In her intervening albums, she has weathered emotional storms – describing the pain of her breakup with artist Matthew Barney in Vulnicura (2015) creating the brighter colours of a world filled with flutes and birdsong in Utopia (2017). Now, she has returned to terra firma, and gone sub terra, for a record of what she has termed “biological techno”. On 2011’s Biophilia, she wrote about life on Earth in the context of the universe. It’s a notion extended here into family trees growing through the decades.ījörk has, of course, been here or thereabouts before. It’s a head-spinning idea but one that Björk appears to reference nine tracks into her tenth album, in Fungal City, as she sings, over a skipping electronic kick drum and flitting woodwind shapes, of “Trunks bursting through the moss from our love,” and wonders, “Should I soften the blow of life on him?” The fact that she uses “him”, blurring the distinction between trees and humans, is telling and underlines the main theme of Fossora (a feminine derivation of “fossor”, the Latin name for diggers or burrowing animals): plants and people are not so different, and thrive thanks to a delicate ecology. If one tree is ailing, the others supply nourishment. In Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book Underland, a study-cum-travelogue exploring the subterranean, he writes of the discovery of an “underground social network” in forests, involving the web-like strands or “hyphae” sent out by fungi that appear to provide a support system linking trees.
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