Björk has spoken about how her tours have changed in recent years so she “can actually have a life”.
The singer-songwriter changed the way she toured after her seventh album, Biophilia in 2011.
Instead of moving from city to city, she set up a musical residency and stayed in the same place for weeks at a time.
Explaining her decision to tour in this way, she said in a new interview with The Guardian: “The nuts and bolts are more flexible. Maybe being a woman, or a matriarch, or whatever, I try to make it more that people can actually have a life.
“I have gently fought, since my teenage years, this macho way of how people organise both films and tours. ‘Oh, let’s now work 18 hours a day, every single day, until everybody throws up.’ I always wanted to coexist. You can have a personal life. You can have your kids. You can have your partners there. I’m not saying I’ve succeeded but at least I’ve tried to create a world that is more open to things like that.”
Her most recent ‘Cornucopia’ tour featured “27 moving curtains that captured projections on different textures and LED screens, creating a digitally animated show: a modern lanterna magica for live music.”
She recently released Cornucopia: The Book which documents and chronicles her four year tour over 480 pages and includes over 300 images from photographer Santiago Felipe. You can purchase it here.
Björk also recently teased an accompanying climate-focused concert film for ‘Cornucopia’. Filmed live in Lisbon, Portugal from the European leg of her ‘Cornucopia’ world tour, the movie captures Björk’s climate crisis activism.
Further details about the film were expected to be announced by the end of 2024 but they as yet have not been revealed.
Reviewing the singer’s ‘Cornucopia’ show in London in 2019, NME described it as “an audacious, expectation-disrupting spectacular from an artist unbothered with people-pleasing”. The concert also featured a specially recorded message from climate activist Greta Thunberg.
In an interview with NME in 2022 for a cover story, the singer spoke about the influence of nature in the sound of her last album ‘Fossora’. “There’s a lot of pleasure in the album… it’s about enjoying that space. That’s why it ended up getting this kind of ‘fungus’ theme,” she said.
“And when I say ‘fungus’, I mean more like a sound. Six bass clarinets and really fat, deep notes. It is designed for the bottom-end. You need to almost be inside all that bass. It fills the whole room. That’s the grounding of being able to stay in your house. ‘Medulla’ and ‘Fossora’ are living in the world you’ve made. The lyrics are more about living this life day-to-day and loving it.”
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