Björk

If you’ve got “face of fungi” biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s global bestseller Entangled Life on your bookshelf, unbattered and spine uncracked, this documentary might feel like an easier option. A beginner’s guide to fungi, just 40 minutes long, it is narrated by Björk and presented by the gently eccentric Sheldrake (imagine Timothée Chalamet playing a Cambridge academic, with a mop of unruly curls). It’s being released in 3D on the giant screen at London’s BFI Imax – all the better to gawp at Steve Axford’s trippy…

Avatar: The Way of Water | New TrailerThe spectacle of James Cameron’s long-awaited sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time was, against all odds, worth the wait. The Way of Water improves upon the original Avatar on every level—not just in the spectacle, which was a given, but in the story, the characters, and the drama, too. The tale of the Sully family, forced to flee across Pandora and adapt to a new, wetter life, allows Cameron to explore a dazzling new world, while the fight with a Na’vi-fied Miles Quaritch…

My condolences to the children of Iceland. While many Christmas celebrations around the world are full of tidings of comfort, joy, and rampant consumerism, for young Icelanders it’s a time of terror, where you’re lucky to escape with your life… or a potato. At least, that seems to be the case according to this fascinatingly frightening folklore.Let’s begin with Grýla, a giant part-troll, part-animal creature who lives in the Dimmuburgir mountains and comes down at Christmas to look for naughty children to abduct. When she…

Björk will perform the only Australian shows of her Cornucopia tour exclusively in Western Australia next March, a coup for Perth festival that will mark the Icelandic artist’s first full Australian concert since 2008’s Big Day Out.Her environmentally themed Cornucopia concerts will be performed inside a purpose-built 5,000 capacity tent in Perth, where she has been invited to meet Indigenous Noongar community members.Perth festival artistic director Iain Grandage said there had been “a lot of interest and muscle” on…

Of all the gin joints in all the galaxy, Luke Skywalker walked into Mos Eisley Cantina. A wretched hive of villainy where your pint of blue milk might get spilled by some unfriendly bum-faced alien, the tavern is seared into the memory of nearly every sci-fi fan alive thanks to its appearance in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope.But what Mos Eisley lacked in charm it more than made up for in live entertainment, being the regular gig of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, perhaps better known simply as the Cantina band – the…

It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before Björk, that great musical nature writer, worked her way round to the living world’s weirdest kingdom: the life-from-death forms of fungi. One of the most beautiful tracks on her 10th album, Fossora, is Mycelia, named for the fine fungal threads that form colonies to break down dead matter.Björk imagines the march of these cottony filaments as staccato vocal chorales, a kind of underground birdsong that grows faster and harder. It calls to mind the work of Dr Suzanne Simard,…

Björk’s last album, 2017’s Utopia, was a vision of paradise. Filled with birdsong and built around a 12-piece Icelandic flute section, it was one of the avant garde icon’s sweetest, quietest records, a suite of pastoral orchestration and hushed electronics that acted as an emotional counterweight to 2015’s Vulnicura, an album about her protracted, devastating divorce. In the intervening five years, during which Björk has been largely out of the public eye, it’s been easy to imagine her inhabiting some version of the world…

If, in the winter of 2021, you had been wandering through downtown Reykjavík, you might have registered the thud-thud-thud-thud of a lockdown house party. Squeezing her “Christmas bubble” of friends into her living room, Iceland’s most famous citizen was throwing another of her “crazy DJ nights, where 20 people could come and I always ended up DJing just gabber”.According to Björk, the nails-hard 90s Dutch techno style is the perfect soundtrack to Covid life. “There’s always a BPM in our bodies, you know? And I think…

Sturgill Simpson - Sing Along (Official Video)Okay so I’m not going to wax poetic about Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury, but the fact is that this country artist fell in love with anime and then went to Netflix and was like, “How about we produce a 40-minute episodic anime film that uses my newest album as a soundtrack.” What came out of the collaboration is a cypberpunk/country mashup that is a delight to watch and listen to, and I have not seen enough people talking about it. Japanese director Junpei Mizusaki took…

‘We love science!” exclaims Jane Weaver during her Friday set, as the crowd whoops as heartily as they do to any music all weekend. It captures the tone of Bluedot: a unique festival in which science and music go hand-in-hand, and where homemade spacesuits are as plentiful as band T-shirts.Weaver’s cosmic disco pop pulses gently through the early evening air before Nuha Ruby Ra offers up a set of intense industrial pop, screaming into two microphones she has tightly clasped in each hand. The evening belongs to Kelly Lee…