She split her time between her more conservative father, who went on to lead the Icelandic electricians’ union, and her mother, who moved into a commune-like entanglement of hippies, bestowing her daughter with a complicated, anarchic independence.Įven when Björk was only 3, she has said, it was she who would look both ways before leading her mother across the road, rather than the other way around. Though it seems unfathomable when revisiting a teenage Björk raising hell with her punk band Tappi Tíkarrass, she had grown up a chronically introverted science and math nerd. “And the head-banging at the end of each song.” At this, she lets out a cathartic “ ahhhh,” drifting off in a techno reverie. “My fungus period has been bubbly and fun, with a lot of dancing,” she concludes. “A tree root album would be quite severe and stoic, but mushrooms are psychedelic and they pop up everywhere.” She considers this thesis, seemingly satisfied. “It’s something that lives underground, but not tree roots,” she explains of the fungus metaphor that guided the record. She frames her last album, 2017’s Utopia, as a skybound haven after her traumatic divorce. Her fascination with mushrooms-she translates the title as “she who digs”-unified the record’s themes of survival, death, and ecological meditation. In the end, she felt it was an “Iceland album”: often uninhibited and volatile, but also steeped in the country’s choral and folk traditions, with strings Björk programmed at her local coffee shop. “I started this album very conceptual, like: This is the clarinet album! Then halfway through, I was like, Fuck that.” She grins. The pandemic pastime that Björk sardonically terms “domestic raving” is one of several segments in Fossora’s patchwork. The PVC mat in the corner, she adds, is not for yoga but for knee slides. “We would sit around the fire, talk really long talks, have some wine, go on a hike, then stand up and head bang for one hour,” she jokes.
In lockdown, this picturesque hideout doubled as Björk’s rave space for her family, collaborators, friends, and everybody’s hyperactive kids. Through the room-length window, she points towards the northerly horizon and the mighty shield volcano Skjaldbreiður. It is hard to believe this humble space hosted such sacred activity-that Björk burrowed away here to interrogate her soul, construct madcap beats, and sequence chords using a sample library built from her own voice. Upstairs is the airy, undecorated, crimson-walled bedroom where, in 2019, Björk started writing Fossora. In hectic moments, this otherworldly hub is where she sequesters away to sing. From the outside, it looks like a private chapel to the deity of her voice step within the confines of its walls and the disconcertingly mirrored floor makes you feel like an astronaut training to live in space. This isolated hut, just opposite her potato patch, is tailored to produce supernaturally sweet reverb. She leads the way to a domed, octagonal chamber layered with uneven wooden tiles that drape the frame like a shaggy hide. The eruption that formed the lake’s basin also carved out the area where, according to Björk, “the Vikings that couldn’t handle war and politics and bossy megalomaniacs started the first democracy in the world in the year 930.” She laughs.
The imposing location induces a sort of trance: Gaze long enough at the shoreline’s dimpled pebbles and they seem to stare right back. The cabin overlooks an immense lake formed 9,000 years ago in the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. After parking, she clomps down a garden path overgrown with herbaceous perennials and birch trees, introducing me to a private stretch of ashy beach and her affable, white-bearded father, Guðmundur Gunnarsson, who is mowing the lawn in a black tracksuit. The Land Rover bobbles down a rocky slope to what Björk calls her “cabin”-actually a vast, two-floor lodge where she holidays, hikes, writes albums, rehearses clarinet sextets, and hosts weddings, as the feeling takes her.
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