My Sigur Ros obsession

Recently compelled to re-visit a past obsession, for that is what listening  to Sigur Ros has provoked in me, an obsession bordering on the obsessive-compulsive, I wondered if the time has come to finally comprehend what draws me irrevocably to Sigur Ros. Yes, it is an obsession because listening to Sigur Ros is a guilty pleasure as I once was a true believer of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits and Mark E Smith. Everything in my sonic universe gravitated around the pull of this triumvirate. So, I ask myself, what is it this pull that Sigur Ros exerts on me? Short answer: I ached for something other. And Sigur Ros truly represents an Otherness in my sonic universe.

Sigur Rós has often been categorised as an Icelandic post-rock band. The name is derived from the name of lead vocalist Jónsi Birgisson’s little sister Sigurrós. According to their website, it is pronounced “si-ur roas (as in roast).” They hail from the same creative and vibrant Icelandic music scene as múm and Amiina. They released their first ever foray into film-making with their tour documentary, Heima in late 2007. But to categorise them as post-rock is too easy, a readily made short-hand used by those music journos.

Listening to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, Takk and in particular to Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, I am transported gracefully by the breathtaking orchestration to a sensuous tonal landscape, seeped with quixotic melancholy and boundless joy. Here in this space I encounter an otherness. They make their instruments cry, coaxing sounds that are utterly other. This alien otherworldly landscape confounds description and without the usual bearings provided by the emotional compass of Tom Waits and The Fall, co-ordinates with which I have become familiar, I find myself bereft for words. The easy descriptions are, of course, too easy. The obvious motifs evoke blissfully, ethereal moments. Oh yes, it would be too easy to succumb to such descriptions, a cop-out even. Their musical inventions start small, with gentle coos and keyboard tinkering, then build and build until they’re cascading and tumbling over each other, high and alive somewhere overhead, inflated by ambitious instrumentation that could tear you to pieces and then pick you up and put you back together.

Their instrumentation tempts you to stare skywards, making you want to contemplate the vastness of the human spirit, believing that it is perfectly within our grasp to capture the music of the spheres. Arranged just so, their sounds encourage the breath to come alive, soaring, peaking and then weeping. The landscape their orchestration lays out before us is magnificent. And heartbreaking. Pulling us away from life, and yet, yet somehow managing to make life seem more meaningful. With strings, horns, piano and operatic cries, Sigur Ros show us the world made strange, but it is a world as we, or is it I, would like to see it.
 
 
To listen to Sigur Ros is to feel joy and the faint stirrings of something once thought long-lost found again. Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur makes it almost possible to believe. I find this quite confounding. How does it go? Credo quia impossible est, “I believe it because it is impossible”. I can’t listen to Sigur Ros without hearing the faint voice from my past reminding me of these words again. And yet, Sigur Ros’ orchestration encourages the temptation to slip away from the world as it is. But in the increasingly harsh world, some strange fragile beauty persists. Listening to Sigur Ros gently reminds me of this, making me wonder again, and affords a glimpse of a possibility to another way of being in and with the world. Because, as Angela Bassett says in Strange Days, “Memories were meant to fade, they were designed that way, this is your life, right here, right now”.