Soul On Ice

Landscape shapes sound. So many great pieces of music are synonymous with a sense of place, be it Sao Paolo, Seville or Spiddal. So it is with Icelandic quartet Sigur Rss: it s hard to write about the current album Agaetis Byrjun, their first international release, without employing adjectives like icy and glacial . Here s a music that coud hardly have been conceived outside the Northern hemisphere.

I think we re realising more and more how much influence it (landscape) has on the music, bassist Georg Holm admits, making a rare concession to press duties. The first time we were asked this in an interview we just kind of laughed at it, but the more and more we thought about it, then we realised that it must have some influence.
Sigur Rss are space-rock, but in the sense of scale and spectacle as opposed to the solipsism of the karmaceutical brigade. Inhale this noise and you get a vicious hit of Arctic air, not dope smoke.
Goerg: I think people sometimes say that they like to take drugs while listening to our music, but I say that they shouldn t do that, you should let the music be the drug.
Do many Icelanders have this attitude?
No, not really. Some people just like to be in a rock band, drink lots of alcohol and be a rock star. But that s not what we re about really. It s more about the music.
This isn t the band s only wilful characteristic. Singer Jonsi (Jo-Por Birgisson to his mum) frequently eschews both his native language and English in favour of a made-up argot called Hopelandic. Psychologists have indicated that it s often a sign of uncommon intelligence when individuals formulate their own self-speak. Such unlikely bedfellows as James Joyce, Liz Fraser and Anthony Burgess might agree.
When we started out we didn t have any lyrics to the songs, Georg explains, it was just babbling, some kind of mix of words, sometimes Icelandic, sometimes English, sometimes babble. Jonsi s gotten much better at it now, the language is evolving very rapidly.
Relieved from the (arbitrary?) function of language in music, the burden of meaning so to speak, Jonsi s vocalese can be taken as a textless keening akin to Eastern European gypsy laments; an onomatopoeic emoting worthy of Joe Heaney, Sheila Chandra, or any warbler who ever dared leap off the edge of language and into sheer sonic space. These songs don t have to be about anything but themselves. Georg feels people are becoming more receptive to this idea of sound over sense:
I was just reading on our homepage, there was this vote, people had heard that we might do English versions on the new album that we might make soon. So there was a vote if we should have it in English or in Icelandic, and I think some 50% were against it being in English, everybody wanted it to be in Icelandic or Hopelandic.
For an ensemble all in their early twenties, Sigur Rss are a remarkably evolved unit, fluent in forms many rock musicians resist until their middle years. It s something they have in common with many of Canada s Consteallation groups: Do Make Say Think, Sackville, A Silver Mt Zion, etc. The bulk of the songs are sepia dream sequences, although the guitar still glows hot enough to set the Geiger counters clicking, emitting the Oh-my-gawd-there s-an-oil-slick-in-the-sky-and-everything s-about-to-burn ambience of Godspeed on tunes such as Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa . Arrangements favour the amorphous, become gorgeous gushes of noise, shoals of colour. Is it possible that bands like Sigur Rss signify an accelerated evolution happening amongst young rock musicians outside the mainstream, going straight from garage rock to chamber music?
I think young people, before, they had so much against them, Georg offers. They had to fight to get out, so they had to make something new, like rock. But now a lot of young people listen to classical or jazz, everything; there s no reason to fight really.
So it s a rebellion against rebellion?
I think it is, yeah.
Sometimes, thinking on Iceland and Ireland, the chief differences seem to be one consonant and two decades. Iceland boasts its own showband circuit (literal translation country-ball music ), characterised by Georg as very, very basic pop music which everybody can like. You can make a living touring around the country and playing where people can dance.
Shades of seventies Hibernia a backwater brimming with talent, characterised by a compound of oddball arrogance and low self-esteem.
There was this funny question every journalist asked a foreign rock band who came to Iceland, Georg says. They always asked, How do you like Iceland? I think that kind of explains the atmosphere, that people really wanted to know how other peole saw Iceland. But now that s changing a lot, they don t really care.
The logical extension of this new-found confidence is global domination. Can Georg see Sigur Rss selling six million albums and playing the stadia?
Yeah, easily.
Echoes of another impressionistic quartet with a fetish for snow-laden backdrops and panoramic soundscapes. But don t quote me on that.
Sigur Rss play the Temple Bar Music Centre on August 17th. Agaetis Byrjun is out now on Fat Cat.