Reykjavík Grapevine - 12.04.2019, Blaðsíða 17

17 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 05— 2019
would work. It’s hard to explain with words. A whole
new world opened up to me.”
ORIGIN STORIES
The two musicians have arrived at the collaboration
via very different paths. Skúli is a veteran musician
with a long history of collaboration. His father was
an amateur musician, giving him an early interest in
records and musical instruments.
“I became interested in the music he was playing
in the house,” he recalls. “I sang in choirs as a kid, and
then in the 80s I was in bands. I picked up the bass
because my father had one. There was no more to the
decision than that.”
He found calm and solace in music from the start.
“I really enjoyed the solitary aspect of practicing an
instrument,” he says. “At that time in Iceland, the
music scene was quite small. As soon as I was able
to play, I fairly quickly became a professional musi-
cian—which is fairly bizarre, looking back. I didn’t
know much.”
Soon enough, the young bassist’s talents were
in demand. He played on 30 different records, and
performed live jazz four nights a week with pianist
Guðmundur Ingólfsson. He also mingled with the
vibrant and burgeoning DIY scene. “I was fascinated
by Þeyr, and the beginning of things that are still
going on, like Bad Taste Records and The Sugarcubes,
which became Björk, Sigur Rós and múm—the foun-
dation of creative Icelandic music. There was a mani-
festo of ‘It doesn’t matter what you know, but what
you do,’ and a lot of crossover with artists and writ-
ers. It was far from the world of the symphony—it
was the idea that anyone can make music.”
COMMUNITY IS EVERYTHING
Skúli’s true love, however, was the wave of free jazz
coming from the US. Musicians like Ornette Cole-
man, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He enrolled at
the home of free jazz, at the time—Berklee College
of Music. There he was exposed to a milieu of like-
minded musicians who helped set the foundations of
his outlook.
“I realised quickly that, in music and music-
related activity, community is everything,” he says.
“It’s having a conversation with other musicians
and figuring out what to do through that conversa-
tion. Everybody is trying to understand something
that nobody really understands. It’s not just that you
write something, and have someone play it—it’s the
product of a community. And collaboration is a form
of listening—it’s a conversation where that comes
to the foreground.”
THE WIDE WORLD
Like many of his contemporaries, Skúli
migrated to New York City as a postgrad.
He became involved in the formative stages
of Blonde Redhead, which in turn led to
a connection with John Lurie. “He intro-
duced me to a lot of people in New York,”
says Skúli. “It was an important meeting.”
To stay in the US, Skúli realised he’d need
a dayjob. A fortuitous series of events led
to a place in the band of guitarist Allan
Holdsworth—a legendary figure in the jazz
fusion scene of the time. “It was a solution
for me in many ways,” Skúli explains, “to
be able to stay in the country and to learn
from a master musician.”
He went for an audition in LA, and a
week later he was on the road, touring all
over the world. The collaboration proved
to be an invaluable learning experience. “I
was very interested in how people develop
a unique voice,” he says. “Very few people
can do that, but Allan did. I wanted to learn
about the process—how do you get to that
point where you play one note and every-
body knows it’s you?”
NEEDING AN ADDRESS
After several years of touring, Skúli started to transi-
tion back into working with various colleagues he’d
met along the way. His interest in cross-disciplinary,
artistic, genre-bending music led him to collaborate
with people like Anthony Burr, Ryuichi Sakamoto
and Laurie Anderson. “Working with Laurie was
an amazing opportunity that involved all of those
aspects—music, spoken word, film, theatre, and
communicating in a creative way, on a high level,”
says Skúli. “The projects were on a big scale, but the
work itself was very playful and creative.”
He also started thinking about venues as spaces
for collaboration. “I became interested in why music
was always evolving in the city, and realised that, at
any particular moment, there were a couple of small
spaces where all the creativity happened, with music
every night, different disciplines, different audi-
ences, and social interactions. I started to realise
that, for me, this is the most important part of music
evolving in an urban environment.”
After planting some seeds in Iceland with his
‘Sería’ album—which was performed as an ensemble
that included Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hildur Guðnadót-
tir, Hilmar Jensson, and Skúli’s future partner Ólöf
Arnalds, opening doors for future collaborations—he
finally moved back to Iceland after 25 years away.
“I realised that in Iceland there were not that many
places for spontaneous performances,” says Skúli.
He and Ólöf started looking around for a space. “We
met Bjarni Gaukur, who was just returned to Iceland
and was interested in starting something with music
culture. And that became Mengi, which has been a
big part of my life in Iceland.” He smiles, self-effacing
as always. “The scene was already happening. It just
needed an address.”
UNIFIED SOUND
Fittingly, Bára and Skúli’s album will come out via the
Mengi label. The two have performed together several
times at the Mengi space, improvising and develop-
ing their music before rapt and respectful audiences.
“People were surprised about our collaboration at
first, but we weren’t,” says Bára. “Skúli would like to do
more dynamic stuff on his instrument than is possi-
ble—and now we can do that together. Even though
both of our instruments are basses, they are very
different. The double bass is more physical—you need
to be physical to get the stuff out of it that you need to.”
Bára finds collaboration and group performance
to be beneficial to life as a musician. “I like work-
ing with other people generally,” she says. “If you’re
composing alone, it can be quite a lonely thing. And
I like that—but it’s easy to get lost in it. It keeps you
healthy to perform, in some sense. You can very easily
get lost in something egocentric if you are always
alone. It can make you unwilling to compromise or
take in other influences.”
DIGGING DEEPER
The collaboration with Skúli strikes a rare note of
instinctive mutual understanding. “We have a lot
in common,” says Bára. “Our ideas in general—in
music, and in life—are quite the same. This is a
unified sound work that we have made together. To
do that, you need to have something of the same
origin, maybe. Most of the time you’re working with
very different perspectives, which is also amazing.
But this is a little more rare.”
“It’s really all about the tendency to dig into some-
thing,” she finishes. “We both seem to have that
tendency to dig deeper into what’s happening. It’s like
a tunnel and you’re seeing how far you can get with a
sound. It’s a lot about how deep you dare to dig… and
then, finding the right solution to get out of these
places. It can be boring when everything is solved in a
shimmering way and you can see the sunlight again.
So we try to find different directions to find our way
down, and up again.”
THE ENERGY BEHIND
When asked to describe Bára’s sound, Skúli hesitates,
seeking the right words. “There are many ways to
describe music, like ‘beautiful’ or ‘aggressive’—but
to me the most beautiful thing in music is when you
hear individuality,” he says, slowly. “On the surface,
music might appear to be dark, or strange, but at the
same time it’s incredibly beautiful; there’s some kind
of attitude behind it that’s beautiful. I like that idea of
music, to ask: ‘What is the energy behind it?’”
Skúli namechecks Italian composer Scelsi and
Romanian composer Dumitrescu as reference
points for Bára’s work. “They focus on texture and
the sound of the instrument, instead of being stuck
inside of tonality and scales—almost like putting
a microscope on a note, and inside you see harmo-
nies and melodies,” he explains. “When Bára plays
one note, there are harmonies and melodies inside
that note. She’s a master of that. And to me that’s
incredibly moving.”
SKIES AND HEAVENS
The album is, when we speak, in the final stages
of mixing and mastering. A long-form quadruple
album, it was culled from over four hours of impro-
vised sessions. The working title is ‘Caeli,’ the Latin
word for “skies” or “heavens.”
“I felt like this music was related to something
ritual, or religious,” says Bára. “I’m not religious—or,
maybe we all are in a way, but I don’t believe in one reli-
gion. This magic I experienced—something I hadn’t
witnessed before—becomes religious, or spiritual.
The song titles are in English, Latin, Icelandic, and
Italian, and a lot of them are related to the heavens.”
A DANGEROUS ACTIVITY
But with musicians so ready to adapt, listen, and
improvise, the title may well change before the
album’s release.
“When I was in New York, I fell in love with the
idea of music as a dangerous activity, where you don’t
know what’s going to happen,” says Skúli. “That’s what
I found in improvised music. Then I’d go to a heav-
ily produced show, with a climax in the right place
and the light came up—but it had no impact. I didn’t
feel like I was there, and I didn’t feel the perform-
ers were there—because the structure had taken
over. There was no witnessing something happen-
ing in the moment. And that’s the ultimate beauty of
live music.”
“I think we both like to work in music without
borders, free of genre,” finishes Bára. “That’s why I
like the idea of the skies. It’s like an unlimited area,
and you don’t know where it ends.”
“We both have a
tendency to dig deeper
into what’s happening.
It’s like a tunnel, and
you’re seeing how far you
can get with a sound.”