about the music

Introduction

To describe the music of Sigur Rós with words?

Is it possible at all?

But if one has to…

It is somewhere between an unspecified fear and warm peace, between a patient waiting and a convulsive frenzy,

 somewhere between an impenetrable mystery and recognizable reality – there does the music of Sigur Rós flow.

The sounds echo through the dark and cold interiors of an old gothic cathedral in order to slip via a chink and fly away

 with a stream of the sunny wind of Icelandic summer.

Does the music anonymously flow through a listener like cold vapours of a darkish forest…?

(in the eight and the last piece of (   ) one can clearly recognize Polish words sung but as if in a foreign language

“It’s so dark, so dark, so dark”)

… or perhaps it wraps the listener the way a soft and sheep wooly plaid does…

(in the third piece of  (   ) the music grazes a roughish piano ivy).

It is as a polar night reigning in Iceland for several months, an unceasing darkness and winter, as summer without any significant transition,

summer when the Sun shines day and night… The music full of contrasts is energetically sprung and simultaneously it is lunaticly lost.

The destructive explosion bursting out the speakers and closing with “Hjarto hamast (bamm bamm bamm)” …

… it leaves only silence …

… everything’s already destroyed …

… bamm bamm bamm …

…and silence…

… some time, from lifelessness, from the sound of dust falling down from debris – there life emerges…

… hesitantly the frames of the tune appear …

‘Viđrar vel til loftárása’

…the sounds grow, grow stronger and stronger, and clearer…

…life progresses, as …

‘En það besta sem Guð hefur skapað er nýr dagur’

(‘the best thing God has created is a new day’)

A bow, having forgotten about its maternal feeling that has linked it with a cello, slides on guitar strings, passionately and without restraint.

It seems not to have any end. The guitar having been irritated this way pays back with a hypersensitive

lament of delight, or pain…?  As an oceanic journey of a whale, apparently strenuously and sluggishly but consistently and freely it approaches its goal. But eventually what is its goal? Presumably it is endlessness –

 the feeling of being lost in a big corn field, with dry, chapped and pale soil underneath and above with an azure dome shaded by corn cobs and leaves so sharp that could make you bleed. The vocalist’s voice echoed in a listener’s ears, as if from nowhere, merges with him/her like a drop of navy ink unexpectedly drowned in a glass of crystal water.  It’s neither a volcano nor a glacier. At the base there is coarse pumex, a congealed lava from

one of Icelandic  thousands volcanoes, and at the fringes there is smooth and squeezed ice from

 one of Icelandic glaciers. Organ pipes create solid and imposing scaffoldings initiating the renovation

of the soul  and drops of the piano notes moisturize the skin.

The cure is highly effective…

…and it’s my recipe for winter.

It’s a marvelous accompaniment to lethargy – at least for 71 minutes. 

Lu

Translation: Alexcure