Hello everyone. As some of you may know, I’m spending some time over the next few months writing about the philosophical and political notion of hope, through the work of four of the most popular and influential post-rock bands: Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Explosions In The Sky, and Godspeed You! Black Emporer. I’ll be sending out small sections here, so if you want to read more, please do head over to patreon.com/thelitcritguy.
This week, Sigur Ros and their debut album, Von.
I hope you enjoy reading, and please do let me know your thoughts here, or over on twitter.
All the best, and thank you for being here.
I want to start with something of a problem, a knot around which many of these pieces will circulate. There is a particular image of what this band is - a product of their success which wasn’t reached on this album. That image is commercial. And I don’t mean that in the straightforward sense of being popular or being successful (even though the band has been and is both of those things) but rather in a much more literal sense. The band’s compositions and music have been beloved by advertisers - they are the soundtrack to commercials - the aspirational fantasy that links the romance and joy of their music to products, lifestyles, and modes of being that can be packaged and sold back to us by capitalism. So the challenge here with this band is not simply to understand their particular kind of post-rock hope but rather to try and articulate a detournement of hope against capitalist hope. Capitalism promises us the utopia of our fulfilled desires - this is, almost entirely, what advertising and marketing are for after all - but what should be insisted upon is that the essential otherness and strangeness of utopia which has been shattered by the sledgehammer of capitalism into the Spuren or traces of it we see throughout all of culture and history.
So before Sigur Rós became the band known for adverts and commercials, the sonic background to the dream-scape of capitalism selling you that which you lack, their debut album perhaps offers some resources for understanding the band in a new way. The opening track Sigur Rós has a dreamlike quality to it, a drone piece that utilizes emptiness and echo in a way that a band like Mogwai or GY!BE would aim for texture and heaviness. It sounds otherworldly, like water dripping through caverns. Five minutes into the track comes the first sounds that offer some humanity - distorted screams and shouts on the edge of language. For all of the popular conceptions about the band, romantic, hopeful, and beautiful, there is a dialectical tension already at work within the first track. What is underground may well be something new and gorgeous but the track closes out in a swirl of discordance. There is something darker in here too. It’s precisely that darkness that makes the transition into Dögun so striking - the trademark choral voices emerge to the background of instrumentation. It’s a mild build and release into a beatific moment of calm. But it doesn’t endure. Rainfall breaks the moment up and the vocals become garbled and unrecognizable - we aren’t just being offered bliss, but something far more ambiguous and strange. Hún Jörð is where the album leaves behind drone and soundscape for something far more direct - sounding in the guitar work like a Mogwai riff with some disciplined drumming that pushes the noise along propulsively. For those who see the band as naive Utopian Romantics it’s a strange track but that friction I think is essential for recouping the notion of hope - hope against the hope of capitalism.
Leit að Lifi is a strange, and relatively short, work. The juddering whirrs and chattering sounds are drowned out by wind and rain before the lead-in to Myrkur with its Pink Floyd style guitar line - a chilled-out jam with ethereal vocals and more structured and organized instrumentation but is, I suspect, exactly what people may have criticized GY!BE for missing on their Yanqui UXO album. Myrkur has a great sense of contrast which generates some much-needed emotional balance to the album as a whole - it’ll leave you with a smile from a moment of Icelandic sun. It is, in other words, the soundtrack to a fond memory with friends. Hafssól takes us back outside again but a landscape that is more desolate - organs in the distance get drowned by the wind and the words of the vocal are snatched away into distortion. It is the sound of the climb to the top of the mountain, wreathed in cloud and in the distance perhaps even thunder. It raises an issue that will almost certainly come up in later albums -- namely, the relationship of hope to nature more broadly, or in other words, how Romanticism and its philosophical and literary heritage both allows for and circumscribes our thinking about the nature of hope and the character of Utopia.
Von (translated in English as either Hope or Expectation) manages to marry many of the tensions and points of friction in the album so far. The ethereal vocals and delicately picked guitar mesh beautifully with the swell of noise in the background and a rhythmic drumming pattern gives the whole thing shape. Hope then, is an organization and combination of disparate, even competing elements held together through a given purpose and the active work and participatory consciousness of bringing it into being. It is, for the most part, a peaceful song - a gently rolling noise that doesn’t necessitate the cathartic scream of something like GY!BE. If their music is the fight for a better world, a scream against the darkness in the effort to articulate what could be, then for Sigur Ros we have a way into that better - a brief glimpse through the gray curtain of capitalist realism. From there Von shifts into windchimes before the glitchy weirdness of Syndir Guðs (Opinberun Frelsarans) which is another cavernous soundscape shot through with electronic beeps and more of the familiar ethereal vocals. Again, there are elements here that simply do not fit with the simple vision of the band as straightforwardly hopeful. There is a peaceful air, but rather than lapse into what the Pitchfork review for this album called Therapop, it is far too reflexive and self-aware for that. This isn’t just to make YOU feel BETTER, but to generate reflection, introspection, and thus, potentially, change and renewal.
It’s a point made immediately clear with the album closer, the nine-minute-long Rukrym which starts with over six minutes of silence. A John Cage inspired idea (is it really silence? - for me at least those six minutes were populated with all kinds of noise, from the wind outside my window to planes flying overhead, the noise of the dogs barking down the street). Silence, like the long take in film, forces the listener to pay attention to details, to look for meaning, to be more aware of the noises which surround us. To put this another way, Silence is both meditative - it demands of us that we do nothing, but in so doing we can come to reappraise the noise of the world around us. This is not simply a personal project but a profoundly political one too. To quote China Mieville:
Capitalism is catastrophe, exhausting, brutal, quite unrelenting, it just will not give us a minute, and it is too fucking loud. How could there not be those of us for whom the myth that keeps us striving, in full knowledge that we can’t know what will be, in fact whatever, however clamorous, the desperately needed thereafter might be, the yearning that drives us to deploy the insights of words and of the silences therein and beyond, is for the quiet of the deep, of stone, a chorus all speaking that silent underground language, an ultimate abstraction, silence beyond the silent silence as the Gnostics had it, but all heresies aside, for silentium, just to take a breath and hear nothing, for silence itself. Stop, listen. Selah.
Stop. Listen. Can you hear it? There, on the cusp of understanding, on the edge of consciousness, beyond the realm of manufactured glamour that is the capitalist hope, there remains something else. The quiet, inextinguishable hope of Utopia.
LISTEN HERE: