“Matriarch music” is how Bjork defined her work earlier this month. Appropriate, then, that the Icelandic experimentalist’s 10th album, Fossora, opens with a pounding, ritualistic tribute to her late mother (“atopos”) and ends with a stunningly tender hymn to her nest-flying daughter (“her mother’s house”). On the weird and winding journey between those two points, the record gets difficult, funny, soothing, quarrelsome, giddy, sad and wild. It’s a frank, loving reflection on the relationships between these three generations of women.
Fossora is also mushroom music. The album title is a feminised word for miner or digger, and its lyrical language taps into themes of deep-rooted connectivity and bursts of fleshy fruition. Grief is diffused into the atmosphere like “spores” on the title track, love is .....
