Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.07.2013, Blaðsíða 20

Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.07.2013, Blaðsíða 20
20The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 9 — 2013 Step into the Viking Age Experience Viking-Age Reykja­vík a­t the new Settlement Exhibition. The focus of the exhibition is a­n exca­va­ted longhouse site which da­tes from the 10th century ad. It includes relics of huma­n ha­bita­tion from a­bout 871, the oldest such site found in Icela­nd. Multimedia­ techniques bring Reykja­vík’s pa­st to life, providing visitors with insights into how people lived in the Viking Age, a­nd wha­t the Reykja­vík environment looked like to the first settlers. The exhibition a­nd museum shop a­re open da­ily 10–17 Aða­lstræti 16 101 Reykja­vík / Icela­nd Phone +(354) 411 6370 www.reykja­vikmuseum.is List of licenced Tour Operators and Travel Agencies on: visiticeland.com Licensing and registration of travel- related services The Icelandic Tourist Board issues licences to tour operators and travel agents, as well as issuing registration to booking services and information centres. Tour operators and travel agents are required to use a special logo approved by the Icelandic Tourist Board on all their advertisements and on their Internet website. Booking services and information centres are entitled to use a Tourist Board logo on all their material. The logos below are recognised by the Icelandic Tourist Board. EIGHT YEARS AGO Hooray! We turned ten this year. For a humble street rag like Grapevine, turning ten is a pretty big deal—we barely expected to make it to ten issues (and, indeed, all of our contemporaries Reykjavík's street rag market have long since bid farewell... miss u, Undirtónar!). To celebrate our decade of existence, we thought we'd get a little introspective and reprint some choice articles from the past that are for some reason significant, accompanied by commentary and even updates. Call it a "blast from the past" or "a look into the dark cauldron of time" if you want to—we call it fun. Thus, for ten issues, expect a page dedicated to a year of Grapevine's existence, starting one issue ago, with a look back into magical 2003. This issue is a look at 2005, our third year of ex- istence when Valur Gunnarsson and Bart Cameron were editors. The articles below are printed as they were printed then, typos and everything. I didn’t personally download your al- bum. I overheard someone listening to it and confiscated it. I swear. After we heard that you weren’t that upset over the fact that it was online. Jónsi: How does it sound when you down- load it? I haven’t downloaded it myself. Really high quality for a pirated re- cording. Jónsi: I like that better than if it were a crappy recording. We’ve spent all week dealing with Sigur Rós fans, honestly. I’ve been surprised by the international community behind your band. At how interested they are solely in the music, not in the personal- ity or the lifestyle of the members. The Sigur Rós website, for example, focuses only on types of keyboards. Jónsi: That’s how it should be. Though I never go to the website. I think it’s quite scary, actually, how everyone wants an explanation for everything. I never go. Is it scary even if they’re only discussing music? We had someone looking at the photo we had from the studio explain- ing that the keyboard is a Casio 87, ask- ing which song it might be on. Jónsi: Well that’s obviously wrong. It’s just nerdy, though I think it’s cute, actu- ally, when they’re asking about how we got the guitar sound, but then it gets scary beyond that. A lot of weird discussions go on. Regarding the music versus personal, there is an aspect I liked about Sigur Rós and the coverage in Iceland. When The Grapevine went to your studio last year, even though you and I had met be- fore, we discussed nothing personal at all—a Sigur Rós interview used to just be a reminder that you should be con- tent with the CD. But then this week, in Iceland, I’ve been seeing your personal life in the media. All about who you’re dating and who got married. Jónsi: I know, I think it’s fucking ridicu- lous. I think it’s because of the website. The web designer put it up for news, but then Fréttablaðið just took it and printed it. It makes everything weird for us. You’d rather be left alone when you’re at home. Jónsi: Yes, but we can’t get frustrated about this. That’s just the way journalism is. We just leave it alone. That said, it’s hard for journalists to cover Sigur Rós. I’ve been thinking about this: with rock or folk music, you have lyrics and patterns that interact with journalists as much as fans, as op- posed to say jazz and classical music, which doesn’t directly transfer into print. Plus, Sigur Rós doesn’t react with journalists. There’s an interesting pres- sure when we just have to review music like its music, not like it’s somebody’s article. But you’re really fucking with rock journalists when you put out an album that considers influences and styles out- side of our small space of known mate- rial. Jónsi: Especially with the brackets album. That was so hard for them. No titles, no lyrics. Nothing for them to hold on to. When they got it and they realized there were no titles and you just had to listen, it was too much for them, I think. And they talked more about that than the music. And I think when the journalists are not being fed everything then they get a little scared. But you sympathize with that, I imag- ine. A lot of musicians in Iceland have written or commented on local music in addition to performing. Are you one of them? Jónsi: No. I think it’s scary to analyze music too much. There should be a certain amount of magic that shouldn’t be thought about too much. It should happen natu- rally. I think that’s always the best thing. Talking about the album, Takk. Can we begin with the overall organization? How it works together. I noticed songs blended together, it felt like a complete symphony more than a collection of tracks. Jónsi: It was not organized: there are many songs, which connect with each other. The order just came along that way. Of course number 11 had to be number 11. And track 3 and 4 are looped. And they’re actually made from a loop from Ágætis Byrjun, a reverse loop of track 7. So it’s a lot of recycling going on. I think it’d be fun to take one song and try to sample something from that, then sample some- thing from that. And make something from that. It would be fun. Do you want to know something about the songs or something? Anything you want to tell. The song that most fascinates me is Lest, track 5. The composition, the mixture of beats. The polka. Jónsi: That was funny. We got a celeste, do you know the instrument? No, I honestly hardly knew any of the instruments at your studio. Jónsi: A celeste is like a small upright pia- no. There’s a picture of it here (in issue 12 of The Grapevine), this is Björk’s celeste. It sounds a lot like a glockenspiel. But it is played like a piano. Ah ha. This explains a lot. Jónsi: It’s really a beautiful instrument. We got that on loan from Björk. And we got a vibraphone that we bought at a flea market in New York. When you get toys like this you start to write differently. Then we started playing different instru- ments. It keeps us awake and happy. So this song was written right when we got the celeste. The whole composition? With that many layers and change-ups. I figured it was a long project. What was Orri just going crazy with drum beats or something? There’s a waltz in that one, too. Jónsi: It kind of happens like this a lot. This is actually two songs put together. We wrote the first part then the second. We wrote it like that and then we found that it really worked together. A lot of our music is like that. Nice ac- cidents. Accidents that really work well. Kind of accidental art. We changed a lot on this song. In the first part, I play piano, Orri played vibra- phone and Kjartan played celeste, and, in the second part, I play the vibraphone, Orri plays the celeste and Kjartan plays the piano. But it’s really fun though. So when we hear things like the thun- dering basslines, we can’t assume it’s Georg. Jónsi: You know it’s him. He plays so massive. I really like the bass sounds—he has a signature sound. Do you have any favourite tracks on this album? Jónsi: Right now my favourites are tracks 3 and 4. These are studio songs, songs we found by accident and just played around with. (Reading from The Grapevine) “Also we developed a sneaking suspicion that track 4 may present a reversal from track 3,” já, that’s exactly what it is. It’s just backwards. One good guess. The main advantage to doing early reviews is that it will be out of print before the album comes out. Everything I got wrong I’ll say “I was right, you just aren’t remembering cor- rectly.” But you prefer composing in a studio as opposed to live. Jónsi: Já. Most was written in the studio. Gong was the only complete song before we went in. Glósóli (track 2) was the first song we wrote for the album, and then a lot of the others are just us playing. How are you going to prepare for the reaction to this? I’m thinking it will be quite a different critical response than for the bracket album. Jónsi: This is definitely more accessible. The bracket album was a lot heavier. When we did this album we wanted to have more fun. For the other album we’d been touring with the songs for so long before we went to record them. So it was very hard to be creative. But for this the songs were fresh. And I think we silently agreed that we were tired of the heaviness. Because we aren’t very heavy, we’re just a bunch of silly guys. Definitely not serious. I think we just wanted to have fun. (Looks closely at The Grapevine.) Heh heh heh. You wrote [regarding track 6, Sæglópir] “Opens with a reverb piano part strangely reminiscent of 90s metal ballads” that is very true I think. So you’re not pissed? Jónsi: Does it get many beers? Oh shit. You read our paper. It would get six beers, I think. One thing that I find especially commendable, something that is hard to cover, is how much pressure this album had on it. You really had a lot of magazines and websites wondering, especially when movies like Life Aquatic were featuring the old material. Jónsi: I just wasn’t listening to them. Es- pecially after the brackets album. We had so many people saying for that album can they follow Ágætis Byrjun again, and we just never listened to them. The fans who emailed us wanted to know what track the toy piano featured in our photo of your studio is on. Jónsi: It’s on track 5, your favourite song. Yeah, okay I’m a dork for liking polkas. But if you were going to make a sequel to The Triplets of Belleville, I really think that could be the soundtrack—it’s such a blend of energy and melancholy. Jónsi: (laughing) Yes, it would fit very well in there. Read the rest of this interview at www.grapevine.is in Issue 13, 2005. One of the most exciting articles we printed in 2005 was from an Iraq War veteran explaining how Sigur Rós helped him keep his soul during the war. I thought that said a lot about the power of art. The Sigur Rós interviews were enormous for us during my time. They didn't have to reach out to us, but they did. My first attempt to interview them was so bad that I used it as a lesson and developed a ‘How not to interview musicians’ based on my own conduct. This cover story, when they released ‘Takk’ and gave us an enormous interview and let us shoot them at the small restaurant that was the site of their first Reykjavík concert, was a vindication. There are thousands of crappy Sigur Rós interviews, but I believe we have one of the few good ones. – Bart Cameron
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