Valgeir Sigurdsson - In Search of Ekvílibríum

Collaborator with major artists of widely different backgrounds, producer, founder of a record label and, finally, also the name behind a musical project in his own right: this is the path followed, over the course of just a few years, by Valgeir Sigurðsson, the multifaceted Icelandic artist fresh from an ongoing collaboration with Bjork and from productions for Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Cocorosie

by Raffaello Russo

From producer and collaborator with major artists of widely different backgrounds to an artist in his own right, as well as founder of a record label and of a genuine artistic circle centered on his native Iceland - a country that is always musically vibrant, though his work is not confined to music coming from that fascinating Nordic nation. This, in short, is the intense path followed over the course of just a few years by Valgeir Sigurðsson who, fresh from an ongoing collaboration with Bjork and from productions for Bonnie “Prince” Billy (“The Letting Go”) and Cocorosie (“The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn”), first gathered around his Bedroom Community label artists such as Ben Frost, Nico Muhly and Sam Amidon.

In 2007 Sigurðsson reaps the rewards of these many different experiences on his debut album under his own name, Ekvílibríum, which from its very title evokes the search for common ground between different artistic identities and modes of expression, the result of pairing Sigurðsson's largely electronic compositions with expansive string and horn sections and musicians such as, among others, Nico Muhly, Múm drummer Samuli Kosminen, and Bonnie "Prince" Billy, who wrote and performs two of the tracks included in the album ("Evolution Of Waters" and "Kin").

As is easy to guess just from the names of his collaborators, Ekvílibríum is an extremely heterogeneous album, which across its fifty minutes alternates between different electronic modes, ranging from the fragmented, almost danceable beats of the disorienting opener "A Simmetry", to progressively rarefied dreamlike, liquid, dilated sounds. A common thread running through all the tracks, however, is an approach tinged with classicism, present in the form of airy string arrangements both in the more rarefied passages and in the four tracks where Sigurðsson's electronic substrate is topped off by genuine "songs".

The first category includes the instrumentals built almost exclusively around Muhly's piano, which sketch out fragments of "experimental piano music", dotted only by violin or by multifaceted electronic flourishes ("Focal Point", "After Four"), as well as the drifts into full-blown orchestral ambient, culminating in the long suite "Equilibrium Is Restored".

But it's when the Icelandic composer opens up his sensibility to the songwriting of some of his guests that he gives rise to hybridizations that are sometimes superbly successful. If, in fact, on "Baby Architect", J. Walker (Machine Translators) immerses echoes of understated singer-songwriting in a not entirely accomplished atmospheric pop context, Bonnie "Prince" Billy brings all his incisive personality to bear on the two tracks entrusted to him, one of which, "Evolution Of Waters", is a gem of utmost sweetness and romanticism, where his voice blends perfectly with a context of nocturnal electroacoustic orchestration, decidedly unusual for him. A similarly positive outcome also results from the album's most ambitious and complex track, "Winter Sleep", performed by the ethereal voice of Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables and characterized by minimal electronics of sober, hushed solemnity, cut through by a sweeping orchestral arrangement, with strings and horns in abundance and even the mandolin of Warren Ellis.

The entire work is, after all, marked by the same ambition, whose ultimate goal seems to be to build a bridge between genres and modes of expression; it can ultimately be said that Valgeir Sigurðsson achieves this with reasonable success, when his electronic textures, admittedly a bit inconsistent, tend to dissolve into a context of modern classicism and, above all, when they come to fruition in songs with light, dreamlike melodies.

It's precisely the more classical aspects displayed on the debut and on many of the Icelandic artist's productions that return to the fore in the second work released under his own name: the circle of collaborators gravitating around Bedroom Community is confirmed and indeed expanded for the soundtrack Sigurðsson composed for "Dreamland", an environmentally-minded documentary dedicated to the issues surrounding the exploitation of Icelandic territory by rapacious multinationals involved in aluminum extraction and production.

Draumalandið – the Icelandic rendering of the documentary's title – offers a faithful parallel to the narrative and imagery it contains, professing Sigurðsson's extremely strong bond with his homeland, demonstrated for example by the revival of the opening traditional "Grýlukvæði" (an emblematic allegory telling of a witch who eats children), which, entrusted to Amidon's voice, is transformed into a stark orchestral folk ballad and a kind of warning against the overreach of economic mechanisms.

The same bond also runs through the remaining original compositions, instrumentals geared not only toward the simple evocation of enchanted landscapes but also, and above all, toward rendering in musical passages of mounting drama the dangers stemming from short-sighted exploitation of natural resources. In Draumalandið, then, the glocal environmentalist message coexists with romantic touches and postmodern unease, unfolding over the course of a soundtrack that fully expresses the irreconcilable contrast between the graceful descriptive naturalness of the piano and airy arrangements of "Dreamland" and "Draumaland" and the stark, anguished tread of the dark "Past Tundra" and "Cold Ground, Hot". As the musical narrative unfolds alongside the visual one, the tones grow darker and the compositions more intricate and irregular: anguished strings accompany and overwhelm residual acoustic crystals, until they nervously take over in the two solemn orchestral elegies that close the collection ("Helter Smelter" and especially "Helter Smelter"), conveying a sense of unease steeped in genuine love for one's homeland, one that manages to properly drive home that reflection on humanity's relationship with nature which is the ultimate purpose of the images with which Sigurðsson has paired the suggestions of a music that is as perfect as it is fragile, much like the balance of the land that inspired it.

Two years later, it becomes clear that Draumalandið was not simply a one-off aside, a detour from the main path. Confirmation comes punctually with the ten tracks contained on this "Architecture Of Loss", which see the founder of Bedroom Community (the label on which this very work was released) continue his pursuit of a vibrant, instinctive ambient music built on intense orchestral textures, in which all outside contributions and after-the-fact manipulations are kept to an essential minimum, thereby favoring a more direct, immediate rendering of the sonic material.

With its presentation betraying the efforts behind this new collection of instrumentals, Architecture Of Loss, conceived first and foremost as a musical accompaniment to a dance performance by Stephen Petronio, is made up of pieces that aptly capture the atmosphere suggested by its pitch-black, decidedly gloomy title, one that heralds scenarios that are anything but reassuring. Indeed, it's a relentless unease, a darkness that grows ever thicker, that drives the course of Sigurðsson's compositions, aimed at depicting as faithfully as possible that architecture of defeat which is not merely an intriguing calling card for launching a new project.

Architecture Of Loss is thus a work capable of standing on its own even outside the context for which it was specifically conceived, a genuine album also designed for the dimension of pure listening. Built essentially on adventurous, tormented viola embroidery, with the by no means secondary contribution of electronics and piano (played by friend and collaborator Nico Muhly), the tracks, in a synesthetic celebration in which concepts like rhythm and melody are, if not surpassed, then at least upended in how they're used, suggest an inner resignation and an outer world in complete collapse, dense with visions of a fully realized apocalypse.

Even when the sound takes a turn toward less severe timbres, the work never strays from a deep unease, one closely tied to the vibrant scores skillfully conducted by Sigurðsson's hand, a hand that accompanies with a deft touch, creating and dissolving as needed. A work that, while not lacking a decidedly personal stamp, shows, in its extreme overall cohesiveness, that it doesn't always have the drive needed to overcome a certain repetitiveness of solutions. If this is nonetheless a work endowed with real solidity, the suspicion at times is that the Reykjavík musician has by now truly outgrown the role of "artist for hire", and that much of his real potential still remains unexpressed. Even with this limitation, the monuments to failure carved here possess more than enough substance to confirm the artistic weight of one of the most important musical representatives from the land of ice.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis ("Architecture Of Loss")