Björk, Cornucopia

Perth Festival 

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Dear Björk 

 

I’ve been your devoted fan ever since I watched The Sugarcubes music videos back in the 80s when I was living in a student share-house. My bedroom had the TV aerial socket, so it became the shared living room, and I’d stay up watching MTV after my fellow householders had all gone to bed. 

 

When you went solo I continued to follow your career through the 90s and into the new millennium. With your incredible voice, musical inventiveness and fearlessly independent artistry I felt like you were a worthy successor to your (and my) feminist singer-songwriter icons Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. Your first four albums – Debut, Post, Homogenic and Vespertine – were each more wondrous than the last, as were the videos that accompanied the singles. As for your performance and soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark: I can still remember sitting in the cinema in devastated silence long after the film had ended.  

 

I have to admit that you lost me for a while when you released Medúlla, followed by Volta and Biophilia. I also had trouble getting on board the Nissan Maru with you and Matthew Barney for Drawing Restraint #9. I loved the soundtrack, but I was repelled by Barney’s self-absorbed aesthetic and fetishistic appropriation of Japanese culture, not to mention the uneasy sense of complicity and exploitation I felt while watching the two of you enact your nuptial rituals onboard a Japanese industrial whaling ship However ironic or critical your intentions, it seemed like an act of artistic hubris and political naivety, especially for someone like yourself with a professed commitment to the environment and biodiversity. More generally, I found myself troubled by an element of self-importance that seemed to have crept into your work, and a loss of the sense of humour and playfulness I’d always loved about you before.

 

However, you won me back with your post-Barney breakup album Vulnicura, which felt like a return to Vespertine’s sense of intimacy and personal revelation, and its follow-up album Utopia’s transcendent embrace of love and nature in all their forms. More recently Fossora seemed like an airy expansion of that vision, while also including some of your most personal tracks yet; I especially loved your elegy for your activist mother, ‘Ancestress’. 

 

So it was with great expectations that I attended your much heralded and critically hailed visual and musical extravaganza Cornucopia. I found myself sitting about halfway back – that is to say, in the back row of the ground-level seating, just in front of the rear, tiered sections – in the huge five-thousand seat pavilion at Langley Park which was apparently designed and constructed according to your specifications. 

 

As a result I felt less immersed in the experience than I imagine would have been the case had I been sitting closer to the stage. I could barely see you in the distance over the heads of the rows of audience sitting in front of me; to be brutally honest a regular stadium would have provided better sightlines. In any case you were totally dwarfed and often completely obscured by the digital art projected onto the curtain of ropes in front of the stage as well as the screens on either side and behind you. As for the video content itself, this was impressive for a while, but eventually became a bit like watching an endless series of screen savers interspersed with clips from your music videos, and hardly included any live coverage of you or your fellow musicians.

 

I’m sure the designer costumes and masks worn by you all were marvellous, but I couldn’t really see them either; and while the choreographed antics of the female flute septet in their fairy wings provided some visual and comic relief, there was otherwise little to engage me in terms of what I could see onstage. As for the blinding lights that were blasted into the audience at regular intervals, these had two young fans sitting beside me cowering and covering their eyes.

 

This visual onslaught was reinforced by the rolling waves of incoherent and indiscriminate sound delivered by the (again apparently specially designed) surround-sound system, which added an extra layer of reverb to the already dense of mix of live and prerecorded sources. A friend later remarked that all of this made her feel a bit seasick. The effect was exacerbated by the occasionally out-of-synch video clips. In fact as I increasingly withdrew internally from the experience I found myself wondering if I’d be better off watching and listening to your music videos in a well-designed surround-sound cinema.

 

As for the music itself: I was more than happy with the selection of songs, predominantly drawn from Utopia and supplemented by some additions from Fossora, as well as some interesting new arrangements of some of my favourite hits from your back catalogue like ‘Isabel’, ‘Hidden Place’ and ‘Pagan Poetry’. I also enjoyed the instrumentation and musicianship – especially from the septet of flautists, the harpist, the drummer/percussionist (mostly using an electronic drumkit, but with some occasionally intriguing additions), and the 18-voice choir (also dressed in white and wearing golden masks and headgear) who opened and closed the concert, as well as augmenting what was for me a stand-out central performance of ‘Body Memory’ from Utopia (the video art for this was also amazing, with what looked like hordes of dancers appearing at the base of the screens and then slowly floating upwards like souls towards the gates of Heaven).

 

However, the strange sense of your ‘live absence’ (as opposed to the virtual presence of your digital avatars onscreen) was reinforced by your frequent disappearances into a specially designed reverb chamber cocoon, as well as the fact that neither you nor the musicians interacted with us throughout the show, apart from the four-word ‘Thank you for tonight’ you left us with in parting. You didn’t even bother to return for the encore, which was valiantly performed by the choir without you, in what must be the most abrupt ending to any live gig I’ve ever attended.

 

As for the video of Greta Thunberg delivering a variation on her now-all-too-familiar speech about climate change which was projected across the rope curtains just before that encore: the whoops and cheers from the audience in response made me feel like I was at an eco-revivalist tent rally of the culture-knowledge class faithful blindly signalling their collective virtue and worshipping their celebrity saint – all the while blithely ignoring the apparent contradiction between your fantasy of saving the planet by becoming one with nature and the massive use of sound, lighting and audio-visual technology involved in your Cornucopia travelling show. I wanted less of all that, and more of what makes you special: your astounding voice, your glorious music (without all those layers of reverb) and your pagan poetry.

I remain as ever

Your devoted but brutally honest fan

Wolfgang.

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary folk dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.