Using the title track of the singer’s latest album ‘Fossora,’ the experimental design studio depicted her performance within a dynamic, rotting, earthy mushroom world, bringing two parallel universes together in sync with the music.
Experimental design studio FutureDeluxe collaborated with Björk’s close-knit circle of long-term creative partners - agency M/M (Paris) and photographer/director Vidar Logi - to create a music video (watch it below) for the title track of her latest album, Fossora. The visuals also appear as a part of Björk’s current global tour.
“The Fossora album cover, created with a custom typeface design by M/M (Paris), had been previously animated for the album release trailer,” shared FutureDeluxe executive producer Svet Lapcheva.
According to Lapcheva, FutureDeluxe created a world that feels “alive and connected to the music as the performance itself — but one that existed in parallel with the performance, instead of engulfing it.”
Lapcheva explained, “In our first conversation, we discussed the concept of ‘brutal collage,’ a way of creating the mushroom world to allow us a glimpse into the complexity of the Fossora mushroom world, revealing an ecosystem of mushrooms surrounded by spores and light.”
The artist and musicians’ performance in the video is a “brutal collage” set over a dynamic, rotting, earthy mushroom universe. The opening mushroom sequence spells “Fossora” with each letter part of a typeface developed by M/M specifically for the Fossora world. FutureDeluxe reimagined each mushroom letter in refined detail, recreated to host multiple digital-fungal organisms, only with more and higher fidelity textures.
“Each mushroom letter, and often isolated elements of each mushroom letter, has an audio-reactive setup as well as a light-reactive setup,” noted Lapcheva. “This means that individual instruments and stems drive the behavior of the digital world. As the musicians and Björk themselves create the music, the individual mushrooms come alive to it.”
Logi directed the live performance, working with Björk and M/M (Paris), followed by FutureDeluxe’s CG design and motion direction team, who brought it to life. Each sequence, Lapcheva said, is designed to work in tandem with the edit, ensuring the cameras and lighting, combined with Björk’s performance, “do not create a false feeling of integration but retain the brutal collage aesthetic.”
The video takes viewers deeper and deeper into Björk’s world, transporting them into a complex ecosystem of audio-reactive CG. The performance and visuals function together as two parallel music videos on the same timeline, unified by the music and nocturnal earthy tones.
In a process involving Björk, Logi, M/M and FutureDeluxe, and the song itself, the mycological mutations - an intrinsic network of sound-reactive living beings - are driven by the audio expressions played by Björk and her musicians. In this way, noted Lapcheva, “the two parallel universes are in sync, bound by the music.”
“Creating the visual universe that runs parallel to Björk’s live performance was a joyful challenge – and the result of long collaborative discussions and reflections between Björk, Vidar, M/M, and us,” concluded Lapcheva. “A digital ecosystem all about soil, earth, rot, and rhythmically writhing fungi, is an exciting brief, not least because it allows us to embrace the beauty of the darker things people often shy away from. Crucially, we wanted to ensure that the resulting moving images form part of the Fossora world, as envisioned by Björk.”
Watch björk – fossora:
Source: FutureDeluxe
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
