longue chanson centrale d’Utopia, est un manifeste pour la vie. Ne plus analyser - pour ne pas laisser nos névroses prendre le pouvoir en nous plongeant dans un gouffre d’anxiété -, mais s’appuyer sur l’instinct du corps pour renouer avec tout ce qui nous relie à la vie. Si l’on n’arrive plus à aimer, à être une mère, à faire l’amour, à se fondre dans la nature, à affronter l’avenir, notre corps, lui, s’en souvient. Il suffit de le laisser faire, de lui faire confiance.

By contrast with Vulnicura, Björk’s new album feels lighter than air.

Il s’agit en quelque sorte de trouver l’extase. J’ai eu une idée de roman de science-fiction où nous irions tous sur une île pour recommencer à zéro et fabriquer des flûtes avec des bâtons. Et nous pourrions, à cause d’un accident nucléaire, avoir muté en oiseaux ou les oiseaux en synthétiseurs. Mais, malgré tout, nous nous en sortons.
Je pense qu’il s’agit surtout, je suppose, de l’idée de créer un havre de paix sans violence. Et peut-être le fait d’être épuisé par le fait que 90 % des histoires (se déroulant) dans le futur sont très dystopiques et sans espoir.

À l’instar d’un titre comme Headphones, Björk chante les louanges du rôle et du pouvoir de la musique « Le musique guérit aussi, je suis là pour la défendre ».

i am so overwhelmingly humble while announcing my album utopia is coming out end of nov . i can´t wait for you to hear it . this is the cover made by the warm extraordinary talented jesse kanda and was assisted by me , james merry and hungry . thank you for telepathically getting me !! over the moon and jupiter gratitudes to magical arca for making the music of this album with me : what a profound and nourishing trip this has been !!! thousandfold appreciation and headbowing . hope you like it , warmth ,

Looking back now, the melodies on Vulnicura are very sad, and there’s short spaces between the notes. It’s kind of paralyzed. The first song I wrote on this album, the opening song, “Arisen My Senses,” is the opposite. The melody’s like a constellation in the sky. It’s almost like an optimist rebellion against the normal narrative melody. There’s not one melody. It’s like five melodies. I really loved that.

The first song we did was the first song on the album [‘Arisen My Senses’]. I actually found a loop of a mixtape or a SoundCloud thing that [Arca] had done three years prior. I just thought it was the most happiest firework that he’d ever done. I didn’t tell him about it – I just sampled it, sang it to him and he just exploded, you know ? I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing. I was reaching for the most euphoric, antigravity moment that he’d done, and then I exaggerated that by looping it and writing a harp arrangement around it and singing on top of it these ecstatic lyrics. After we’d taken the saddest coordinates of each other and combined them into Vulnicura, we were doing the opposite now. And that was kinda the starting point.

J’ai bricolé une chanson à partir d’une courte boucle, ajouté un arrangement de harpe, posé un texte et je l’ai envoyée à Arca, comme un cadeau. Il n’en revenait pas, il a eu le sentiment que j’avais puisé dans son inconscient !

Half of this album is about when me and Alejandro meet as equals, for the first time,” she says. It was with the opening track, “Arisen My Senses,” that Björk came to that realisation. When she took a mixtape of tracks Arca had made a long time before the two met, she wrote accompanying harp arrangements, and sang over it.

“Without knowing it, I was probably taking an element out of his musical character,” she says. “The most extreme happy, euphoric element, and maybe the most extreme happy element of my musical character, and putting them together. It was kind of a new coordinate—the opposite of ‘Vulnicura.’ For me, it sort of went from there.

In “Courtship,” she looks into software-assisted dating. “He turned me down/I then downturned another/who then downturned her,” she sings, over chords built from flutes, and bursts of sputtering percussion hinting distantly at techno.

Des échanges musicaux, vous en avez connu toute votre carrière. Après pu nouer une relation plus forte encore un message d’espoir pour tous.

Absolument. C’est pour cette raison que j’ai baptisé l’album Utopia. Parce qu’il ne s’agit que de ça : garder l’espoir. L’espoir dans un monde où la hiérachie entre les êtres serait bannie. Une forme de matriarcat, en somme, à la place du patriarcat.

Me and James Merry started talking about it a year or so ago and I was talking about how it was kinda sci-fi – arriving on an island after some sort of apocalypse and starting anew. So like an optimistic moist rainforest mood. There would be some sort of mutation, like birds that become flutes that become synths that become human. And somehow – as in all beginnings – somehow erotically charged but not in the traditional sense : more in the energy. I wanted it to be peach and light seagreen and somehow try to capture that magic of sunrises and sunsets. It needed to have some sort of warped twist. Like the borderline aggressive optimist.

“Loss” is very much a continuation of “Pagan Poetry,” a certain sort of girl goth music.

“For me, that song needed to be about that same pain and the same grind of ‘Vulnicura,’ but zoomed out,” Björk explains. “You’re looking at the big picture, so it’s not personal like ‘Vulnicura,’ but it does have to have that same sort of feeling.”

I did get the idea of a new place, of women supporting women, of rejecting old systems.

the gate est une chanson d’amour mais je dis "amour" de manière plus transcendante. Vulnicura était une perte très personnelle, et je pense que ce nouvel album porte sur un amour encore plus grand. Il s’agit de redécouvrir l’amour mais d’une manière spirituelle, faute d’un meilleur mot"

‘The Gate’, the first single, that was that sort of song. He sent me the instrumental and it was so perfect, it didn’t need any editing. Actually I take that back – it did need some editing [laughs]. So I wrote the flute arrangement and my vocals.

The gate est une chanson d’amour, mais je dis "amour" de manière plus transcendantale. Vulnicura était une perte très personnelle, et je pense que ce nouvel album porte sur un amour encore plus grand. Il s’agit de redécouvrir l’amour, mais d’une manière spirituelle, faute d’un meilleur mot.

you’re gonna eventually float up to the surface and become light and fluffy. This song is a documentation of that. It’s about almost like a metaphysical thing, where the wound of heartbreak – where you heart gets broken and your chest implodes – when that oval shape restores. It becomes a gate. And then you maybe discover, even more so than before, that it was there all along. It’s like a gate : when you’re next to people you love, you exchange energy.

Also, I used a vinyl album of Venezuelan music I had, [Hekura–Yanomamo Shamanism From Southern Venezuela], that was recorded in the ’70s—Venezuelan birds. The birds there sound completely different. They sound like R2-D2, or techno. There’s one beautiful sound that ended up in the beginning of “The Gate,” a recording of these birds that Venezuelans believe are the ghosts of fetuses. If they have stillborns or young children that die, they think they go into the jungle and make these sounds. They sound like ’70s analog synths. It’s one of my all-time favorite noises. I had sentimental feelings about that particular album. You can actually hear the scratches of the vinyl on the birds. It’s a layered affinity for me.

“The Gate” is the bridge from one album to the other, in a way, even though I didn’t write that song first. The wound featured in almost every video for Vulnicura changed into a gate that you can love from. Then the rest of the songs are in a new place.

Some of it was recorded in Iceland. I have a cabin by a lake, and there are a couple of pairs of Arctic Loons that live just outside there. They’re really beautiful and huge. They obviously ended up on the album.
Also, I used a vinyl album of Venezuelan music I had, [Hekura–Yanomamo Shamanism From Southern Venezuela], that was recorded in the ’70s—Venezuelan birds. The birds there sound completely different. They sound like R2-D2, or techno.

“I have had a thousand name suggestions, and I think it’s going to be called Utopia. I can’t think of anything better. Well if I change my mind five minutes before the LP cover goes into print — that might happen”

“I kind of like the fact that it’s a cliche, that word, and I like the fact that it has a fascistic, weird, ‘I want the world to be like this’ feeling about it. It’s a proposal of how we can live in the future with nature and technology in the most optimistic way possible. We have Trump, we have Brexit, we have our issues in Iceland, we have our environmental issues – if there was ever an urgency or necessity to come up with another utopian model, how we’re gonna live our lives, I think it’s now. And this is my proposal.”

the soft merge that yielded this album has been one of the most oxygenating experiences i’ve had in my lifetime.
can i be a little sentimental ? i cherish every single moment in the 2+ year journey of this album with you (Arca) and james and jesse. the licking raindrops out of the salty air in the tropics & listening for birds, swimming in green rivers, the fires crackling through snow ... the dark grey storm and the luminous rainbow that flooded the air after. it floods me still each day and with colors i didn’t know.
this album truly carries a piece of utopia for me— one that is already smilingly real.
unquantifiable, hundreds of thousands of sparkles effortlessly magicked by the regal james t. merry i love u

when i wove up all the flute arrangements
i got super obsessed with patterns and textures
then recorded them and
when i heard them all back to back,
i discovered the beats had
to be the opposite of fluffy,
they needed to be double speed and
italian techno style sharp and nasty
i explained this to arca and
it was extremely satistying
when she obviously nailed it
... in one day... !
that day,
we were dancing manically
allover

Utopia’s covers is a portrait of Björk. Depending on when you look at it, it can be ugly. And that’s the point, that’s what I’m trying to do. Making something painful but transmuting it into something beautiful.

The album concludes with “Future Forever,” with shimmering chords and Björk’s voice floating above silences ; she invokes a benign matriarchy. “Imagine a future and be in it/feel this incredible nurture, soak it in,” she sings, then turns to tech advice. “Your past is a loop — turn it off.”

losss is a sort of a blues
in a way a closure to pagan poetry
like the binary dark twin
the mourning of a love and i probably spent
equal amount of time as in the harps in pagan poetry
only now i was weaving flutes
into ribbons of sorrow

The song that we made is pure feeling. It’s my first outside production work—it’s important that it means something. Thoughts and ideas have wings ; we talked about this a lot throughout the process. How force of will is the ultimate force—our ability to choose. I think that the world needs a reminder of that right now. That’s what the song is to me, and why it’s so necessary.

in sue me i was excited about trying rave flutes,
kinda how quicksand of vulnicura was for the strings
to prove somehow that flutes can be techno
and that they are very dynamic and diverse
in all the different arrangements i tried to cover
romantic, humourous, ballad, aggressive
vibrato :
both modern sounding and more extreme passionate
and in sue me, i was going for more
like lazer beams
confrontational

tabula rasa happens in utopia.
It is a song i wrote to my
daughter and it is about taking on
generational traumas and clearing them
up, in hope to give girls the least
amount of luggage for their future
i tried to make the oxygen in the
tutes weave a healing chord
...almost like hyperventilating yourself towards a cure...

the gate is about the flow of love
in the chest between 2 lovers...
...the album before , vulnicura
was about the healing of a heartbreak-
wound in the chest and the gate is
about the energy of the wound
reversing and it becoming a gate
where love can be given from
and received...
i wanted the arrangement to project prisms
when you are in the void and the arrival of
the first beam bursts through the darkness
and it prisms around with generosity
the flutes arrangement is prisming
in the same way

utopia is a scifi offer for a new world
it is about women and children
arriving to an island starting a new
without agression, violence
an optimistic-post-apocalyptic manifesto
the birds might have merged with the flowers
and humans become flute mutants
but it is harmonious and hopeful
i wanted the flute arrangement
to represent this kinda weaving