Wiki
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Length
7:46
Moving on from her relationship with Matthew Barney, “Atom Dance” is about healing and being open, and how Björk’s friendships got her through the breakup. She enlists the help of ANOHNI, a good friend who previously appeared on Volta’s “The Dull Flame of Desire” and “My Juvenile”.
“Atom Dance” may be referencing the concept of quantum entanglement, AKA “spooky attachment at a distance”, where even two particles at great distances are still connected and impacting eachother. You spin one particle clockwise, the other will spin counterclockwise in tandem, even when they are separated.
Björk is expressing this concept in terms of her many relationships, with her friends and lovers, where even though they are separated, they are forever joined in an atom dance, always influencing each other.
In a talk for Red Bull Music Academy in 2017, Björk pointed out that she wrote “Atom Dance” addressing Vikivaki, an ancient roundabout that has been taking place around the whole Nordic region since the Middle Ages, and also getting inspired by Sufi poems.
And actually, funny you mention Vikivaki, because on Vulnicura a song called “Atom Dance” was my attempt to kind of address this in a very very roundabout way, because I was reading Sufi poems and being very obsessed with this kind of devotional Sufism. Then I was like, “How would I do this in Icelandic? We must’ve had this, but it was just suffocated by the rednecks”, or something. And then just finding it and looking for it, and actually that’s the one lyric on "Vulnicura" I co-wrote with someone, with my very good friend Oddný Eir who is a philosopher/author, and we talk a lot about stuff. We actually wrote that lyric together trying to make a Icelandic/Vikivaki/Sufi song and one of the reasons it’s in 5/4, it’s more cyclical, about turning in circles, and Vikivaki is actually turning in circles, which obviously the whirling dervishes do in Sufism.
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