Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Page 32

THE NUMBER 1 MUSIC STORE
IN EUROPE ACCORDING TO
LONELY PLANET
SKÓLAVÖRÐUSTÍG 15, 101 REYKJAVÍK AND HARPA CONCERT HALL
Lighthouse Recordings
Amiina release a new album
María recalls setting up at the base of the
lighthouse while visitors were scattered up six
flights of stairs all the way to the top. Thanks
to the natural acoustics in the building, the
music Amiina performed that day filled the
whole space and was as clear on the ground
floor of the lighthouse as at the top. At the end
of the show, a father with two young boys ap-
proached the band. He had been standing at
the very top of the lighthouse for the whole
set. “I felt this strange feeling that the light-
house was producing music instead of light,”
María recalls him saying. “I felt like the mu-
sic came from down there, up to the lens, and
then [was projected] out over the sea.”
Inspired by this experience and poised for
big changes within the band, Amiina set off,
accompanied by a photographer, one spouse,
one newborn baby and another about to be
born, playing an intimate series of live shows
in lighthouses around Iceland. Now, four
years, two new members, and one album lat-
er, Amiina is releasing ‘The Lighthouse Proj-
ect,’ a collection of new live recordings of the
songs played on that tour. “It is like a memo-
ry,” María says. “A photo album that you take
out and flip through.”
A delicate balance
Amiina was founded by Edda Rún Ólafsdót-
tir, Hildur Ársælsdóttir, María Huld Markan
Sigfúsdóttir and Sólrún Sumarliðadóttir in the
late 1990s as a string quartet with multi-lay-
ered and richly inventive instrumentation; in
addition to the aforementioned saws, glasses,
and string instruments, their compositions
make use of xylophones, bells, synthesizers,
kalimbas, and all manner of harps, among
other things. There is an incredible generos-
ity in their music—every sound, from the fo-
cal melody to the smallest chime, is given
equal weight and importance. “We’ve always
worked as though everyone had one fourth of
a cake and then we put it together as a whole,”
Maria says.
It is, of course, a difficult balance to main-
tain, especially now that Amiina is a sextet,
having gained drummer Magnús Tryggvason
Eliassen and electronic musician Kippi Kani-
nus in 2009. But the group has certainly ben-
efitted from this “broader sonic palette,” not
least during their live performances. “When
you are performing, it is really nice to have
power and volume on stage. When the four of
us were touring together we sometimes felt
exhausted,” María says. “We had been play-
ing all these delicate things, we felt out of
breath from all the tiptoeing. So we really like
the other side to turn the volume up.”
Amiina’s compositions and arrangements
develop collaboratively, often with members
splitting up into pairs or small groups to work
on song ideas together before presenting
them to the rest of the band. “Usually we don’t
really talk about what we are going to do. We
just do it,” María says, “and we are always
amazed, the outcome is always independent
from us.”
Reacting in the now
There are a few new singles on ‘The Light-
house Project,’ but overall, the album is an op-
portunity for Amiina to revisit familiar songs
from their debut album ‘Kurr.’ When asked
why the band has chosen to revisit these songs
and this project now, María reflects that the
three years that have passed since the original
lighthouse tour have given everyone involved
the necessary perspective to get the most out
of the material. “When we started listening to
the recordings, we decided that this was too
good to leave behind,” she says, sometimes
you have to have some distance to see where
the good parts and the not so good parts are.”
The band made several live recordings of
each song on the album, with all of the mem-
bers recording their instrumentation in the
same take instead of separately, as is often the
case with studio albums. This live approach
makes it more musical, María says. “You have
to react in the now to what’s happening.” The
goal, of course, was to retain the intimacy of
the original performances, to give the listener
the feeling that they were hearing the set “in
someone’s living room.”
Amiina is excited about releasing ‘The
Lighthouse Project,’ their first album in three
years, but they aren’t by any means slowing
down with their other projects. The band will
be spending the next year or so working on
their next studio album, and will also be per-
forming at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a music
festival held at the former NATO base in Kefla-
vík in June. They have been working on clas-
sical recordings with an American company,
which is designing an app dedicated to the
music of the composer Bach. Amiina has also
been invited to the Cork Opera House in Ire-
land to collaborate with sixth grade students
on musical interpretations of Amiina’s music
using the Indonesian gamelan. This project
has cleverly been dubbed “Gamiina.” More-
over, each member of Amiina has their own
family life and independent projects—some
musical, some not—which they cultivate out-
side of their work as a band.
“That’s kind of our world now,” María says.
It is a difficult balance, but Amiina is just one
element of all of our lives. It doesn’t need to
be the main thing; it doesn’t need to dominate
us. It’s something that is always there and we
can come in and out of. We don’t have any
expectations of Amiina growing bigger and
more famous. We don’t need that, and the
music doesn’t ask for it. It’s just rolling there,
steadily.” - Larissa Kyzer
MusicAmiina’s new album ‘The Lighthouse Project’ comes out on June 6, the day this paper hits the streets.
“We knew that the
people there knew
nothing about us
and were probably
really surprised
to see us banging
saws and playing
glasses.”
In 2009, the founding members of the eclectic, multi-instrumental band Amiina
were invited to play a concert in a lighthouse on the Reykjanes peninsula for an
unsuspecting audience, mostly parents and children who were there for a family
festival over the weekend. “It was a funny moment for us,” violinist María Huld
Markan Sigfúsdóttir says. “We knew that the people there knew nothing about us
and were probably really surprised to see us banging saws and playing glasses.”
INTER
VIEW
32The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 7 — 2013
Photo: Alisa Kalyanova