Björk and Rosalía have joined forces to launch highly effective new single ‘Oral’. Produced by the artists alongside Sega Bodega, ‘Oral’ marks the primary collaboration between Björk and Rosalía. It goals to make clear the alarming cruelty, and extreme environmental and ecological penalties of open-pen ocean salmon farming in Björk’s native nation, Iceland.
‘Oral’ dates again 20 years – first written by Björk between 1997’s Homogenic and 2001’s Vespertine, the observe was misplaced to her archives after feeling prefer it wasn’t the suitable match for an album. Björk rediscovered the track after being reminded of its identify while on tour in Australia in March 2023, the identical month a report was launched in regards to the devastating impression of poorly regulated, Norwegian-owned business salmon farming operations on Iceland’s native ecosystems.
After deeply resonating with the trigger, and as a passionate campaigner and protester for a lot of her life, Björk enlisted Rosalía to assist carry the track to life and in flip increase consciousness of the difficulty. The merciless follow of open-pen farming, launched to Iceland after Norwegian businessmen started buying fish farms within the nation’s fjords, entails intensively farming fish by penning them into open water nets which can be anchored in pure waterways, the place the fish are saved enclosed till they attain marketable dimension. This accelerates the fish’s improvement and in lots of circumstances creates genetic mutations within the salmon’s DNA, in addition to being a breeding floor for quite a lot of parasites and ailments. The trade in Iceland has grown tenfold since 2014, producing beneath 4,000 tones to 45,000 in 2021, with it now estimated that the annual manufacturing could possibly be as much as 106,500 tonnes. Iceland has the biggest untouched pure space in Europe, and the waste and air pollution related to open-pen farming threatens to completely injury its total ocean ecology. Lack of regulation and the trade being largely unsupervised has additionally meant that hundreds of those genetically altered, diseased salmon repeatedly escape the pens and swim upriver to Iceland’s highlands, the place devastating genetic mixing happens and endangers the way forward for Iceland’s wild salmon inhabitants.
We wish to thank visible artist Carlota Guerrero and government producer Zico Choose, of Blur & ProdCo, for making a video artwork piece to associate with this track and assist increase consciousness of the cruelty, and extreme environmental and ecological penalties of open-pen ocean salmon farming in Björk’s native nation, Iceland. Carlota got here up with the idea and executed the video, exploring the usage of AI expertise and embracing the glitches blurring the road between actuality and virtuality while difficult the notions of identification. All through the piece, feminine rage is explored via Bjork’s and Rosalía’s avatars. They aren't preventing one another; they're coaching collectively to combat the true and greater enemy.
