At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. We hear all this breath rushing through metal, wood, plastic, cartilage, and muscle, all in largely minor, dissonant modes. All throughout the album we hear the singing of birds called the Montezuma Oropendola-the one that sounds like a Moog synth in a microwave-and the Musician Wren, whose call is one of a few birds that sings in melodies similar to human music. The arrangement on the album flits and flutters everywhere, hard to grasp, much like modern classical composer Olivier Messiaen’s serialist compositions or even his ones composed to mimic birdsong. Its orchestration is carried by a small flute ensemble, the Icelandic Hamrahlid Choir, Harmonic Whirlies, and a collection of birdsongs culled both from Iceland and Arca’s homeland of Venezuela. After a few plucks of harp on the first two songs-the arresting banquet of “Arisen My Senses” and the gentle touch of “ Blissing Me”- Utopia lives almost entirely suspended in the air. But Utopia is, more accurately, an album of breath and wind. Utopia is Björk’s flute album much the way the darkly intimate Vespertine leaned on the celeste or Medúlla was composed mostly of human voices, or Volta had brass and Biophilia its choirs. Groups of flutes and synths zoom from one side of the song to the other, unconcerned with sub-basement beat gurgling beneath, or Björk savoring every consonant from elongated s’s to trilled r’s. The chest wound she repaired becomes the “gate” through which this new love enters. “How to capture all this love?” she sings on the near 10-minute epic “Body Memory.” She knows it’s not easy, “like threading an ocean through a needle.” Her first single “ The Gate” is a good starting point, though, the crossroads between old heartbreak and new wonderment. But a crater of loss is easier to describe than the feeling that might begin to fill it, and accordingly, a denser fog hovers over the music of Utopia. The former was the focus of Vulnicura, a breakup album of strings and electric thuds that grounded her music for many listeners. If this seems high-minded, it’s because it is, but it’s also because Björk’s music now exists on ever grander musical staffs, her lingua franca is that which is rarely broached in casual conversation: How does it really feel to lose someone? How does it really feel to start loving again? Her shift from avant-garde pop star to immersive multimedia artist is not brand-building in a career sense-rather, it’s in service of having more tools for this restless excavation of human senses, their origins and futures. Her relationship to feeling is particularly spatial, living within environments built Björk-tough for all the screams and whispers of history: emotional landscapes, hidden places, internal nebulas, mutual coordinates. The four decades of Björk’s music can be seen, simply enough, as a long trek to detail every last tendril of spiritual energy and spark of emotion that has existed in the world. It’s a long, skittering discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of the violence inherited by men, and a generous offering of love song after love song, rendered musically with unerring elegance and passion. “If you feel this world is not heading the right way,” Björk said recently, “you have to be DIY and make a little fortress.” It’s within this matriarchal frame that Björk and her co-producer Alejandro Ghersi (aka Arca) created the challenging album Utopia. Add to this small world a child and it seems like a miracle-a small paradise immune to the horrors outside of it. Yet most of us persist in this welcoming, an act that requires so much patience, compassion, and sacrifice because we believe that by co-organizing a perfect world for two, we might come closer to knowing love. Another person? With me right now? I’m good, thanks. If only we didn’t have this misbegotten, biologic desire to welcome someone else into our world. It’s easier to create a utopia in isolation.
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