Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.05.2019, Síða 30

Music
Marteinn is mellow yellow
Weightless World
Marteinn Sindri’s light work of many hands
Words: Rex Beckett Photo: Jenny Hviding
Album
Marteinn Sindri’s debut album ‘Atlas’
comes out digitally on May 16th and
on physical formats in September
In Greek mythology, the god Atlas
carries the weight of the world on
his shoulders. For Marteinn Sin-
dri’s debut album ‘Atlas’, the cre-
ation involved lifting the weight
away and engaging in a deeply col-
laborative process.
With a 20-year background
playing classical piano, singing in
choirs and a career in radio, the
singer-songwriter and compos-
er came to find his own voice and
write his first album thanks to
those who lifted him up.
Small steps to comfort
The result is a low key but beguil-
ing album of gentle, lyrical indie
pop. The journey began when Mar-
teinn was living in Berlin four
years ago. He found himself with
a guitar, rather than his default
piano, and it became his primary
tool for composition.
Early in this process, his friend
Daníel Friðrik Böðvarsson stepped
in to encourage him to make an al-
bum. “I visited him where he was
living in Berlin and we made some
demos,” Marteinn says. “I was also
working with a local producer, Ber-
gur Þórisson, who said, ‘the best
thing you can do to make an album
is to perform as much as you can.’
Which is what I did. I’ve tried to
play a lot, locally and abroad. Every
time is a small step towards get-
ting a little more comfortable.”
Quality, texture, style
As his confidence in his own voice
grew and with the coaching of his
friends, they began to translate
the songs back to piano. Two years
later, Marteinn and Daníel moved
into a studio setting with producer
Albert Finnbogason
and brought in a new
wave of collaborative
musicians.
“We were really
navigating our dif-
ferent approaches
and points of view
and trying to find something that
worked for us both in terms of
quality and texture and style,” he
says. “It happened quite fast there
and we just had this plethora of
material left afterwards. We were
quite pragmatic about it as well,
trusting that what’s there is good.”
Every single voice
The songs themselves began to
take on new forms throughout the
process as Marteinn performed as
much as he could with a variety
of artists. “I don’t have very fixed
notions about how it’s supposed
to sound live, it really depends on
who’s with me,” he says. “That’s
the beautiful thing about playing
with others is that there’s so much
potential in every single voice that
steps in. The music is really per-
formed for the first time every
time it’s performed.”
As the songs took on their re-
corded shape, they became their
own kind of world. “The songs are
maps, they aren’t landscapes, so
these maps take you through dif-
ferent landscapes every time you
use them,” he says.
“The album is an-
chored in a similar
degree of composing
music and compos-
ing texts, but they are
rendered every time
anew.”
This continuous process of
renewal aided by strong collab-
orations lifted a certain burden
for him and allowed him to just
let things happen. “I’m conscious
of my own limitations, I have my
strengths and my weaknesses,”
he says. “That comes back to this
myth of Atlas who’s alone with the
weight of the world on his shoul-
ders. I would very starkly want to
oppose that line of thought. That’s
not my experience of how things
should be. We shouldn’t strive to-
wards isolating ourselves.”
“We shouldn’t
strive towards
isolating our-
selves.”
30The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 07— 2019
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