Björk chose Los Angeles and San Francisco as the only American stops to present her long-anticipated Cornucopia tour, which first started in 2019. The local leg began at the Chase Center on Saturday, with a second date to come Tue/8.
Her 19-song performance included most of the songs from her last album, 2017’s Utopia, plus vividly reimagined arrangements of “Venus As a Boy” (from 1993’s Debut), “Isobel” (from 1995’s Post), “Hidden Place” and “Pagan Poetry” (both from 2001’s Vespertine). Bringing Björk’s visions to life were collaborators like Tonality, a choral group from LA; Viibra, her all-woman Icelandic flute septet; and serpentwithfeet, an incredible singer and artist from New York who appeared onstage to sing “Blissing Me” with her. Acoustics and electronics effortlessly intertwined—no guitars, but plenty of water drums and harp instead.
She wore one exquisitely strapped, poofed and tall booted outfit for most of the night, favoring a mask over her eyes as she has in performances for the last several years. Her sheer vocal power filled the arena and kept the crowd arrested in a rare and polite awe. A fringed curtain was used to add layers to the visual projections, which used rich blues, greens, pinks and purples to create electro-nature imagery. People around me were crying at the gorgeousness of it all.
Two video sequences in Cornucopia articulated Björk’s views on climate action. The first used a scrolling text message to suggest new realms of thinking: “We have to imagine something that doesn’t exist… let’s imagine a world where nature and technology collaborate and make a song about it, a musical mockup, and then move into it.”
Later, a video from 19-year-old Swedish climate activist/rock star Greta Thunberg played while Björk gave us a costume change into an antennaed, leafy, and floral feature creature.
“Know that you are never too small to make a difference,” Thunberg said. “If a few kids can make headlines all over the world just by not going to school, imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be…
“The adults are not mature enough to tell it like it is; even that burden is left to us children,” she continued. “But I don’t care about being unpopular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.”
Thunberg’s interlude preceded a two-song encore (“Future Forever” from Utopia and “Notget” from 2015’s Vulnicura) and continues the conversation presented in Björk’s last Bay Area appearance in 2013 inside the historic Craneway Pavilion in Richmond. That live performance, in support of 2011’s Biophilia album, began with a recording from the distinguished English natural historian Sir David Attenborough. She always sings the body electric to show how everything is connected.
“I like extremes, I guess,” Björk told me in an interview conducted at the Empire Diner in New York City in 2001. “Very raw acoustic things and then very pure electronic beats. To me, electricity comes from nature. Like acupuncture — something several thousand years old triggers the electricity that’s inside us within our nervous system.”
“I think it’s important to stay on your toes and keep discovering what music is,” she said three years later while walking across a canal in Venice, Italy and talking to me in San Francisco via a mobile phone. “Music isn’t one thing — it isn’t a harp and it isn’t a virgin singing somewhere. Or it isn’t a rock band. It’s not about the circumstances or the setup, it’s about the heart of the music, and it’s important that people don’t forget that.”
I’ve been writing about Björk since we were both in our 20s and was blessed with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview her not just once, but three times in order to write magazine cover stories. I’ve caught most of her post-Sugarcubes local appearances, including a guest spot with UK techno heroes 808 State at the legendary Club DV8 in San Francisco in 1991, and have traveled to see many of her Stateside appearances, including an abandoned post office DJ gig in Houston in 2016.
These experiences gave me overall support and confidence as a music chronicler and are among the most important of my career, so if you’re reading, thank you for all of your work and for what you mean to me, Björk! You’re right, it was worth the risk to see Cornucopia, as you discussed with the Chronicle’s Aidin Vaziri before the show.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to attend beforehand. I had been skittish about going to such a large indoor event and had already lost money by not using tickets to see the first Cornucopia performances at the Shrine in Los Angeles. However, the audience was seated, calmly rapt, and encouraged to put their phones away, so it didn’t feel crazy to be in such a big venue.
One handy tip I learned that may be useful at least for ballers to know is that if you make reservations to eat at Tyler Florence’s exquisite new Miller & Lux restaurant beforehand, you can enter the venue directly from a back door and avoid all the crowds entering the Chase Center. That meant forgoing my usual concert pastime of people-watching, but that was the price for baby-stepping back to the world of big concerts.
Aside from the man in my row who apparently still hasn’t gotten the memo that masks are supposed to go over his dick-nose, the Chase Center and its breezy HEPA-filtered air felt safe enough to me. If you’ve been on the fence about catching the second Cornucopia performance at Chase Center on Tue/8, consider this a nudge from the nosebleeds to check it out.
