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Musician Bjork
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Vidar Logi / One Little Independent
Album of the week:
Bjork - »Fossora«
After a long journey through hyperspaces full of spherical sounds, the Icelandic musician Björk has landed back on earth, literally: Five years ago, »Utopia« was her escapism album, to escape the pain of her separation from artist Matthew Barney with artificial flute sounds and birdsong, her comeback is now digging for life deep in the fungal biotope of a »Fungal City« of human relationships.
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Bjork
Fossora
Label: One Little Independent
Label: One Little Independent
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09/30/2022 5:09 p.m
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»Fossora«, the title of her new album, borrowed from Latin, is supposed to mean »the digger«.
So Björk operates as a miner in the wells of her soul previously buried by grief.
But also as a gravedigger: With two solemn, mythically exaggerated pieces and an Icelandic folk tune, she bids farewell to her hippie mother, who died in 2018 - and reflects on fulfilling her own role as a mother and the corresponding reception of her children in the tender ballad »Her Mother's House«, in which daughter Isádora »Doa« Bjarkardóttir Barney, who is just starting her own career as a musician, actress and model, also sings along.
Incidentally, both of them were playing mini-roles in the Viking action film »The Northman«.
However, most of the songs on »Fossora« are about starting and allowing a new love.
Differences and flaws that one avoids and emphasizes in the other, aren't these just lame excuses?
"Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect," the 56-year-old encourages herself in the song "Atopos."
Appropriately, she trains the closeness of her music: Anyone who thought that the concept artist Björk, who was once again working with stunningly imaginative visuals on this release, was too remote to return to pop, will experience her quite at home and courageously digging up her comfort zone.
Which doesn't mean that Björk's arrangements have lost any of their complexity, on the contrary, they've just become a little more tangible again.
A sextet of bass clarinets and strings arranged by Björk himself guide the singer with an organic, earth-warm pressure, gently humming through the rhizome of her newly burgeoning emotions, which repeatedly fluctuate between euphoria and skepticism.
In some pieces, the electronically rousing hardcore techno sound of the Indonesian avant-garde duo Gabber Modus Operandi, dug from the 1990s and dug up in the nineties, provides for bold, brisk propulsion – an initially irritating, but also quite cathartic clash of fine, analog orchestra melting and jackhammer - due to the physically noticeable noise. Electronics.
A greater contrast to the two previous albums is hardly imaginable, but that's how it has always been in Björk's meanwhile very long, but never boring journey to and to the borders of pop music and beyond.
If "Utopia" was a magical retreat, she recently told the Guardian, then show "Fossora" what happens when reality intrudes there: "Let's see what it's like when you have lunch in this fantasy and then farts.«
(8.5)
Listened briefly:
Jens Friebe – »We are beautiful«
He could be the heart of every party: the Berlin-based musician and songwriter releases a new album every four years with cleverly playful hymns to absurd everyday life.
His seventh is his most optimistic so far, he calls it "anti-nihilistic."
So you can imagine Friebe early in the morning, when the drunken conversations are drifting towards doom and depression, the table arrangement is breaking up and the disc jockey is already playing Toto (»The End of All Celebrations«), plucking his glitter suit and putting on the yes synthesizers that are randomly lying around somewhere: He then plays exhilarating soul or elaborate pop, trained in Hamburg and at Heaven 17.
As a teaser, he lures Druffis with a satirically twisted ode to the »Microdoser« and performs Leonard Cohen's »First We Take Manhattan« in German.
Then he swings into a melancholic social drama (»The Shrinking City«), reflects the general exhaustion in late capitalism (»The No Longer Can«) and the ideological self-righteousness of the neighborhood bubble (»Sing It To The Converted«) with pounding and hammering sounds, until he talks us all »free« with a shamanic groove.
At the end he pulls out a plastic trumpet, starts the bossa nova preset and warns us »please don't go home«, because »death lies in all beds«.
All right.
until he talks us all »free« with a shamanic groove.
At the end he pulls out a plastic trumpet, starts the bossa nova preset and warns us »please don't go home«, because »death lies in all beds«.
All right.
until he talks us all »free« with a shamanic groove.
At the end he pulls out a plastic trumpet, starts the bossa nova preset and warns us »please don't go home«, because »death lies in all beds«.
All right.
(7.9)
Gaddafi Gals - »Romeo Must Die«
"This shit is here to loop," the first track confidently suggests, before tipping out of a guitar and trap-rap haze into the sweetest R&B you can currently hear from local musicians.
In fact, one would like to run the Gaddafi Gals' second album after a three-year break in an endless loop.
In the meantime, singer Nalan has released her very good debut album, rapper Ebow recently became one of the most prominent migrant and feminist voices in German hip-hop with »Canê«, while producer and programmer walter p99 arkestra, Leipzig's Timbaland, is working on his now even more elegant sound from trip hop, trap and millennial R&B.
In any case, the single "Bye Bye" sends emphatic greetings to Justin Timberlake.
The entire album can also be understood as a homage to a pop princess from that time, Aaliyah, who died young: in the Shakespeare adaptation »Romeo Must Die« she had her first big movie role in 2000 before she died a year later at the age of 22 died in a plane crash.
The title track is correspondingly great drama, the vibe less avant-garde and abrasive than the debut »Temple«.
But even in sensual pop and groove mode, the two frontwomen are still able to quickly raise the middle finger to the present, as in "MDLFGRS (Like That)".
Heavy rotate this shit.
before dying in a plane crash a year later at the age of 22.
The title track is correspondingly great drama, the vibe less avant-garde and abrasive than the debut »Temple«.
But even in sensual pop and groove mode, the two frontwomen are still able to quickly raise the middle finger to the present, as in "MDLFGRS (Like That)".
Heavy rotate this shit.
before dying in a plane crash a year later at the age of 22.
The title track is correspondingly great drama, the vibe less avant-garde and abrasive than the debut »Temple«.
But even in sensual pop and groove mode, the two frontwomen are still able to quickly raise the middle finger to the present, as in "MDLFGRS (Like That)".
Heavy rotate this shit.
(7.7)
Shygirl - »Nymph«
On her long-awaited debut album, Blane Muise aka Shygirl repeatedly refers to the melodic, flowing R&B of the late 90s and early noughties, a sound that is en vogue again after 20 years.
However, one would have expected Shygirl, one of the central figures of the so-called hyperpop genre, to once again chase her musical influences through sonic shredders and particle accelerators, as most recently on her radically sex-positive and acoustically challenging EP »Ailas«.
The very first »Nymph« track »Woe« surprises with a shocking softness and wants to seal itself in an emo cocoon, analogous to the lyrics of the song, instead of letting all body and fantasy juices squirt wildly.
But »Come For Me« (produced by Arca) immediately tempts you with those pop breaks and glitches,
which Shygirl cultivated together with her partner Sega Bodega on her own label Nuxxe or tried to bring into the mainstream together with PC Music colleagues like AG Cook or the unfortunately deceased Sophie.
With »Nymph« she could be the first artist of this futuristic underground sound to do exactly that, when subversive, ravishingly dirty tracks like »Shlut« or »Coochie (A Bedtime Story)« make their way from the underground laboratory into the charts or onto the Dancefloor whisper.
(8.0)
Various – »Hello 22 – GDR Funk and Soul 1971-81«
The East Germans were better at soul than the West Germans, says Heilbronn-born rapper Dexter in a statement on the knowledgeable and very cool compilation of funk and R&B nuggets by the GDR label Amiga, which he created together with his ten-year-old older Stuttgart colleague and German rap godfather Max Herre curated.
Dexter's assessment is as correct as it is obvious: if you have to live in a repressive system, you probably feel the existential pain that runs through African American soul more intensely.
Lines from »Alle Wege« by the Dresden Ekkehard Sander Septet (1972) read like thoughts of escape, only superficially encoded in private: »All waters do not cool the longing for you/ Shining shores, no matter how far away, far away to the edge of the stars.
In this biotope, composer and arranger Günther Fischer created opulently orchestrated, pointedly grooving music with artists such as Holger Biege, Uschi Brüning, Uve Schikora and of course Manfred Krug, which Herre and Dexter, both Wessis who became fans early on, dug up at flea markets and as precious rarities celebrated.
On the album, which was released on the occasion of the 75th Amiga anniversary and whose title is reminiscent of the first Amiga sampler »Hallo Nr. 1″, they now collect an amazing number of songs by women (the GDR was also better at that), including this Veronika Fischer's »Schönhauser« based on »Aquarius«, Angelika Mann's Betty Davis-style funk »Kutte« or Uschi Brüning's early disco track »Hochzeitsnacht«.
Herre and Dexter close ranks between East German soul and West German hip-hop on two new tracks with their own participation,
a rap version of Pantha Rei's »What's Going On« from the East, »Off and Over«, as well as a version of the ballad »Das war nur ein Moment« by Manfred Krug that transcends decades and German-German artist biographies.
It could hardly be more essential.
(9.0)