If there’s one thing Björk is known for aside from her weird music and weird outfits, it’s combining those two things in her weird music videos. Her new album Utopia has already produced some strange visuals, and her clip for “Arisen My Senses” is no different. The video, which she shared via file hosting service WeTransfer, chronicles Björk’s emergence from a semi-translucent and alien-looking external womb that has two writhing tongues sticking out of it. She comes out as a fairy-like creature, which seems at least in the same genus as the one on her Utopia album cover.
The video was created by Björk, Arca, Jesse Kanda, and James Merry, and Björk wrote on Twitter, “I am incredibly honored to have gone on this spectacular trip with [Kanda], [Arca] and James Merry, to get together to express from our mutual melting pot the music and the visuals to this.” Kanda says that the clip was inspired by a “giant unidentified creature [that] washed up in Indonesia”:
“A couple of years ago, this giant unidentified creature washed up in Indonesia. It was this gorgeous mound of white skin and fat and flesh in a pool of blood on a sunny beach. That really moved me – like total awe. It was the combination of something so catastrophic being so beautiful at the same time, the mystery and fantasy of what it actually was, and the connection to the grander ecological context.
Björk had been playing a video of leopard slugs mating at her concerts, so I knew she and I both loved that as an image. And another kind of obsession I keep coming back to is amniotic sacks, and making sculptural work that depicts birth and death. But this is the first time I did birth, death and mating at the same time.”
Watch the video and read more about its creation here.
