Liminal: Sigur Rós as a living, breathing eco-system

December 8, 2018 2:11 PM

Welcome to Liminal. Liminal is an ‘endless’ Sigur Rós ambient playlist which is live today [May 8, 2018], brought to you by Jónsi, Alex Somers and Paul Corley. It will be built over linear time into a never-finished project. Albums will be released, volumes added to. Liminal, both live and locally, takes the listener to a place neither here nor there; a “liminal" space. Liminal + Liminal 2 + Liminal 3 = approximately 3 hours of ambient "chill-out" music from Iceland, both original compositions and remixes of works by this trio and others.

More from the introduction, included as the first link in the OP:

liminal is more than an ambient sigur rós mixtape curated by jónsi, alex somers & paul corley, however. it approaches sigur rós as a living, breathing eco-system, identifying the connections and blurring the boundaries between work done and work to come; between brand new music and ideas barely yet born; between songs written 20 years ago and collaborations to be made tomorrow [May 8, 2018].

in bringing together these collaborations and commissions with solo work and the work of close friends in the sigur rós ‘family’, liminal aims to take the listener to a hinterland, to the threshold of a place neither nor there; a “liminal” space.

“liminal is a musical thread that binds us together; the sounds that we all found inside of ourselves from a young age,” say alex somers. “it’s a music that is patient. sounds unfold in front of you and momentarily offer to show the world from a different angle.”

The three volumes are also on YouTube (one + two + three) and other platforms

"But wait," you say, "that's only three hours! I wanted endless!"

Fine, fine. Here's twenty four hours of (generative) Sigur Rós music: Route One, part one, part two, and part three

on the longest day of summer 2016 sigur rós drove the whole way round iceland’s ring road, broadcasting the entire 1332km journey live on youtube. the soundtrack to this “slow tv” adventure was created using generative music software taking the multi-track stems of the sigur rós song ‘óveður’ and endlessly reinventing them to create new and unpredictable musical directions in real time.

And another 1 hour 22 minutes of Sigur Rós: Tónandi Liminal Soundbath - Live from Los Angeles (YouTube).

posted by filthy light thief (12 comments total)

look forward to listening... generally like the idea liminality in general. An oldie but a goodie in this space is Distant Early Warning by Icebreaker - https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/icebreaker/distant-early-warning/ still a favorite many years later.
posted by specialk420 at 3:03 PM on December 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have driven round the perimeter of Iceland with my kids (pro tip: don't stop for all the awesome waterfalls; there are too many. But stop for the great ones because OMG) and anyway we had Sigur Rós playing and it was perfect.

If you can manage this in your lifetime... do it!
posted by sjswitzer at 3:06 PM on December 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

I feel like Sleeping Dragon deserves a mention here: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/sleepingDragonToneGenerator.php
And the software music generator that this is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cpqNAQPWVs
posted by doctorfrog at 4:05 PM on December 8, 2018 [5 favorites]

say, this is relevant to my ARGH NO WHY ARE YOU DISTRACTING ME WITH SHINY THINGS
posted by loquacious at 5:57 PM on December 8, 2018

Shit... Autechre, you boys gotta up your game, apparently!

Also - is there no singing on this? Because, while I like the *idea* of Sigur Ros, all that weird ass singing is like Post-Rock with vocals. That is to say: WRONG!

If this is more like Sigur Ros without singing/words, I think I can handle it.
posted by symbioid at 6:56 PM on December 8, 2018

deserves a mention here:

Also Absolute Value of Insomnia, a weekly four hour radio show of fresh generative stuff ...
posted by philip-random at 7:27 PM on December 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

What the hell does "built over linear time" mean?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:52 PM on December 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

it means it uses blockchain
posted by rhizome at 10:15 PM on December 8, 2018 [4 favorites]

Linear Time is a term of art in Computer Science (indicated by the "Big O-Notation of "O(n)":

"An algorithm is said to take linear time, or O(n) time, if its time complexity is O(n). Informally, this means that the running time increases at most linearly with the size of the input. More precisely, this means that there is a constant c such that the running time is at most cn for every input of size n. For example, a procedure that adds up all elements of a list requires time proportional to the length of the list, if the adding time is constant, or, at least, bounded by a constant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity#Linear_time
posted by symbioid at 10:30 AM on December 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

It may have been because of this post, but last night I was thinking of what would be on my list of all-time favorite songs, and Hljomalind would definitely be there.
posted by 4ster at 12:59 PM on December 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

I know what big O notation is. "Built over linear time" in this case still makes no sense.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 7:54 AM on December 11, 2018

All music proceeds in linear time.
posted by rhizome at 9:44 AM on December 11, 2018