Who let the strings out? Why Sigur Rós reinvented their music for this Australian tour
If ever a band was suited to performing live with an orchestra, it is Sigur Rós. The Icelandic trio's music is hard to categorise, but sounds like it comes from another planet – it is sung largely in the invented tongue Hopelandic and dotted with creative elements, such as a guitar played with a cello bow. Textural and complex, this music doesn't need language to be understood on an almost spiritual level.
'Sigur Rós and an orchestra is something that a lot of people have been waiting for – and actually, we've been waiting for as well,' says the band's bassist, Georg Holm.
'We've been waiting for the right opportunity and the right way to represent it.'
In 2023, this long-held vision finally came to life – and what began as an experiment has bloomed into an ongoing tour around the world. Holm makes an important distinction between this show and other rock bands performing with orchestras.
'It was important for us that it wasn't a band with an orchestra, but rather the orchestral version of the band,' he says. 'We wanted to take everything we had, dismantle it and rebuild it into something different.'
This version of the Sigur Rós live experience has more in common with a classical music recital than a rock show: a sit-down affair in some of the most beautiful concert venues in the world.
Many of the band's songs had to be reworked to suit this new setting. Keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, his wife Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir of the Icelandic band Amiina (also formerly a touring member of Sigur Rós), and British conductor Robert Ames composed the new arrangements. Some songs are only performed in part during the show, as the music all swirls together in this magical space.
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Holm refers to this process as a reinvention of the music. 'Songs where I'd usually be playing very loud with a distortion pedal on the bass – that's not happening now,' Holm says. 'And the opposite as well – parts I'd usually play quietly, I now play loudly. [They are] subtle differences, but for us, it's very different.'
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