Björk Threw A Rave Under A Bridge With Shygirl, Eartheater & More

The memes about Björk’s Brooklyn DJ set were being made before it’d even happened. According to the posts, the event was “Brooklyn’s Met Gala,” or the “popper user’s Coachella.” At 9 p.m. on May 10, when I sidled up to the line under Brooklyn’s Kosciusko bridge, I got my first taste of how chaotic the scene would be when a visibly wasted Williamsburg bro bumped me to ask if I “was alone too,” blowing me a kiss when I left to pick up my ticket at will call. Past security, the crowd was even less readable: suited Gen Xers, salmon-shorted Wall Street-ers, and leotard-strapped ravers mingled shoulder-to-shoulder, smoking cigs and sipping beer. It was 50 degrees and drizzling, but everyone had converged to catch something that felt like spotting a rare Pokémon in the wild.

A visit to the bathrooms lets me know I’d actually arrived late. A breathless 30-something, who calls Björk “mother” and someone who’s “gotten me through so much in my life,” tells me the musician had already come out once to play an “interesting set” of songs she couldn’t recognize except for a Megan Thee Stallion cut. She’d now ceded the stage to her hand-picked slate of openers: indie artist Mun Sing, electronic musician Jlin, and Eartheater, who shouts things like “imagination” and “believe” into a mic over discombobulated cyborg techno. Shygirl gets the crowd jumping with cuts like “4eva,” and the Challengers soundtrack; I watch a man in front of me pull out a very tiny spoon that’s immediately spotted by his friend, who darts to his side.

At 11:30 p.m. on the dot, Björk skips out in a Noir Kei Ninomiya and James Merry mask-dress ensemble that makes her look like a half-deity and half-fantastical creature. She proceeds to kick off an hour of truly incomprehensible rave music, with Bhangra-pop cutting into baile funk, cutting into Georgian hymns, cutting into what I yell to my friend as “cutlery music.” It doesn’t even seem like she has a deck, just her laptop which she’s barely looking at, instead choosing to dance facing the VIP section, as if willing the transitions through telekinesis. If I hadn’t eventually seen her tapping at its keys, I would’ve believed there was some sorcery at play, because who else could’ve kept a crowd dancing through a literal laugh track.

Later, I learn that the same night the aurora borealis was visible over New York City, and many people thought they’d caught a sight of it through the clouds. In the end, the purple smear turned out to just be a reflection of Björk’s stage lights in the sky.