Björk has announced a new book that will document and chronicle her five-year ‘Cornucopia’ tour – find out more below.
Cornucopia: The Book serves as a physical commemoration of the artist’s boundary-breaking ‘Cornucopia’ tour that morphed through multiple iterations over the last five years.
The book is due for release on November 15 – pre-orders are available now. The book is 480 pages long and will include over 300 images from photographer Santiago Felipe.
Björk wrote of Cornucopia: The Book on social media: “Before this tour, I spent a decade working with 360-degree sound and visual software in virtual reality and animation, creating ‘Biophilia’, the first app album, and later ‘Vulnicura’ as a VR album. I was deeply inspired by the idea of a fully-immersive experience, spending a spring in an Icelandic lighthouse, spreading Utopia into fully surround speakers. My intention was to bring what we had created for 21st-century VR into a 19th-century theatre—taking it from the headset to the stage.”
She continued: “This vision was realized with 27 moving curtains that captured projections on different textures and LED screens, creating a digitally animated show: a modern lanterna magica for live music. I also wanted to feature bespoke instruments: a magnetic harp, an aluphone, a circular flute, and a reverb chamber, specially built with an audio architect to enhance the most intimate version of a performance—in a personal chapel.”
Besides chronicling the spectacle and technicalities of the ‘Cornucopia’ tour, the upcoming book adds a narrative: “Throughout this tale, there is a subplot woven in: a second story of an avatar—a modern marionette who alchemically mutates, from puppet to puppet, from the injury of a heart wound to a fully healed state.”
Check out Björk’s full announcement below.
The announcement comes just weeks after Björk began teasing 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.
In a statement structured in the form of a poem, the singer shared the significance of the project: “It is an emergency, in order to survive as a species we need to define our utopia. The Paris climate accord is a modern utopia impossible to imagine, but overcoming our environmental challenges is the only way we can survive.”
Further details about the film are expected to be announced by the end of this year.
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 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.”
