Talk:Utopia (Björk album)

This is not so literally about making an album about just optimism or the light. I think it's also about darkness. Utopia is more about this wish that humans have to want to dream. Maybe you want to try to imagine what your life can be in 5 years or 10 years, and you go "okay, this is my fantasy, this my dream", and even if only half of it comes true, that's enough. I think it's very important to have a manifesto or a recipe of what you would like your life to be. Especially now with Trump and all these quite dystopian politicians, I think it's even more important that the people dream and kick off their DIY... you know, cells in their bodies to drive them to come up with an alternative to the reality the politicians are offering us. I think we all have a right to create our future, I think."

"Vulnicura was really painful to write but really easy to mix. It was like drinking water, to mix it. And this album was so fun to write, like sliding down a slide, it was so fun to write it with Alejandro, and then mixing it took months. And then I just changed it into another character. I just become whatever person the album needs and in this instance, I needed to be the stubborn person that works every day for months and I just don't give up. I just become the stubborn mom sitting by the hospital bed of the child and I'm not going to leave until it's healed and cured."

"I think sonically it's kind of the opposite of [Vulnicura]. It's very... lot of of flutes. It's very happy, very light and airy, very fluffy with a lot of birds and flutes and synthetizers and sounds like wind... There's a lot of air and luxuriant clouds. So in that sense it's opposite to Vulnicura, which was very heavy, strings... The music was like rocks on the ground. Emotionally, it was like lying on the ground or something, the melodies... While the melodies on the new album are like fireworks in the sky. I think maybe what it was more similar about the two albums is I did both of them with Alejandro, Arca. But we sort of worked in the opposite way, because on Vulnicura I had already written most of it when I met him and he came up after I recorded all the strings and all the vocals and everything [...] and then on Utopia there are a lot of songs we wrote 50\50 together. So, we wrote more of Utopia together but it's the same balance, I think, as with production.It's kind of similar."

"The first video is out, "The Gate", and I think it's a very good example of where the album is heading, especially the intro of that. You can see a sort of utopian landscape and the flute. But I think also that song, especially emotionally, is the stage in between Vulnicura and Utopia. What you will see in the digital exhibition is a lot of the songs in the VR, I have a wound in my chest. It's like a metaphysical heartbreak wound and [...] in "The Gate" the wound has changed into a gate where I can love people from and they can love me from. So I think that's why I chose that song to be the first single, because it's the bridge from Vulnicura to Utopia."

"I mean, Utopia has dark songs. I think the most interesting thing about paradise is that it always has this mix somewhere, all utopias from all different mythologies. We were doing research, me and James Merry, my collaborator, on cultures of South America and Indonesia, Africa and Asia, their idea of utopia and also mythologies about flutes and spirits, and they all kind of share a similar story where the women take the children and escape. They take the flutes and go to some island or somewhere where there is no violence and they write very peaceful music. But then later in the story always their men return with some violent reaction and you have to deal with that, somehow confront it and you end up with a new balance between the light and the dark, the woman and man, the feminine and masculine. I like also the cliché of utopia. It's like a Disney film, like a Bambi film, that has a monster in it, you know. It's a very extreme contrast. I like that."