Los Angeles’s Lindsey French aka Negative Gemini aka Neggy Gemmy follows up on her remix of Millionyoung‘s “Free” with two throbbing new instrumentals, that are released under the project Utopia. If you follow the artist, you probably already heard “Clown Cleaner” and “House of Trix” in her Virtual Utopia VR performances, as she was working on on them during the stream. Listen below.

Björk‘s videos are always an event and her latest one is no exception. For the visuals of “Losss”, the Icelandic artist collaborated once again with German digital artist Tobias Gremmler, who alredy directed “Tabula Rasa” earlier this year and who has also contributed to her new show. About this new video and collaboration, Björk explained:

[su_quote]noone captures digital sensuality like him , elegant and expressive !!!! this is made for the multiple of screens of cornucopia and we share it all here on 1 for your laptop screen … we based it on the conversations between our inner optimist and pessimist , when i recorded this i tried to sing in a deeper tone for one of them and if you listen on headphones it will match the imagery.[/su_quote]

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Björk has recently launched Cornucopia in NYC and Mexico; a live concept that is described as her most elaborate stage concert yet. The theatrical and innovative show is now coming to Europe and the UK. Check her itinerary below.

13 Nov – Brussels @ Forest National

16 Nov – Luxembourg @ Rockhal

19 Nov – London @ O2 Arena

25 Nov – Glasgow @ SSE Hydro

28 Nov – Dublin @ 3Arena

Björk made her come back on TV for Later… With Jools Holland where she performed live for the first time in eight years. The Icelandic artist, who was surrounded by jungle-like settings and an ensemble of flautists, sang “Courtship,” a song taken from her 2017’s ninth studio album “Utopia” as well as “The Anchor Song” from her 1993’s album “Debut.”

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The artist also started her “Utopia Tour” which will bring her to London’s All Points East Festival, Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival and to Gent Jazz Festival amongst others.

The first remix features New York-based artist serpentwithfeet who adds an R&B and mysterious touch to the track without ever taken the essence of what Björk has created. Imagined as a collaboration with producers Arca for most of the songs, and Rabit for one, it makes sense that she continues to give life to this album through collaborations. The second version features the harpe as the main character without any beats. It can give you a first taste of the album without the mesmerizing touch of Ghersi.

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“Utopia” is out now via One Little Indian Records.

Taken from her last album “Utopia“, we follow the Icelandic artist into her dreamy journey. With facial make-up that reminds the cover of the album, she sits on a perfectly weird costume while playing the flutes to tell her story. Alongside some nymphs playing with her, the Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones-directed video ends showing us that her world is actually on floating island, where her dreams stand still.

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“Utopia” is out now via One Little Indian Records. You can also watch the video of “Blissing Me” and “The Gate“.

An impressive late-career renaissance featuring production duties by Arca, “Vulnicura” resonated emotionally with its listeners like few modern albums. Basically a tale of Björk’s break-up with her long-time partner, it was a trip down one of the darkest paths in her life that avoided coming off as some sort of personal exhibition. Its report of a break-up felt intimate and universal at the same time, as the album was granted a distinctive warmth that made it stand out from her previous work. A post break-up record at its core, Utopia encapsulates the nervous early steps of a new romantic affair and the bittersweet cut off ties of her previous relationship. But this is Björk, so there’s a twist – there are many twists, as a matter of fact. Unlike “Vulnicura”, Björk‘s “Utopia” does get too awkwardly personal at times.

This chronicle of the early stages of love masterfully materializes in songs like “Blissing Me” or “The Gate”, in which Björk’s private life is transmuted into a series of detailed images that are as universally relatable as fitting with the album’s sonic landscapes, but it is also responsible for some of the LP’s most questionable moments. “Sue Me” reports Björk’s legal issues with her ex-partner in such explicit fashion that it’s impossible not to feel put off by the lyrics accompanying its strident, amelodic chorus: “Sue me, sue me, sue me, all you want / I won’t, I won’t denounce our origin.” One of the two tracks that do not feature Arca (the other one being the short yet impressive instrumental “Paradisa”), the minimalistic “Features Creatures” is also a victim of the album’s penchant for the explicitly intimate, remaining largely uninteresting during five minutes. In what might be a regrettably frivolous assessment, I would venture to say that while these songs obviously mean a lot to Björk, it’s almost impossible to care about them as outsiders to her personal circumstances. “Utopia / It isn’t elsewhere / It’s here”, she sings in the album’s title track, reminding us that her utopia is only private; we are denied access to it. “Utopia” operates by pairing up polar opposites – it’s Björk’s most intimate but it’s also her most impenetrable.

In recent interviews, Björk has mentioned that this is her Tinder record, a set of collected experiences of a middle-aged woman trying to find love again. “Utopia” seeks to reconcile the sense of estrangement and distancing that comes with love in the modern age and the spiritual connection of the human body to nature, its seamless transitions coming off as effortlessly as the intertwining of Arca’s electronic superstructures with the album’s pastoral tone.

Despite being described as her ‘Tinder’ album, Björk is impenetrable on “Utopia”. The album thrives in its fluidity and challenges our conceptions of popular music in unprecedented ways

Detached from any familiar musical referent, these songs are exclusively circumscribed to Björk’s utopian Arcadia; they are concerned with the creation of a fictitious space where pan flutes and eccentric electronic noises co-exist as parts of a single whole. Both the album’s opening track and its strongest artistic statement, “Arisen My Senses” might be the best thing that has come out of Björk’s partnership with Arca. Introducing “Utopia”’s unlikely alliance between pastoral traits and visionary production, a bird’s calm tweet is suddenly superposed by a set of outlandish electronic arrangements that transforms the song’s chord progression into the musical equivalent of a chain of exploding stars. A throwback to the “Vespertine” era that somehow found its way into “Utopia”, “Losss” features the album’s most impressive chorus, Björk’s voice melodically breaking through an Arca-designed barrier of anarchic chirps and buzzes.

Björk’s approach to melody and harmony has always been fairly liberal at best, but “Utopia” represents a new stage in her history of experimentalism. Her voice refuses to be restrained by any sort of static pattern, instead meandering through sonic amorphous structures with total freedom. If “Vulnicura” gave us a first taste of what Björk’s collaborations with one of the most exciting contemporary producers could offer, “Utopia” is wholly dependent on their artistic symbiosis. A good number of these tracks barely qualify as songs, and that’s not meant to be taken as a derogatory statement. “Utopia” thrives in its fluidity and challenges our conceptions of popular music in unprecedented ways, even if it sometimes falls short of making a lasting impression.

There are times when Björk’s penchant for liquidity can be taken as mere self-indulgence, the inexplicably endless “Body Memory” being the most evident perpetrator. Clocking in almost at the ten minute mark (Björk has revealed that it originally went on for twenty minutes, God save us all), it’s supposed to be a direct answer to “Black Lake”, the sprawling centrepiece in “Vulnicura” and the root of that album’s pervasive darkness. But whereas “Black Lake” elicited a deep emotional response from its very first notes, “Body Memory” comes off as an excessively forced attempt at forging an aura of bewilderment and defamiliarization, a failed experiment that ruins the album’s pace with its frustrating over-reliance on repetition.

“Utopia” is a challenging listen, a sprawling high modernist work which demands the listener’s undivided attention for more than an hour while remaining excruciatingly impenetrable. For better or worse, there’s no other living artist who could have made an album like this one. It’s Björk at her most inaccessible ever, breaking with her past self to create an art piece equally fascinating and dull, futuristic and bucolic, bitter and yet weirdly joyful.

Directed by Tim Walker and Emma Dalzell, the video is a stunning piece of art expected only from Björk. Following the release of her previous video “The Gate“, “Blissing Me” reminds a lot her fifth album “Vespertine”, specially the track “Aurora” by the used of harps and the sweetness of the lyrics.

You can check the tracklist of the album below and pre-order it here.

“Utopia”
1) Arisen My Senses
2) Blissing Me
3) The Gate
4) Utopia
5) Body Memory
6) Features Creatures
7) Courtship
8) Loss
9) Sue Me
10) Tabula Rasa
11) Claimstaker
12) Paradisa
13) Saint
14) Future Forever

As pop and electronic as it can be, we never forgot how much we missed them. The vocals are completely mesmerizing, the production is as creative as their last album “Olympia” installing a surprisingly dancefloor-shaped atmosphere.

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The video directed by THAT GO is as mesmerizing as the song, keeping it very pure and simple. About the video, THAT GO declared:

[su_quote]Katie came into the video project with a lot of ideas about the future, we discussed everything from food trends to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The video is more near-future than distant-future, with recognizable technology and modern protein sources[/su_quote]

With “Utopia”, Austra are delivering an eerie, futuristic and addictive electro-pop song

During a very political time for most of Western countries, more and more artists are becoming very vocal about their views in the matter. Austra have never shy about their feminist activism and political point of views, as such we are not surprised on how the album should be inspired by the current political events and how we are all projecting us in the future as human kind. Nevertheless, the band insist that it will be more a reflexion of futurist possibilities more than anchored in present realities. As said by Katie herself, the album should be an exploration of:

[su_quote]A commitment to replace the approaching dystopia… not just hope in the future, but the idea that everyone is required to help write it, and the boundaries of what it can look like are both fascinating and endless. It’s not about ‘being political,’ it’s about reaching beyond boundaries, in every single field.[/su_quote]

“Future Politics” is out 20 January 2017 via Domino and you can check the tracklist below.

1. We Were Alive
2. Future Politics
3. Utopia
4. I’m A Monster
5. I Love You More Than You Love Yourself
6. Angel In Your Eye
7. Freepower
8. Gaia
9. Beyond A Mortal
10. Deep Thought
11. 43

You can also listen to “Utopia” in our Spotify playlist “Daily Dose for Music Junkies“