I don’t want to be lazy, but Anthony from the Alternative Music Blog on About.com does as good a job as anyone introducing the new project from our singer, Jonsi, and Alex Somers:
Amidst all the Americana, folksiness, and indie-rock moves of the almighty, compilation-for-a-generation Dark Was the Night, few songs seemed so radically ‘other’ as “Happiness,” that eight-and-a-half-minute burbling ambient blow-out from Riceboy Sleeps.
The artistic marriage of Sigur Rós’s Jón Þór ‘Jónsi’ Birgisson and Parachutes’ Alex Somers, Riceboy Sleeps started out as a product of the pair’s domestic union; songs built together, late at night, on laptops. Of course, Riceboy Sleeps quickly evolved into anything but a band: the pair’s paintings and video-work soon exhibited at galleries and festivals on hemispheres North and South; the first entry in their discography being not a record, but a sweet hardcover art book.
Now, Birgisson and Somers are prepping their first Riceboy Sleeps LP, a self-titled set due out in July. The instrumental affair is big on dense atmospheres and processed lullabies, the duo taking acoustic instruments and treating them until they sounded like pale blue fog rolling through mystical dreams of Icelandic wood-nymphs. Sleep tight, Riceboy…
Watch: Riceboy Sleeps “All the Big Trees”
Watch: Riceboy Sleeps “Daníell in the Sea”
Riceboy Sleeps tracklisting.
1. “Happiness”
2. “Atlas Song”
3. “Indian Summer”
4. “Stokkseyri”
5. “Boy 1904”
6. “All the Big Trees”
7. “Daníell in the Sea”
8. “Howl”
9. “Sleeping Giant”
Riceboy Sleeps will be released in a special edition deluxe box featuring the album, art book and special colouring book, plus pencils.
The guys recently donated “Með suð í eyrum” for a commercial spot for Oxfam America. You can watch the spot below but the message from Oxfam is simple:
Nearly one billion suffer from chronic hunger. The cost of food from Ethiopia to Afghanistan has nearly doubled. The situation is urgent.
One modest donation can make a difference.
Support Oxfam’s work to end hunger and poverty. You can save a life. You can make a difference.
Eva here the photographer who did the pictures for the deluxe edition. First
of all I’d like to say how much I enjoyed doing these pictures. I love
looking at how people interact with each other and their environment so what
could be a better opportunity than touring with a group of people who know
each other through and through and going to lots of different countries?
I missed a trick when describing our Bonaroo experience in my last blog in not mentioning a beguiling performance we happened across in one of the further-flung outposts of the festival. Wandering round the site, we heard vaguely familiar strains coming from a side stage. Gravitating towards it in order solve the riddle of its origin, we found a troupe of hippy chix doing expressive dancing to ‘Glosoli’.
As anyone who’s shared the pleasure:pain interface we experience when confronted with artistic interpretations of the band’s work (cf. the a capella barbershop quartet version of Vaka; the head-on hip-hop collision of Staralfur and Flostradamus; the unholy mash up of My Heart Will Go On and Bium Bium Bambalo; the much-loved Hebrew reading of Svefn G Englar; We Are Scientists’ Hoppipolla; Kronos Quartet’s Flugufrelsarinn, and perhaps most heinously the current Jonathan Ansell pop-classix rendition of Hoppi) will know how heart-rending and cherishable this stuff can be. After all it’s why we instituted the Gobbledigook remix competition, just to see what we’d get back from y’all. So without further ado, for your cultural enlightenment, here’s the young lovelies from Bonaroo struttin’ their stuff to the peppy, kick-up-your-heels beat of ‘Glosoli’.
I also forgot/neglected to write any sort of Tour Diary from the latter stages of the US tour, even though lots happened. Much of it is now lost in the midst of my brain, but I feel I should mention that i think I found a famous person to undertake our ludicrous ‘Brad Pitt’ (see previous diary entry) idea of trying to say “Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust” on camera, to prove to (some people at) our record company that it’s not such a dumb idea to so name it (although personally I always wanted to call it ‘Sigur Ros’, and be done with it).
So, having singly failed to pluck up the courage to ask Drew Barrymore when she came back stage in LA, despite her being super game and seemingly lovely, I told myself I’d confront the next celeb I met with this askance marketing opportunity. As it turned out, by chance i was sat next to Jared Leto at the next show in Berkeley, and so gave it my best pitch, and he seemed to take the bait and has promised to open himself up to public ridicule on our behalf sometime this side of Christmas. I’m hoping this is the start of a promotional rollercoaster and all manner of folks are going to come on board and out themselves as Sigurphiles and we can snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat.
Speaking of that kind of stuff. I should say the weirdest thing happened to us on the way to the White House. That is, Sigur Ros, a band who remember don’t do advertising, approved an ad for national US television. The circumstances we extenuating, however, the ad was for the final stages of the Democratic campaign to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. Now, we’ve always stayed out of politics, but after sleeping on it a night, we all decided this was worth getting down off our moral high-ground for. So we said yes, only to be stopped in our tracks by an insurmountable amount of red tape. The Democrats were looking for gratis (i.e. free) use of Hoppipolla, which was fine by us, except that, because the band are ‘Foreign Nationals’ it is apparently illegal for them to make “donations” to US political parties, and they would have to pay us “fair market value”, which was deemed as being several tens of thousand of dollars. Now everyone knows that Hoppipolla has become emotional shorthand for “heart-rending hope”, but, under these fiscal circumstances, even a campaign as well-funded as Obama’s was always going to pick a freebie over us.
I understand that you can’t have foreign powers buying influence in the White House, but to be blocked on these grounds for a piece of music that has been used pretty much globally for next-to-nothing under “blanket agreement” deals between broadcasters and rights owners, did for a day or two made my head go dizzy with frustration. For it’s normal for “our” ‘synchronisation licensing’ people to be forever ringing us up, begging us to give our music to this General Motors’ ad, or that Julia Roberts’ blockbuster, trying to find any chink in our armour to make these ‘syncs’ happen. This time, however, it all went strangely quiet. If you are signed to a multi-national it seems you should not expect to be able to show your support for a political party, even though the same corporation’s executives themselves give freely under their own Universal Music Group Political Action Committee [www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expend.php?cmte=C00392464&Cycle=2008 , etc].
Anyway, that’s how we didn’t get to play our (minor) part in history, and I was left with a strange feeling of invisible wheels turning high above my head. Thank goodness Barack won, but imagine how it could have been still sweeter had his victory been soundtracked by familiar, effortlessly ascending, piano chords. Someone will no doubt write to me now with sound and reasonable legal reasoning as to why I should remove this from my blog, but that’s what happened, and I thought some of you at least might be interested.
This being a catch-all round of shit I forgot to tell you before, i will now change into a more free-wheeling gear and post some dumb pix from the summer i’ve just downloaded from my phone. Here’s a couple of Jonsi taken at Bonaroo, sometime between seeing James Hetfield and the Glosoli coven. See how he effortlessly integrates into the festival milieu, a master of anonymity in his pink shades, ‘parasol’ and, er, deerstalker.
Or here, his slender frame almost lost among one of the festivals ‘interactive sculptures’. Careful Jonsi, that’s a priceless work!
Goggi’s initial stage costume ideas were perhaps not fully thought through…
Ingi, from the brass section, shows how to “make your fun”, backstage somewhere in Scandinavia (he already failed to fit himself entirely inside a closed euphonium case)…
íslenska
English
