Halló humans on the Inter-net. My name is Iceland. I am an island, full of mountains and glaciers and hot water and sheep and many nice Icelandic people, who like to make music, and who are sometimes cold. (Maybe you have seen me on your tele-visions, or your Inter-net.) I have heard that many humans use the Inter-net to make friends, and to talk about themselves. I decided to do this, too.
Iceland wants to be your friend. [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on May 19, 2011 -
57 comments
The Jónsi and Alex (Recipe) Show: join
Jónsi Birgisson (frontman of
Sigur Rós),
Alex Somers and their very loud blender to make
raw food recipes. They made three videos from their
Good Heart recipe book, for
Macadamia Monster Mash,
Raw Strawberry Pie, and
Nammi Nammi. If coconut, almonds, dates and agave (heavily featured in their three recipes) aren't your thing, enjoy a couple dreamy videos from the couple's album
Riceboy Sleeps:
All the Big Trees and
Daníell in the Sea. See also:
Sometimes I Get Scared (a distortion-heavy non-album track), and
Jónsi and Alex talk about their album, with parts of the tracks in the background.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 12, 2010 -
7 comments
As They Say is a 20+ minute musical composition by Icelander
Ólöf Arnalds, where she plays and sings all the parts herself in nine-fold splitscreen. She created the piece from interviews with 17 New Yorkers, each of a different nationality, and she sings in all 17 languages. Other Ólöf Arnalds videos:
11 minute documentary,
4 songs live on KEXP,
covering That Lucky Old Sun,
original song that morphs into Springsteen's I'm on Fire live,
new song,
an interview broken up into 17 chunks and a
10 minute documentary. The interview, the first of the documentaries and
some songs are in English.
[Ólöf Arnalds previously on MeFi]
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 9, 2010 -
4 comments
Juan Cabral, the commercial maker behind the
Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad has completed a new piece: this time, he and collaborators, including Múm, Richard Fearless (of Death In Vegas) and the people behind Sigur Rós' live concerts,
transformed the Icelandic town of
Sey∂isfjör∂ur into an ambient sound installation, placing speakers throughout the town, playing music (from folk to electronica to ambient orchestral) and filming the reactions of the locals as they went about their lives.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Oct 12, 2009 -
17 comments
100 Best Icelandic Pop & Rock Albums all streamable in full for free. Icelandic state broadcaster RÚV and Icelandic subscription music website
tónlist.is have published what they, their team of experts and the Icelandic public consider to be the 100 best Icelandic rock and pop albums of all time. Björk, Sigur Rós, Múm and The Sugarcubes don't need much introduction but below the cut there are short description of the other artists.
[via RÚV] [more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on May 6, 2009 -
47 comments
"In 1964, a computer - the IBM 1401 Data Processing System - arrived in Iceland, one of the very first computers to be imported into the country… The chief maintenance engineer for this machine was Jóhann Gunnarsson, my father. A keen musician, he learned of an obscure method of making music on this computer - a purpose for which this business machine was not at all designed… When the IBM 1401 was taken out of service in 1971, it wasn't simply thrown away like an old refrigerator, but was given a little farewell ceremony, almost a funeral, when its melodies were played for one last time. This "performance" was documented on tape along with recordings of the sound of the machine in operation." The whole story with samples, pictures and video at
Jóhann Jóhannsson's site.
[via]
posted by tellurian
on Feb 26, 2007 -
15 comments
