1 Arisen My Senses (4:59)
2 Blissing Me (5:05)
3 The Gate (6:33)
4 Utopia (4:42)
5 Body Memory (9:46)
6 Features Creatures (4:49)
7 Courtship (4:44)
8 Losss (6:51)
9 Sue Me (4:57)
10 Tabula Rasa (4:42)
11 Claimstaker (3:18)
12 Paradisia (1:44)
13 Saint (4:41)
14 Future Forever (4:47)

Titre inédit
Arpegggio

Utopia album Tournée Utopia 2018

Utopia

24 novembre 2017

9^e album solo de Björk, la flûte est l’instrument majeur de cet opus. Les thèmes principaux sont la recherche de l’amour, l’urgence écologique, le féminisme et l’exploration de l’utopie.

It’s about that search (for utopia) – and about being in love. Spending time with a person you enjoy is when the dream becomes real. / Il s’agit de cette recherche (d’utopie) - et d’être amoureux. C’est en passant du temps avec une personne que l’on apprécie que le rêve devient réalité.
If we’re gonna survive the situation the world is in today, we’ve got to come up with a new plan. Especially now, this kind of dream is an emergency. / Si nous voulons survivre à la situation dans laquelle se trouve le monde aujourd’hui, nous devons trouver un nouveau plan. Surtout maintenant, ce genre de rêve est une urgence.

Björk

Très impliquée dans la conception, Arca est présente dès la genèse du projet, elle est clairement identifiée comme co-productrice. Par ailleurs, le titre Allow est dédié à leur étroite relation.

Infos

Durée : 71 min
Singles : 1^er single : The Gate, 2^e single : Blissing Me
Pochette "animée" : Utopia
L’album est construit autour des instruments à vents, principalement la flûte, mais il y a aussi de la harpe.
des chants d’oiseaux et de bruits de la nature servent de transition entre chaque titre. Des sons enregistrés avec Arca, notamment lors de leur voyage aux Caraïbes ou empruntés à l’un des albums préférés de Björk : Hekura enregistré par David Toop et Nestor Figueras et sorti en 1980.
Le chœur islandais Hamrahlíðarkórinn participe au projet.

Chronologie

24 février 2016, lors de son discours de remerciement aux Brits Awards, Björk annonce qu’un nouvel album est en cours d’élaboration.
en mars 2016, à AnOther Magazine, elle explique travailler sur un album s’approchant du paradis, en opposition au très sombre Vulnicura.
2 août 2017, via un message manuscrit posté sur les réseaux sociaux, Björk annonce officiellement la sortie très prochaine de son 9^e album solo.
15 septembre 2017, sortie du 1^er single The Gate.
31 octobre 2017, la couverture est révélée le jour d’Halloween avec une nouvelle typographie.
15 novembre 2017, sortie du 2^e single Blissing Me.
8 décembre 2017, le titre Utopia est révélé et est décrit comme la « couverture animée » de l’album.
18 décembre 2017, la vidéo pour Arisen My Senses est publiée
3 mars 2018, sortie des remixes pour Arisen My Senses
9 avril 2018, début de la tournée Utopia en Islande
11 mai 2019, nouvelle vidéo pour Tabula Rasa
6 août 2019, nouvelle vidéo pour Losss
6 septembre 2019, sortie digitale des remixes de Features Creatures
1er Novembre 2019, sortie du vinyle Country Creatures
19 Novembre 2019, sortie du coffret Utopia Bird Call Boxset

Crédits

Paroles : Björk
Ecriture : Björk, Arca et Sarah Hopkins
Production : Björk, Arca et Rabit
Mixage : Heba Kadry Marta Salogni
Mastering : Mandy Parnell

L’ordre de la tracklist est différent sur la version vinyle :

Face A	Face B	Face C	Face D
1 Arisen My Senses 2 Blissing Me 3 The Gate	4 Body Memory 5 Losss	6 Utopia 7 Saint 8 Courtship 9 Sue Me	10 Tabula Rasa 11 Claimstaker 12 Paradisia 13 Features Creatures 14 Future Forever

Pochette :
Direction artistique par Björk, James Merry et Hungry
Photographie par Jesse Kanda
Maquillage : Hungry
Masque : James Merry

Artwork : M/M Paris (Typographie et enluminures digitales)

Nominations

Nordic Music Prize	Best Nordic Album	nommé
Icelandic Music Awards	Album of the year (Pop)	nommé
Brit Awards	International female solo artist	nommé
Grammy Awards	Best Alternative Music Album	nommé

Björk à propos de l’album

Son prochain album serait un "album Tinder" autour de "la recherche du bonheur, et le fait d’être amoureux", ajoutant : "Passer du temps avec une personne que l’on aime, c’est quand le rêve devient réalité."

Dazed

The whole album is a little bit about air, because we decided to have synths that have a lot of air in them, and we have flutes that sound synthy, so there’s that sort of crossover there.

Nowness

“This album, for me, is kind of like a soundtrack to that place that we can all move to after Trump. I think I wanted to create a…utopia [where] you would escape and go to an island and the people would be naked and they’d be playing flutes and it would have birds and flowers that you’d never seen. It would be this kind of paradise.”

The Big Issue

i think the idea of the album was never to fanatically pollyanna forth some ideal perfection but rather a speculation of what our fantasies are and what the reality is and where can they help each other. have courage in going for your first choice and standing by it. i feel in this time of trump it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative. it’s a question of life and death for our species. as a musician i feel i can suggest the musical poetic angle which is that after tragedies one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. it’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it, it doesn’t work that way. you have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. it’s a territorial hope affair. at the time, that digging is utopian but in the future it will become your reality.

W Magazine - Octobre 2017

Because the subject matter was utopia, I wanted to feel like you’ve come to this island and there are all these sounds and birds and plants that you’ve never seen or heard before.

NPR - Novembre 2017

I think the severity of the last album made me very excited about everything that was light and fluffy and in the wind, so that became definitely one of the major sonic inspirations for this album : I started to write flute arrangements, and I got together like 12 girls in Iceland to play the flutes.

NPR - Novembre 2017

I wanted to just be free and become a musician again, and have my voice, instead of it lying on the ground, my melodies to be more like constellations in the cloud.

NPR - Novembre 2017

I did a little falsetto experiment on Utopia ; more songs than usual are now sung like that, which is kind of hilarious ! It was almost like a continuity of "Cocoon," an old song of mine, where I was trying as a singer to get underneath the skin and break the barrier between the singer and the listener. I discovered that the sonic contrast on this album, the point where the fantasy and the real meet is extreme. I guess that’s what the title Utopia is about. I like that the word has luggage. It is about your fantasy but also about how you mix reality into it, and how you do that is really descriptive of what kind of person you are. I’m curious about the gap between the two.

the Talks - Novembre 2017

‘Utopia’ celebrates precisely those elements that push her further into the light—friendship, love and hope. “It’s the polar opposites of ‘Vulnicura,’ emotionally and musically,” Björk explains. “I‘ve done the saddest music I‘ve made in my life, and I felt, as musicians, we could do so much more. It became almost like a joke to do the opposite.”
“‘Vulnicura’ was very heavy, and the melodies were sad, so they didn’t move a lot of the ground. On ‘Utopia’ I kind of gravitated towards everything that was light and happy, because I had overdosed on seriousness,” Björk explains with a laugh. “Flutes are probably the lightest musical instruments. They are fluffy—they‘re wind, and flow.”
“If it were just happy songs, I would have called the album ‘Paradise’ or something,” she chuckles. “Yes, there are moments that are very euphoric and happy, but then there is also—like in all sci-fi films and stories that humans have made about the perfect place—that moment when two thirds into the story, the tail of a dinosaur knocks on your door and you have to deal with it.”

Reykjavik Grapevine

Chroniques

The result is exceptionally beautiful. Utopia is overwhelming, lush and gorgeous, with harps and flutes and real-life bird calls, a magic forest of constantly changing sound.

The Guardian

The new album is another classic from the good lady and her current crew of music makers. It takes in everything from piano and strings to drum machines, beats, bleeps, harps, flutes and samples. The perfect example of how future music can be made by always pushing the boundaries but never forgetting the song. It’s another organic and mesmerizing album that unfolds with repeated plays. Simply outstanding - Bjork always is.

Rough trade

The latest iteration of Björk’s career-long fascination with how nature and technology can interact. (...) Utopia has gone from everything being monasteries, to feminist islands, to socialism, to ‘Peach Blossom Spring’.

The New York Times

« Si vous y prêtez une oreille attentive, cet album vous emportera au paradis »

The Skinny

« Avec Utopia, l’Islandaise plonge Amour et Écologie dans un grand bain de flûtes. »

Tribune de Genève

On est littéralement aspiré dans l’univers unique de Björk.

Les Inrocks

Une splendeur immersive qui enchante par sa radicalité.

Libération

Une lettre d’amour adressée à l’optimisme

New York Times

Un album organique, féministe pro-sexe, bien plus positif que le plombant Vulnicura

Tsugi

La vie qui bat dans cette sonosphère donne sérieusement envie de s’y immerger, s’y perdre et ne plus en revenir.

lapresse.ca

Une écoute attentive d’une œuvre aussi personnelle, exigeante et courageuse s’avère, à ceux qui voudront bien s’y abandonner, lumineuse.

Télérama

Inclassable et difficile à appréhender, souvent, mais toujours très attendue, Björk sort Utopia, disque étrange mais passionnant de renaissance.

Francetvinfo

On sent que la générosité est centrale dans cet album, dont la musique est parfois offensive : Björk dessine des parallèles entre son évolution personnelle et un désir de renverser / changer le système.

The Fader

Utopia est l’interaction entre l’art, le vécu et l’expérimentation, et c’est absolument fascinant.

NME

News

À propos de l’album Utopia
By contrast with Vulnicura, Björk’s new album feels lighter than air.

Dazed

À propos de l’album Utopia
Il s’agit en quelque sorte de trouver l’extase. J’ai eu une idée de roman de science-fiction où nous irions tous sur une île pour recommencer à zéro et fabriquer des flûtes avec des bâtons. Et nous pourrions, à cause d’un accident nucléaire, avoir muté en oiseaux ou les oiseaux en synthétiseurs. Mais, malgré tout, nous nous en sortons. Je pense qu’il s’agit surtout, je suppose, de l’idée de créer un havre de paix sans violence. Et peut-être le fait d’être épuisé par le fait que 90 % des histoires (se déroulant) dans le futur sont très dystopiques et sans espoir.

Mercury News

Annonce de la sortie d’Utopia
i am so overwhelmingly humble while announcing my album utopia is coming out end of nov . i can´t wait for you to hear it . this is the cover made by the warm extraordinary talented jesse kanda and was assisted by me , james merry and hungry . thank you for telepathically getting me !! over the moon and jupiter gratitudes to magical arca for making the music of this album with me : what a profound and nourishing trip this has been !!! thousandfold appreciation and headbowing . hope you like it , warmth ,

Björk

Björk à propos de l’album Utopia
Des échanges musicaux, vous en avez connu toute votre carrière. Après pu nouer une relation plus forte encore un message d’espoir pour tous. Absolument. C’est pour cette raison que j’ai baptisé l’album Utopia. Parce qu’il ne s’agit que de ça : garder l’espoir. L’espoir dans un monde où la hiérachie entre les êtres serait bannie. Une forme de matriarcat, en somme, à la place du patriarcat.

Télérama n°3538, 2017

Björk à propos de la pochette de Utopia
Me and James Merry started talking about it a year or so ago and I was talking about how it was kinda sci-fi – arriving on an island after some sort of apocalypse and starting anew. So like an optimistic moist rainforest mood. There would be some sort of mutation, like birds that become flutes that become synths that become human. And somehow – as in all beginnings – somehow erotically charged but not in the traditional sense : more in the energy. I wanted it to be peach and light seagreen and somehow try to capture that magic of sunrises and sunsets. It needed to have some sort of warped twist. Like the borderline aggressive...

Creative Review

Björk à propos des interludes et sons d’oiseaux
Some of it was recorded in Iceland. I have a cabin by a lake, and there are a couple of pairs of Arctic Loons that live just outside there. They’re really beautiful and huge. They obviously ended up on the album. Also, I used a vinyl album of Venezuelan music I had, [Hekura–Yanomamo Shamanism From Southern Venezuela], that was recorded in the ’70s—Venezuelan birds. The birds there sound completely different. They sound like R2-D2, or techno.

Pitchfork

Björk à propos du titre de l’album Utopia
“I have had a thousand name suggestions, and I think it’s going to be called Utopia. I can’t think of anything better. Well if I change my mind five minutes before the LP cover goes into print — that might happen” “I kind of like the fact that it’s a cliche, that word, and I like the fact that it has a fascistic, weird, ‘I want the world to be like this’ feeling about it. It’s a proposal of how we can live in the future with nature and technology in the most optimistic way possible. We have Trump, we have Brexit, we have our issues in Iceland, we have our environmental issues – if there was ever an urgency or necessity to come up with another utopian model, how we’re gonna live our lives, I think it’s now. And this is my...

Nowness

Björk de la création d’Utopia
the soft merge that yielded this album has been one of the most oxygenating experiences i’ve had in my lifetime. can i be a little sentimental ? i cherish every single moment in the 2+ year journey of this album with you (Arca) and james and jesse. the licking raindrops out of the salty air in the tropics & listening for birds, swimming in green rivers, the fires crackling through snow ... the dark grey storm and the luminous rainbow that flooded the air after. it floods me still each day and with colors i didn’t know. this album truly carries a piece of utopia for me— one that is already smilingly real. unquantifiable, hundreds of thousands of sparkles effortlessly magicked by the regal james t. merry i love...

Jesse Kanda à propos de la pochette Utopia
Utopia’s covers is a portrait of Björk. Depending on when you look at it, it can be ugly. And that’s the point, that’s what I’m trying to do. Making something painful but transmuting it into something beautiful.

Work in progress