Bj?rk on Her Wild New Apple TV+ Concert Film, ‘Cornucopia’: “Something I Hadn’t Done Before”
It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Cornucopia, Bj?rk’s critically acclaimed world tour commissioned by The Shed in 2019, is now a book (out since Nov. 15), and a concert film opening January 24 on Apple, and in select theaters in March.
The 59-year-old musician was never your usual pop artist and Cornucopia is not your usual concert film. Shot on the Lisbon stop of the tour, it features media artist Tobias Gremmler’s otherworldly digital designs that look like alien aqua-flora imagery projected on screens and giant bead curtains. Olivier Rousteing’s bizarre sculptural costumes augment the fungi-inspired props by designer Chiara Stephenson. Bj?rk shares the stage with Viibra, a seven-member women’s flute ensemble playing multiple variations of the instrument. Also joining her is the Hamrahlid Choir, conducted by fellow Icelander Torgereur Ingólfsdóttir. They sing on “Body Memory,” off her 2017 album Utopia, a collaboration with Venezuelan musician Arca that comprises most of the set list.
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Bespoke instruments for the show include a Circle Flute — four flutes bound together with connecting tubes forming a circle played by a quartet of musicians. There’s also a custom-made reverb chamber from which Bj?rk sings “Features Creatures” and “Show Me Forgiveness.” “Blissing Me” includes percussionist Manu Delago playing water drums — hollow pumpkins suspended in water.
“To create digital theater, it was like something I hadn’t done before,” the Icelandic phenom tells The Hollywood Reporter about taking 21st century VR technology and setting it under a proscenium. ísold Uggadóttir shot the concert, but beyond that it’s Bj?rk’s movie.
“Color correction, editing surround sound, shooting the animation, collaborating with animators, every mask, every note, every moment on the stage is my baby, every stage of everything,” Bj?rk says, listing her responsibilities. “I’m driven by what the song needs. I’m very idiosyncratic and it would be easier for me to hire people to do it for me. But at the end of the day I’m the only one who knows how I want it to be done.”
Born Bj?rk Guemundsdóttir in Reykjavik, she sang in school and community events throughout her childhood (including in the Hamrahlid Choir), and cut her first album at age 11. Today she’s one of the best-selling alternative artists of all time with three platinum albums, 16 Grammy nominations and a best actress award at Cannes for Dancer in the Dark.
In her twenties, she became lead singer of the Sugarcubes, the first Icelandic band to have a global impact. Its signature song, “Birthday”, was written following the birth of her first child, Sindri, with guitarist Tór Eldon, whom she divorced in 1987 after a year of marriage. She went on to have a lengthy, high-profile relationship with artist Matthew Barney. The pair had one daughter, ísadóra, in 2002, but parted in 2013, inspiring Bj?rk’s Vulnicura album.
“I was very protective of that album,” she says of Vulnicura, noting that she did little promotion for it and just a few concerts at Carnegie Hall. “What I mostly did with Vulnicura was VR, so it fit the isolation and privacy that ‘Vulnicura’ needed emotionally. I would say ‘Homogenic’ was me at my rawest. That tour was very confrontational and kind of very brutal, and I think just so much was about personal affairs. But emotionally the music elevated through the tour and at the end of it the show was like a catharsis. Full on. I feel Cornucopia is different. The story’s being told in an abstract way in the film. It’s more talking about the whole world. You have singing through the whole content, the catharsis in ‘Sue Me’ and in ‘Losss’ and ‘Tabula Rasa’ coming out of it, the calm after the storm. I think it ends on an up note.”
At the end of the concert, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg appears on the screen. “I’m here to tell you that change is coming, whether they like it or not,” she says of the carbon consuming establishment. “The real power belongs to the people.”
With regard to climate as well as the global rise of the anti-democratic right, Bj?rk is pessimistic that humankind will change its destructive ways, but optimistic in the long run. “The patriarchy has been for ten thousand years. So, it’s not going to happen in five minutes. It’s good that young extreme right-wing white males stand up and say what they have to say. They fell silent there for a few years. And then they will see the things that they’re saying in print, and the next generation will look at that and say that looks stupid.
“It’s very impulsive and reactionary right now. People are heated, they lost their jobs, things they had for a very long time they didn’t have to think about and that women and people of color have dealt with for thousands of years. I think it would be weird if there wasn’t some sort of slapback. It’s going to take decades to work through it. The tool is imagination. And in hard times it’s important to not be paralyzed. It’s important to stand up and act, and imagine a new world. Things are not going to be like they used to be.”
Bj?rk’s next album is still in its embryonic stages, though she has been tooling around with string arrangements for the past few years. It is billed as an acoustic, strings-only show featuring arrangements of past works, reunited her with over 100 Icelandic musicians playing songs from Post, Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark soundtrack album, Selmasongs.
“Whatever comes next, I think it will be different. And often what I do next is a reaction to what I did before,” she notes. “I did my first string arrangement on Post and I got better and a little bit better. And thirty years later I’m not bad at making string arrangements. When I’ve written a melody I care about, a lyric I care about, I am probably the best person to write the arrangement for it cause I know what it means. It’s protection of the original idea.”
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