Sigur Rós's Heima: An Icelandic Psychogeography

Abstract

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.

The screams all sound the same: The music of Of Monsters and Men and the Icelandic imaginary as geographical discourse

“…Even where the relationships between landscape and music are not explicit on the part of the performer, they are frequently inferred. Mitchell (), for example, interprets the music of Sigur Rós as a sonic expression of isolation, creating “geomorphic soundscapes which transport listeners into an imaginary world” (2009, p. 172) and metaphorically evoking “glacial shifts or the contours of craggy hills” (2009, p. 181). Their music, he suggests, provides the listener with a sonic and visual expression of an Icelandic imaginary.…”

“…Such imaginative geographies are also produced at the nexus of real, mundane everyday experience of place and the mythical and fantastical (Daniels, ; Gregory, ). Mitchell's (, ) work on Icelandic music and landscape for example, considers the music of artists such as Sigur Rós and Björk as being grounded in Icelandic geography and culture, but also as creating sonic expressions of Iceland's dramatic physical landscape. The perceptions of this landscape that are drawn on are in part real and in part imagined and fantastical; Mitchell argues that the music acts to “transport listeners into an imaginary world” (2009, p. 172) as part of the development of an “Icelandic imaginary” (see also Webb & Lynch, ).…”

Music and Environmentalism in Iceland

“…What notions of the natural world does music help construct, given a situation in which the environment can be both a particular place to which music might pertain (with implicit connotations of ownership), and an Òecological commonsÓ (the natural resources shared by humans)? While popular music studies, and musicology more generally, has a long history of investigating representations of and relationships with landscape, especially in the Nordic region (Grimley 2005(Grimley , 2011Korsgaard 2011;Mitchell 2009;Richardson 2012), it has only recently begun to explore the relationship with the natural world from an environmental perspective (Dibben 2009a, Pedelty 2011. Where this chapter differs from other approaches in nordic popular music studies, is in understanding the environmental crisis as a failure of culture as much as it is a failure of engineering, science and politics (Allen 2011a).…”

“…Popular musicÕs construction of the Icelandic landscape, and the way this relates to and helps construct Icelandic national identity have been discussed elsewhere (Dibben 2009a(Dibben , 2009bGrimley 2005;Korsgaard 2011;Mitchell 2009;Richardson 2012;Webb 2010). That scholarship shows how musical material and its reception inside and outside Iceland and the Nordic region, is inspired by and expresses particular views about the natural environment as Òpure wildernessÓ through its visual, sonic and linguistic representation.…”

‘It’s A Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing’: Popular Music Practices in Reykjavík, Iceland

“…The observational material is based on three short periods spent around the Iceland Airwaves festival between 2009-2012 and a similar period spent in the capital and the Westfjords region outside the festival period. Very little Englishlanguage academic work currently exists on Iceland's musical worlds, so one of the article's rather modest aims is to provide non-specialists with a critical introduction to some selective aspects of this cultural setting (see also Dibben, 2009;Mitchell, 2009;Cannady, forthcoming). A second aim, however, is to explore what might be accomplished in bringing together what are often seen as discrete concepts -field, space, world and scene -in understanding the nature of music-based associations in dense urban settings.…”