Björk’s music videos tend to skate closer to art films than to the usual MTV fare, so no surprise that her latest—”Mutual Core,” from her album Biophilia—is premiering at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. The Icelandic avant-popster worked with the L.A.-based director Andrew Thomas Huang, whose short film Solipsist won special mention at Cannes. For “Mutual Core,” the duo set the earth in motion—literally. Shot over two days in Iceland, the video depicts the singer as a sorceress commanding rocks to come up out of the ground and collide with each other.
“I thought of it as a parallel between how much pressure and energy it takes for two tectonic plates to push together and form a mutual core,” Huang said of the concept. “It takes that same amount of effort to bring two people together.” And the core’s center, the sorceress herself, with garb to match. “We needed a textural look for this rocky universe that she was in,” Huang said. He ultimately decided on a dress from London designer Michael van der Ham. “He works in a lot of collage and it’s just my palette,” Huang explained. Not to be outdone, Björk added her own finishing touch : an out-of-this-world blue wig.
