Watch the Hypnotic New Music Video for Björk’s “Tabula Rasa”. Although the track was released back in 2017, the newly released video is visually stunning and signifies yet another Björk rebirth.
Beloved Icelandic musician Björk has returned with a trippy new music video for “Tabula Rasa”, a song from her 2017 album Utopia. Featuring visuals directed by digital artist Tobias Gremmler, Björk is seen as a floating, colorful flower-like humanoid figure, constantly shifting between expanding and contracting and sprouting petals, jerking itself inwards and outwards as it stays afloat.
The song’s title comes from the Latin phrase commonly translated as “clean slate”, which is interpreted as a theory that individuals are born without “built-in mental content”, therefore all knowledge comes from experiences or perceptions. Björk reflects this in the chorus: “Clean plate, tabula rasa for my children/Clean plate, not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers”. Perhaps she is trying to convey that the younger generations, being given a blank slate, must not repeat history’s mistakes.
The hypnotic music video released following the premiere of Björk’s new multi-media concert series and theatrical production Cornucopia in New York City, which the singer described as her “most elaborate stage concert yet”, incorporating elements of the acoustic and the digital encouraged by a bespoke team of collaborators. Will Hermes wrote, in a review of the show for Rolling Stone, that “For all the beauty on display, the production is gloriously angry the way Björk can be at her best, embodying a sort of punk-rock Valkyrian fury. And it’s telling that the show’s takeaway, and final word, comes not from Björk, but from 16-year-old Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg, speaking in an unprocessed video message against a backdrop of silence.”
The concert shows, being backed by tracks off of Utopia, saw Björk play the songs “Body Memory” and “Future Forever” live for the first time.
Humorously regarding the artist’s long and prolific career, one of the comments in the music video’s comment section reads: “I thought the Utopia era was over. She is a tricky one. She probably has the next album ready.”