Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.09.2019, Page 16

16 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 17— 2019
Waiting on
the record
button
Sindri has always been obsessed with
music. Although this may sound exotic
to younger readers, it wasn’t easy being
a fan of obscure, independent music in
the early internet age.
"When I was nine or ten I would call
into radio stations and make requests,”
Sindri recalls. “And then I would wait
with my finger on the record button
on my little cassette deck. Or if I was
listening to the radio and heard a song
I liked but didn't recognise, I'd call
them up and be like 'hey what was the
name of the song you just played?' and
write the name down and go to the
record store. It was such a hassle to
be a music fan at that time. And then
when Napster came out, I stayed up all
night looking for music that I had been
wanting to listen to for years but never
found, like some early Slint album. I
just lost my mind on Napster."
Despite this, by his own admission
Sindri didn’t entertain ideas of being a
musician himself until later on in life,
telling The Grapevine that he didn’t
take his first guitar lesson until he was
19-years old.
“I'd always just been drawing and
painting. I thought that in the future,
I'd go to art school, and then I would
continue and do a teacher's degree,
and teach art to kids. That was some-
how set in my brain that that was what
I was going to do."
The bad
student
Perhaps like many creative types,
Sindri fell shy of model student status
in his youth, eventually dropping out
before finishing secondary school.
“I was just so bored of endlessly
doing stuff that I had no interest in,
and school had been that way for me
since I was a teenager,” Sindri admits.
“There's something wrong with my
brain where I have a very hard time
concentrating on things that I don't
have any interest in. So the classes
would float by, and in my mind I
just went somewhere and I couldn't
remember anything that happened in
the class unless I was interested in it."
That would change in 2002, when he
was admitted to Camberwell College
of Arts in London. Although the city
didn’t really appeal to him—”It felt like
no one was very happy in London”—
it was there that he began making
music“playing around in DAWS and
making random beats and sampling
but nothing very focussed until I
bought an acoustic guitar. I started
playing around with it."
The return
to Iceland
Sindri began doing menial jobs upon
his 2003 return to Iceland, at one point
laying blocks of concrete for Reykja-
vík’s pavement. But his subsequent
admission to Iceland University of the
Arts unexpectedly gave him the time
and energy he needed to explore his
musical chops.
“The classes were only until noon,
and you had the rest of the day free,
so I decided to make this EP,” he says
matter-of-factly. “At that time, there
was a nice rack at 12 Tónar that was
only homemade music, so you could
make music in your home, burn 10 CDs
and 12 Tónar would sell it at a commis-
sion for you. There was a bunch of
music there. So I made this CD that
was released under the name Seabear.
I designed the cover, and then used my
mother's sewing machine to sew them
all together, and it just kind of got out
of control. I didn't see myself as a work-
ing musician. That was a dream that
was way too big to have ever thought of
dreaming.”
To Germany
and beyond
For reasons Sindri admits he still
doesn’t understand, that debut EP
somehow made itself into the hands
of a German label called Tomlab. They
released a Seabear song on one side of
a 7”, opposite a song from Grizzly Bear.
“I guess they just thought it was
funny that there were two ‘bear’ bands
making similar music,” Sindri says. He
was invited to play in Berlin by the same
label at the famed Volksbühne theatre.
While initially reluctant, the appeal
proved too strong for Sindri to resist.
There was just one problem: he
needed a band.
Seabear,
assemble!
How does a solo artist go about form-
ing a band in time for a concert when
he doesn’t have any musician friends?
Pick who’s ever around you, apparently.
"At that point I wasn't around that
many musicians who I knew could play
with me,” he says. “There was an amaz-
ing girl at my school who was a violin
player, so I asked her, and this friend
»»