A Fun Little Fact...

As I predicted, nursing school has basically destroyed what little consistent literary output I’d had pre-school. As such, I have a dozen little drafts and outlines of drafts scattered around with no real vision of a time where I might be able to finish them. As such, I’ve been on the lookout for ‘easier’ things to write about, perhaps less research intensive and less substantial, although admittedly my way of thinking isn’t prone to producing or expressing ‘short-range’ ideas. Fortunately for me, someone else gave me one.

Personally I’m very glad Jon Greenaway (better known by his online pseudonym TheLitCritGuy) has had an ongoing project of dissecting Sigur Ros, if only because I still don’t quite know what to do with them, even as they’ve been my favorite band for the last couple years. To some degree this is perhaps part of the bands artistic intent, considering many of their songs are sung in gibberish and the rest are sung in Icelandic (some would call this a distinction without a difference). Not that it matters, considering the band has managed to tour the world for a couple decades now spreading ethereal vibes that everyone seems to ‘get’ in a much more primordial sense, and that seems to be enough for most people. Jon has then taken up the challenge over the last few years to try and analyze them against the background of an ever-decaying world situation, finding in them traces of conflict between hope and despair that map onto the last couple decades of geopolitical change and decay. While there have been moments where Jon may be crossing from interpreting the bands intent into using the band as a springboard for his own reflections, I’ve overall enjoyed the trajectory he traces in them, letting the music be a clearing space to feel his thoughts reflected back with a certain aesthetic clarity.

It’s with that in mind that I recently saw he’d moved onto Substack and continued writing on Sigur Ros’ more recent work, including their most recent album Atta. While not the first time they’ve incorporated strings into their lineup (often collaborating with the experimental Icelandic band Amiina), 2023’s Atta dialed the strings up and recorded everything with the London Contemporary Orchestra, and have since done several ‘orchestral’ tours (which I was lucky enough to see last year in Minneapolis). The album is a slow-burn, even by their standards, although I’ve found it’s an excellent album to read and study to, but perhaps not the one I’d tell curious listeners to start with.

In any case, Jon starts his own essay by reflecting on the changes the band has gone through over the decades and wonders what their place in the contemporary music landscape might be (as if they’d ever occupied it in some standard fashion). He then turns his attention to the opening track:

“Glóð”, is so painfully familiar that a listener finds themself jolted through time, back to the first moment you heard something from Takk…  for the very first time. There are the strings, and Jonsi’s as-ever-ethereal vocals, but the mixing is odd, with the Hopelandic noise being slightly choppy and textural in a way that their earlier work often neglected.

I only want to hone in on the last bit, about the Hopelandic being mixed in a choppy way. Hopelandic (the rough translation of the aforementioned Vonlenska) is the gibberish, nonsensical language that the band often employs, preferring vocals as pure instrumentation, rather than the conveyance of traditional lyrics. While they’d dabbled in nontraditional vocal techniques, it really emerged fully fledged as a consistent technique on their untitled 2002 album.

As a non-Icelandic speaker, it makes little difference in my moment-to-moment experience of the band, but I appreciate the ambition and the vision behind the idea at least. I can also appreciate the freedom it gives Jonsi to simply sing as he feels, unencumbered by linguistic meaning. It’s what makes Atta’s opening track such a beautiful invitation to the album.

The twist is that, in spite of the weird choppiness of the vocals, it’s not Vonlenska. It’s Icelandic, although even Iceland’s native speakers might be a bit confused upon reading that. Perhaps it’s the choppiness of the mix, then? Well, not exactly. It’s just that the vocals are backwards.

I had my suspicions about this when I first heard it, partly because I’d been clued into some time earlier with their track Untitled #9, a bonus track from their untitled sessions.

The vocals are similarly choppy here, coming in and out in odd ways, although they feel a tad more natural if you reverse them.

Of course, this will sound familiar to those who listened to Sigur Ros’ 2012 album Valtari.

Which is what you also get if you reverse Glóð (along with snippets of Rembihnutur near the end/beginning).

It’s not chopped; it’s reversed. They’ve been toying with this for a while now, but it blends in so well with their experimental ethereality that it tends to go unnoticed. I’m sure there are other examples of them doing this that I haven’t noticed. It’s a simple but effective trick that they use quite well, and it also makes it impressive that it means Jonsi has sung backwards in live performances with nobody realizing it. The dude’s got a gift.

I’m not sure how to wrap this piece up. Usually my writing has a point of some sort to tie off, but there’s nothing special here. Just a neat thing I noticed, and Jon gave me a framing device to draw it out into an essay. Sorry if you thought this was going somewhere. If you want something with an actual point to it, maybe listen to Jon talk to me about the relationship between theology and 19th century gothic literature. Then put Sigur Ros on while reading his book.