Jóhann Jóhannsson

My Selection Max Richer

Iceland Airwaves

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muse

If It's Johannsson It's All Good (Rest in Peace)

Johannsson

'We Are Faster Than You', the latest single by FM Belfast comes now bundled in a digital best-of-compilation. You can get FMB's gretatest hits via Itunes & it's out now!

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FM Belfast: We Are Faster Than You

M Belfast is not really a band, it is a community, a force, a friend. You should not treat them as yet another buzzworty mp3 clamouring for your attention; you should treat them as a potential friend or lover, a welcome addition to your life that accepts you for who you are, and wants you to be more of it. Who are they, though?
 For the past four years, Icelandic electropop group FM Belfast have been perfecting the art of reading an audience and connecting with it, using their steadily growing skills to hone a music that catches easily, yet runs deep; an art of performing that can—and usually does—induce unique and euphoric states in large crowds of people, or just in your headphones. It is harsh and technical, warm and embracing and organic, thoughtful and giddy and cool and inclusive. Those who have ever seen them perform or listened to their début, How To Make Friends, can and will verify this. 
“Don’t Want To Sleep” is out on Morr Music (World) and Kimi Records (Iceland) in June. The songs were written and recorded by FM Belfast (guests include Retro Stefson’s Unnsteinn Manúel, Borko’s Borko and mighty trumpeter Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson), they were produced and recorded by Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson and mixed by Kristinn Sturluson, Gunnar Örn Tynes and Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson. Helmut Erler mastered the thing at Dubplates & Mastering, and the cover was designed by the band and Bobby Breiðholt. Haukur S. Magnússon 

Fm Belfast: New Year

A collection of Max's recent filmscore work, together with some tracks from the albums which have recently been featured in various feature films.

HOW TO DIE IN OREGON / Peter Richardson - Endings

Virthulegu forsetar Part 3

Beach II

Miracle, Mystery and Authority

Tu non mi perderai mai

Sindri Már Sigfússon, better known as Sin Fang – and as someone who grew up with summer in his heart and on his mind (skateboarding, eating pizza, reading the German “Bravo”) –, called his last album “Summer Echoes”, and even though there was yet another long winter in-between, his new EP “Half Dreams”, dropping only a year after the album, follows in the same vein: It’s not echoes, but omens in this case, harbingers of a summer that has yet to come. Only a few seconds into “Half Dreams”, and this is blatantly obvious: the guitar is there, the voice(s), everything is switched on, going heads over heels, a-tumble, and it feels like running out into nature after months of hibernation. It might sound like a dream, but Seabear’s founder and mastermind, who, unsurprisingly, also creates stunning visual art, hardly ever sounded this joyous and awake.

“Half Dreams” is not all exuberance though: “I won’t be afraid anymore,” Sin Fang sings on the rather dramatic and majestic sounding “Walk With You”, one of five new tracks he presents on this EP. It’s a haunting tune, a circumnavigation of musical worlds, almost an Icelandic R&B track of sorts, with slow beats, glockenspiel, again many layers of vocals, and bittersweet overtones (or undercurrents), like resolutions for the season to come: let’s not forget how bad things were, how stuck we felt, but it has to change, cannot go on like this.

And it doesn’t: the guitar he picked up rather late – he was already in his twenties – is at the core of the obscurely beeping “Shine For Me”, strummed chords at first to wash over hazy vocals, campfire-style, then vast landscapes busted open, lots of room, again more of that element he’s so in love with: the human voice. Here it shines again, this unique take on (indie) pop that Sigfússon has developed over the last four albums (two solo albums and two Seabear records). In fact, it shines like a freshly done tattoo, some blood mixed in as well, and it’s going to last just as long.

Having recently presented his visual skills in a limited edition book with Múm’s Örvar, Sin Fang (no more Bous, in case you didn’t notice), a collector of prison tattoo designs from Iceland, finishes the new EP with some instantly recognizable “sha-la-la-la” sing-along vocals (“Strange House”) for those hours spent on an ideal, imaginary beach that feels like the year 1962 or 1969, and then, lastly, “It’s Not There”: his take on off-beat stomping, beats made for dancing and chanting, a celebration of “not-quite-knowing” and nevertheless going on, even stronger than before.

A few weeks before “Half Dreams” was finished, there was a flood in the studio where Sin Fang was working on the final mix. (No cat was injured or forced to take a bath, rest assured.) The surprisingly cold water must have washed away the last bit of doubt and uncertainty, only to expose something he knew all along: that honest songwriting serves as the ultimate war paint

Sin Fang - Only Eyes

• Third and most accessible album by icelandic experimental pop artist Sin Fang
• Recorded & produced by Alex Somers (producer of Sigur Rós & Jónsi)
Although there is a certain reassuring quality to evergreens – you can rely on them to never drop their foliage – it’s the flowering plants, the ones that bud, blossom, and bloom, which really light up and even define a season. This is exactly what happens on Flowers, Sin Fang’s third solo album: Seabear’s founder and mastermind unlashes a melodic spring storm and explores even more corners of the lush and baroque gardens he spent the last five years in.
Following his Half Dreams EP, Flowers is a solo album that nevertheless opens with a lot of collective chanting, a sense of deep rootedness, togetherness, unity, shared experience: “We were young boys, smoking in the woods, I showed you how”, are the first words Sindri Már Sigfússon aka Sin Fang scatters across the less-beaten tracks, only to leapfrog across the lawn and switch on the stage lights for his own take of stadium pop. Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with your ears: A song like “What’s Wrong With Your Eyes” would indeed sound infinitely awesome in a stadium setting – it’s so massive, so outspokenly pop, when the beat meets layered vocals and the piano comes in just at the right moments. “I was thinking a lot about pre-teenage and teenage feelings,” he explains. “The exaggerated feelings and dramatic thoughts that most teenagers go through: Love and rejection, the constant ups and downs... I thought Flowers was a good name for that theme as they are used both for sad and happy occasions.”
A few albums and EPs and make-shift DIY beards later (he went from paper to knitted goods and now likes them freshly watered and soon withering), Mr. Sigfússon has obviously learned how to cultivate the heaviest crops of the pops: indie-rooted but vast, quirky at times but crystal-clearly aiming at the stars in other places, there’s more tracks with huge sing-along gestures, more of that well-rounded surround experience now stripped of any insecurities. This is a bold statement that’s a million miles away from cliché Icelandic indie stuff, but instead shows that you can indeed be a sucker for outlandish prison tattoos and at the same time go for rather timeless orchestrations that unfold like springs, followed by summers and autumnal winds.
There’s clearly a ghost at work here, still carrying him away, as he gathers more and more rosebuds and moves from epically marching (“Look At The Light”) to overgrown power pop (“Not Enough”) and back via lots of oh-uh-oh-uh-oohs (going up and down like those distant hills you can’t stop staring at) to fast-paced bliss (“Sunbeam”). “Weird Heart” takes a look at the things one doesn’t care about as one gets older (“so many things don’t mean a thing to me”), while “Feel See” is a call for like-minded individuals out there, as it moves from section to section, pushing onwards, now hesitant and soft-spoken almost, soon hopeful about the answer to the question it poses: “Is there someone that feels like me, that there’s nothing to feel or see?” There’s lots. To feel. To see. To discover and dive into. At least in this garden there is.

Sin Fang - Young Boys

For more information visit: http://www.klassikakzente.de/recomposed/home 

Some works are so familiar that it is almost impossible to hear them afresh, but that is what Max Richter has achieved with Vivaldi “Recomposed”. This is no mere arrangement; instead Richter has absorbed Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons into his own musical bloodstream. At first Richter followed the example of other works in the “Recomposed” series, which re-mix existing recordings, but, he says, “I wanted to open up the score on a note-by-note level, and working with an existing recording was like digging a mineshaft through an incredibly rich seam, discovering diamonds and not being able to pull them out. That became frustrating. I wanted to get inside the score at the level of the notes and in essence re-write it, re-composing it in a literal way.”Richter calculates that, in the process, he has discarded around three-quarters of Vivaldi’s original. He opens with what he describes as “a dubby cloud which I’ve called Spring 0. It functions as a sort of prelude, setting up an electronic, ambient space for the first Spring movement to step into. I’ve used electronics in several movements, subtle, almost inaudible things to do withthe bass, but I wanted certain moments to connect to the whole electronic universe that is so much part of our musical language today.” Other resonances are no less unexpected: Richter describes part of the first movement of his Summer as “heavy music for the orchestra. It’s relentless pulsed music, which is a quality that contemporary dance music has; and perhaps I was also thinking about John Bonham’s drumming. Then, in the second movement of Autumn I asked the harpsichordist Raphael Alpermann to play in what is a rather old-fashioned way, very regularly, rather like a ticking clock. That was partly because I didn’t want the harpsichord part to be attention-seeking, but also because that style connects to various pop records from the 1970s where the harpsichord or Clavinet was featured, including various Beach Boys albums and the Beatles’ Abbey Road.” Clearly, Richter has brought his own frame of reference to the project. As he says, “Vivaldi’s music is made of regular patterns, and that connects with post-minimalism, which is one strand in the music that I write. That felt like a natural link, but even so it was surprisingly difficult to navigate my way through it. At every point I had to work out how much is Vivaldi and how much is me. It was difficult but also rewarding because the raw material is so fascinating.”Just as Richter’s Seasons plays tricks with the way we hear Vivaldi’s original, so it also asks questions of the soloist, Daniel Hope. “Violinists have Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons hardwired in their brain. Daniel is likely to play the original I don’t know how many times in a year, and for him to have my parallel text going on in another part of his brain is a challenge. I think he did a wonderful job. He brought to it a deep engagement with the original, but he was fully prepared to cut this new swathe through the text.”


Spring One - Vivaldi Recomposed - The Four Seasons

Spring 1 (2012)

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The fact that Sigfússon did not only write all the music but also was
doing most of the recording and production promises a lot for his
future and “Summer Echoes” conveys the feeling that the real story
has only just begun: and in fact a next Sin Fang album is already
fully written and Sigfússon shows no willingness to slow down.
Summer Echoes will be released on Morr Music in March 2011. A
limited edition Sin Fang 7" featuring the non-album coverversions of
Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" and Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only
Living Boy In New York" is available as of December 2010 while the
album's first single, "Because Of The Blood/Two Boys" will be out in
February 2011. The artwork for the release was done together with
Sigfússons partner Inga Birgisdóttir.
“I’m cancelling that dinner-and-a-movie tonight so I can listen to this
17 times. How did I sleep on this for so long? How does a band like
Fleet Foxes get on SNL and a band like this not even get to do a TV
on the radio remix? (The lack of facial hair maybe?)
(The artist Andrew Kuo in the New York Times)

Virthulegu forsetar Part 3

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