For three decades, Icelandic singer Björk has been a mystery and a marvel, equally fluent in pop and the avant-garde, the digital and organic. Over that time, she’s steadily cast aside the usual pop conventions with a sound that could be minimal or explosive, and a voice that still sounds like no one else.
Like the rest of the world, Björk Guðmundsdóttir found herself anchored at home during our ongoing plague years. In 2020, the rise of COVID-19 interrupted her newest tour, called Cornucopia, before she could complete it. But her down time in Reykjavík wasn’t wasted: She spent two years off the road with family and friends, and has just completed a new album set for release later in 2022.
The abbreviated tour’s music and message were rooted in her 2017 album, Utopia, songs she finally brought in recent days to Los Angeles and San Francisco in Björk’s first shows outside of Iceland in two years. On February 1, she performed the last of three nights at the Shrine Auditorium in LA in a gorgeously designed, high-concept production that was more opera epic than the usual concert setlist.
Björk’s chosen mission is music independent of pop expectations, and on her Cornucopia dates she’s challenging fans to ease into her empathetic, esoteric worldview via epic visuals and often-understated sounds. The night started with the local 19-voice choral group Tonality, led by conductor-singer Alexander Lloyd Blake, harmonizing on Björk’s “Family” in a moment of pure warmth and grace:
“There is a swarm of sound
Around our heads
And we can hear it
And we can get healed by it
It will relieve us from the pain”
The curtains slowly parted, and Björk stepped out amid the undulating light and dark in an elaborate dress covered in large white balls of fabric, with a colorful flourish of eye makeup and a metallic headdress, singing “The Gate.” The song included an urgent promise—“I care for you, care for you”—in a voice delicate and searing.
Behind her were seven flute players and a harpist, along with percussionist Manu Delago and musical director Bergur Porisson. Each of the musicians were choreographed and costumed. The flutists wore wooly pants or skirts like Nanook of the North, and more than anyone—aside from Björk herself—set the aesthetic tone for the concert. The music was light and mysterious, dark and inviting.
There were some familiar songs, but few of the biggest hits from Björk’s history stretching back to her days in the Sugarcubes—no “Army of Me” or “It’s Oh So Quiet.” If that made the night less immediate in the usual pop terms, it could also cut deeper.
Her theme for this pop opera was the uncertain future of the environment and its troubled coexistence with humanity. So visuals played a major role in telling that story, with digital animation of organic life, of flowers in bloom and in retreat on the big screens, and of humans suffering the consequences as well. The elaborate stage show was co-directed by Björk and Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel.
On “Body Memory,” she was accompanied by animation showing a human form being battered helplessly by walls closing in. There was a duet on a lilting “Blissing Me” (from Utopia) with the singer serpentwithfeet. And projected onto a curtain, during a lilting, piercing flute solo, were the words: “In order to survive as a species. We need to define our utopia.”
In not being the Björk hit parade some might have expected, a number of fans could be seen quietly slipping out as the night wore on. But most remained in their seats, some in extravagant costumes inspired by the singer’s startling fashion sensibilities. This is a singer with artifacts included in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York, after all.
The main part of the concert closed with Björk standing within her circle of flutists for an embracing, regretful “Tabula Rasa.” She sang, “My deepest wish is that / You’re immersed in grace and dignity / But you will have to deal with shit soon enough,” then left the stage with her band to a standing ovation.
The two-song encore was brief, beginning with a video message from climate activist Greta Thunberg, whose image looked down on the audience in weary judgment. “You are never too small to make a difference,” Thunberg declared, urging others to join her fight for “climate justice and saving the planet.”
Björk wasn’t going to allow that message to get lost amid the night’s poetry and layers of light. In a time of coronavirus and climate disaster, the singer is using her time on the road wisely, sharing her poignant sound and vision with a warning about worse troubles that could still lie ahead for everyone.
