Isn’t the world gorgeous through Sofie Birch-tinted glasses? Listening to “Sefirot Surfa,” a gentle, whimsical romp from Bivabippabualukka, has made the harsh and poorly maintained streets around my East London flat feel magical and new: What portals, it begs a listener to ask, could lie between those cracks in the pavement, or beneath that pile of refuse?
Lush and animated, Bivabippabualukka is an extraordinary break from convention in comparison to Birch’s previous releases, a series of ambient folk records that encouraged scholarly engagement with the minutiae of Birch’s compositional choices. 2025’s soundbath-like Hiraeth, for example, was hardly casual listening, a listening experience that would likely be impeded by the wrong environment. Bivabippabualukka, on the other hand, seems designed to enhance the everyday. It is lighthearted and sprawling—a record full of magical left-turns and strange detours that recalls Stereolab’s cosmopolitan dioramas if they were dropped in some ancient wood and left to be overtaken by the local flora and fauna. Encompassing jazz, bossa nova, field recordings, and verite folk, it’s Birch’s busiest record by a mile, but busy in the way that a forest could be considered busy—each fragment of autoharp or saxophone or unusual percussion feels totally in harmony with its surroundings, contributing equally to this charming world.
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Birch recorded Bivabippabualukka over the past few years with her brother Alfred Bundgaard, and she has described its playful, wondrous atmosphere as the result of “releasing deep traumas and healing wounds.” To say it feels unbridled would be an understatement: “Miarai” jangles along like a friend whose bag is loaded with trinkets and doo-dads, Birch’s incantations of witchcraft floating over the top of a gentle clattering of percussion. (I asked for a lyric sheet for Bivabippabualukka, and Stroom impresario Ziggy replied: “All lyrics are magic spells and made up language!”) Some songs feel like tributes to classic bossa nova: Opener “Juaduddanya” this record’s down-the-rabbit-hole moment, opens with calm horns and descends into wild, but gentle, prog, and “Husiana” recalls the Gilberto-indebted experiments of Sam Gendel’s Fresh Bread. But Birch just as often reaches into less expected sounds, as on minimalist experiment “Wanwu,” which is built around a bulbous synth sound not unlike something you’d hear on a Jessy Lanza record.
Birch has said that she “will still continue playing spiritual ambient music—this work is something else,” which makes sense given the radical departures of Bivabippabualukka. This album feels distinct in Birch’s catalog—if it has a forebear, it would be 2022’s floral Holotropica—but it also plays like a bridge into the mainstream, its dalliances with pop and jazz suggesting a looser, more expansive future for Birch. This embrace of more familiar forms hardly feels like a cop-out. Rather, it contextualizes her source of inspiration—after all, isn’t that what healing is all about? Waking up one day, walking outside and realizing that, actually, you’re part of the world, too?
