Björk’s November 27 release revisits an evening in Reykjavík when fifty singers joined her at Harpa Concert Hall. Björk Orkestral with the Hamrahlíð Choir is coming on LP, CD, Blu-ray and DVD, with a running order of eleven songs from the October 24, 2021 performance.
The programme starts with “Show Me Forgiveness” and “Pleasure Is All Mine”. “Hidden Place”, “Cosmogony” and “Unravel” appear further down the list; “Where Is the Line” leads into the closing “New World”. Most of the material comes from Medúlla, released in 2004, but this is a later performance with its own musicians and arrangements.
Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir conducted the choir, while Bergur Þórisson served as musical director and played organ and electronics. A listener drawn to Medúlla’s emphasis on voices has a good reason to be curious about that combination. There are fifty singers to work with here, as well as sounds that no singer has to produce. The performance can distribute a familiar composition differently without needing to introduce a new song.
The choir evening at Harpa
Orkestral was bigger than this one show. Four concerts at Harpa involved more than a hundred Icelandic musicians across the series. The release title can easily make the project sound like one large ensemble, but the recording date narrows it to this particular group. Keep October 24 in mind if you are looking for an arrangement heard at one of the other evenings.
Björk’s public message about the release puts the emphasis on rehearsal. She describes learning how to balance voices and electronics physically in a live space, and revisiting older songs whose performance she had wanted to develop. That is a more revealing starting point than treating a live album simply as a souvenir. The work here concerns how existing songs can be performed again.
The partnership had already produced “Body Memory” on 2017’s Utopia. The choir also appeared in the Cornucopia shows at The Shed in New York in 2019. Harpa came two years after those New York performances, and the physical release now arrives a little over five years after Harpa.
The official shop gives November 27 as the pre-order shipping date, so delivery will need time beyond that. Black vinyl is listed along with the three other formats. Read the individual listing for the edition you want before assuming that audio and screen versions carry identical extras.
That is also the question behind our Back to the Beginning edition comparison: a concert can leave several different records behind. Here the date, the choir and the eleven-song sequence tell buyers which performance they are taking home.
