Reykjavík Grapevine - dec. 2020, Side 11

The end is nigh.
You feel it in your bones. Each time
you read the news, each time your
phone beeps with fresh tidings of an-
other catastrophe, there’s a sense of
unravelling, a sense that we can’t pos-
sibly keep hurtling from one disaster
to the next. Civilisation is exhausting.
Give us some catharsis. Just let the
whole thing splatter onto the pave-
ment already.
The problem is that history never
runs out of new corners to turn. The
end times never really end.
“In the Eddas, Ragnarök is the
end of the world, but what it actually
means is that when something comes
to an end, something new begins,”
says Georg Holm, the bassist of Sigur
Rós and one of the band’s two remain-
ing members.
‘Remaining’ being the operative
word here: for some years now, it’s
been unclear whether or not Sigur Rós
had ceased to exist, following several
public scandals and, most notably, the
departure of drummer Orri Páll D!ra-
son amid sexual assault allegations in
2018. There hasn’t been a studio album
or a tour since the release of ‘Kveikur’
in 2013; keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson
left around the same time and front-
man Jónsi remains conspicuously ab-
sent, currently holed up in Los Ange-
les pursuing his own projects.
And yet...
It’s December, one year into a glob-
al pandemic, and I’m on a Zoom call
with Georg, Kjartan and long-time
collaborator María Huld Markan Sig-
fúsdóttir (of Amiina fame). The band
have just released a new album, the
long-awaited ‘Odin’s Raven Magic’—
ORM, for short.
Admittedly, “new” is a strong word
here. In a release schedule that can
best be described as glacial, ‘Odin’s
Raven Magic’ was first composed in
2002 and performed just a handful of
times, surviving only in whispers, leg-
ends and bootlegged YouTube clips.
The new release was actually recorded
live in Paris and mastered in 2008,
with the band inadvertently deciding
to sit on it for 12 years.
“There was a lot of other stuff go-
ing on and it sort of fell between the
cracks,” explains Georg. “It was always
meant to come out, but I guess it took
a lot longer than anyone expected. It’s
very fitting that the album is being
released now, though. It’s music that
is really old and is all about the end
of the world. It’s the end of 2020 and
hopefully 2021 will be something com-
pletely different.”
Apocalyptic warnings
Unpacking ORM is no easy task, large-
ly because it is so unlike any other
Sigur Rós release. It is perhaps one
of the band’s most collaborative ef-
forts to date. The piece was originally
conceived of by Hilmar Örn Hilmars-
son, a veteran composer as well as the
current allsherjargo"i (chieftain) of
the Icelandic heathen organisation,
Ásatrúarfélagi".
°Hilmar was commissioned by the
Reykjavík Art Festival in 2002 to pro-
duce an orchestral rendition of “Hraf-
ngaldr Ó"ins,” a lost chapter of the
Poetic Edda and the inspiration for
the album’s name. Hilmar, on a self-
described crusade to have the poem
reinstated as part of the Edda, asked
the band to join the project. They im-
mediately said yes.
With less than two weeks to put
the piece together before the festival,
the team enlisted Steindór Andersen,
one of Iceland’s foremost epic poetry
rhyming chanters. They then called
Páll Gu"mundsson, a sculptor and
the inventor of the steinharpa—a ma-
rimba constructed out of stones—and
headed straight out to the countryside
to begin composing.
As only one member of Sigur Rós—
Kjartan—is able to read music, it
quickly became clear they would need
outside help, so María jumped in to
oversee the arrangements—or, as she
puts it, “save Kjartan from a nervous
breakdown.”
From there, this beautiful—if inac-
cessible—text began to take on new
life.
A shot across the bow
In many ways the album and the text
on which it is based are warnings from
the past; shots across the bow into an
uncertain, terrifying future.
Just as the album was composed
years before its release, the poem
was discovered centuries after it was
first written. It was proclaimed to be
a forgery in the 1980s and disqualified
from editions of the Poetic Edda until
2012, when new scholarship certified
it to be authentic and possibly even
hundreds of years older than the oth-
er Eddic poems. (It has only recently
been included in published editions of
the Edda.)
Words:
Ciarán Daly
Photo:
Provided by
Sigur Rós
Hilmar at the laptop, Steindór chanting, the giant stone harp at the bottom of the picture
Info
'Odin's Raven
Magic' is
available on
streaming , vinyl
and CD at
shop.grapevine.is
Sigur Rós
Survives
Endin!s, Eddas and ‘Odin’s Raven Ma!ic’