Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.06.2016, Qupperneq 43

Music 43The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 8 — 2016
Lækjargata 4 | 101 Reykjavík | Sími 55 10 100 | jomfruin.is
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The dark, huddled masses pray
like slaves to the pale machine-
god of the beat. Pixelated shadow
armies slowly march towards us
in the distance as bright, flicker-
ing lights obscure the darkness
from the unholy glow of a dangling
apple. A low, glitchy bass shudders,
punctuating each flailing arm with
the arrythmic thumps of a broken
pacemaker. The horde has begun to
dance at the foot of ULTRAORTHO-
DOX’s throne; the nightmare fac-
tory is packed to the rafters.
ULTRAORTHODOX is one of two
aliases of Arnar Már Ólafsson, an
electronic artist and founder of
the label (and genre) Bass Noir. “I
was once applying for a festival,
and the organisers wanted to know
which genre I would be playing,”
Arnar explains. “I thought, ‘Fuck, I
have no idea.’ Rather than a really
long description like ‘down-tem-
po… sluggish… hip-hop…electro…
bass?’, I came up with Bass Noir. It
fit the music.”
Stalinist propaganda
His new release, ‘Alternative His-
tory, Vol.1’, is more rhythmic than
his abstract, explorative debut, ‘Vi-
tal Organs’. “I don’t want to make
the same style of music twice,” ex-
plains Arnar. “I wanted to make an
album that was more straight-out
aggressive, less droning, less atmo-
spheric—straight to the point. I’ve
already started working on new
material, but it’s still kind of in the
brainstorming phase. I think it will
be different from both albums.”
With the new record, Arnar has
also introduced a video element
to his live shows. A distorted, pix-
elated projection of a brainwashed
military hell marches across the
screen—his first attempt at video
editing, and the first hint at what
the album is about.
“I did some editing of old videos
because I felt it would elevate the
music to have this sort of slow-
motion, black and white Stalinist
propaganda in the background,”
says Arnar. But he didn’t want the
visuals to be too easy to make out,
because “it would kind of kill the
mystery.”
“So, basically, the
Commies won?”
Who are these soldiers? What does
the propaganda mean? As nomi-
nally static notions of sound and
time begin to break down during
ULTRAORTHODOX’s live sets, the
concept behind his alternative his-
tory becomes increasingly intrigu-
ing. The album cover is adorned
with a photo of Stalin, Roosevelt,
and Churchill at the Potsdam Con-
ference at the end of WWII, and
song titles like “Increasing The
Paranormal Research Budget” and
“Global Utopian Socialist State”
hint at an alternate post-Cold War
timeline.
On the one hand, this is the mu-
sic of the future—not only does it
sound like it belongs to a different
time, but it speaks to our collective
insecurities about the world we live
in, what’s to come, and what could
have been. On the other hand, UL-
TRAORTHODOX is actively rewrit-
ing history.
“You can always imagine what
could’ve been if events had played
out differently,” Arnar says. “We
live in the post-Cold War world
where capitalism obviously won.
Now we have global capitalism,
and the destruction of the planet.
The banking system has kind of
become a superstate. But what if
the Soviets had won the hearts and
minds of the people, and all those
proxy wars? What would have been
then? Nobody knows—so you just
have to make music about it, and
wonder.”
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“We live in the post-Cold War world where
capitalism obviously won. But what if the Soviets
had won the hearts and minds of the people, and
all those proxy wars?”
Standing At The
End Of History With
ULTRAORTHODOX
Words CIARÁN DALY