Recreating the Creation:

Recreating the creation is on the trail of a theory of remix. Using the example of the debut album of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, the question is asked how nature sounds and pop songs relate to each other and in the tension between production, composition and sampling. In doing so, contemporary poetics and techniques of music production are historically and aesthetically contextualized with the practice of a music that not only wants to reinvent itself, but refers to existing music and sounds.

Can the Core of Icelanders be Found in the Wilderness?:

This article investigates how Iceland is presented in Heima: A Film by Sigur Rós and how it relates to the issues of nationalism and national identity in Iceland. In this article stereotypes of the North and Iceland are introduced, and concerns regarding nature and nationalism are presented. The indie band Sigur Rós and the film are discussed, and the relationship between nature and music and their conjunction is analysed. The stereotypes of Icelandic national identity appearing in the film are examined and put in context with the ideas from the national romantic movement and its modern counterparts. This is likewise intertwined with an analysis of the attitudes towards nature conservation in the film. The findings show how the film can be understood as a contribution to nation building based on an “othering” process constructed on stereotypes and nationalism, which originates from both urban and foreign viewpoints.

Sigur Rós: reception, borealism, and musical style

Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding post-rock band Sigur Rós. This article offers a critical reading of the band's reception in the Anglo-American music press during the period of their breakthrough in the UK and USA. Interpretative strategies among listeners and critics are scrutinised using the concept of borealism (Schram 2011) in order to examine attitudes towards the Nordic regions evident in the portrayals of Sigur Rós. Reception issues then form the basis for a musical analysis of a seminal track in the band's history, aiming to demonstrate how specific details in Sigur Rós's style relate to its reception and the discourse surrounding it. The article finds that much of the metaphorical language present in the band's reception can be linked to techniques of musical spatiality, the unusual sound of the bowed electric guitar and non-normative uses of voice and language.

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland

This chapter is a scholarly response to environmental degradation in Iceland. In recognizing the scope of the crisis, the chapter questions conventional wisdom in musical geography and offers a new vision for music’s potential in transnational futures. The chapter offers an argument for eco-cosmopolitanism as an alternative to place-centered approaches to the analysis of contemporary spatial experiences, suggesting that recorded music might help people see themselves as part of a global biosphere. The analysis includes a discussion of musical activism in response to the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and offers two case studies, illustrating a topophilic and a biophilic conception of the national environment. The first case study is the 2007 documentary Heima (Homeland) about a free, unannounced concert tour by Sigur Rós and the second is Björk’s 2011 album Biophilia.

Sigur Rós e o projeto “Valtari Mystery Film Experiment”: por uma reflexão enunciativa em videoclipes musicais

O presente artigo busca propor um espaço enunciativo para a análise de videoclipes musicais enquanto objetos da cultura visual incorporados ao universo da arte contemporânea, através do estudo de caso do projeto “Valtari Mystery Film Experiment” (2012), do grupo musical islandês Sigur Rós. Para isto, promove aproximações entre os campos da comunicação e os domínios teóricos das artes visuais, traçando pontos de observação que partem da subjetividade dos músicos e diretores envolvidos até chegarem a questões de reorganização da circulação de obras na contemporaneidade.Palavras-chave: Videoclipes, regime contemporâneo, cultura visual

Sigur Rós's Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography

This paper examines the sonic geography of the Icelandic ambient rock group Sigur Rós with particular reference to their documentary film Heima, which documents a tour the group made of remote places in their home country. Known for causing some people to faint or burst into tears during their concerts, Sigur Rós’s music could be said to express sonically both the isolation of their Icelandic location and to induce a feeling of hermetic isolation in the listener through the climactic and melodic intensity of their sound. This is distinguished by lead guitarist Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto vocals and Gibson Les Paul guitar played through reverb with a well-resined cello bow, heavily amplified drums, and the use of various types of keyboards, including church organ, minimally emphatic bass, and an all-female string section called Anima who play instruments such as xylophone, celeste, a glass of water, a musical saw and a laptop. Singing both in Icelandic and an invented language called Hopelandic (vonlenska), Jónsi, who is gay and blind in one eye, channels a striking form of glossolalia in his vocals which links the group’s music to ambient rock predecessors such as the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance. As Edward D. Miller has stated, ‘Glossolalia reveals the tension between voice and signification, and exposes the communicativeness of sounds itself. The casual listener to Sigur Rós easily becomes an involved one. S/he is listening to made up words and in accepting the meaning of their arrangement in a melody, imagines what the lyrics might mean. This dual dynamic creates a strong emotional correspondence between the band and its listener’ (2003: 8). The group acknowledges a strong degree of Icelandic animism in their music – they have referred to ‘the presence of mortality’ in the Icelandic landscape, and their links to stories, sagas, magic and ritual in a remote country where ‘the majority of the population believes in elves and power spots … the invisible world is always with us’ (Young 2001:33). In their music they create geomorphic soundscapes which transport the active listener into an imaginary world. As bass player Georg Holm, who is demophobic, has stated, ‘we provide the colours and the frame and you paint the picture’ (Zuel 2005). This paper mobilises Barthes’ ‘jouissance’, Michael Bull’s work on personal stereos, and Daniel Grimley’s work on music and Nordic identity along with various notions of musical affect to discuss relations between Sigur Rós’s music, arctic landscape and its resonances outside Scandinavia.