Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Sigur Ros: Heima, Sweet Heima
Sigur Ros has had a great deal of International success with their atmospheric, moody, and captivating sound. Their songs were picked up in Vanilla Sky and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou They are a band of Icelandic musicians who are dedicated to music making. I predict that the biggest spike in their musical popularity will be due to a striking film, Heima, documenting their 2006 summer return to Iceland, playing a series of free, virtually unanounced concerts across their home country.
Musically and visually,Heima is a exceptional and striking experience. The DVD set includes a 90 minute documentary of the tour. The second disc, which I first saw, due to Netflix cue demands featuring lots more concert footage and unique locations across Iceland. I watched sections of this second disc repeatedly for most of this month with much less context than the complted film provided.
In Heima, the documentary proper, director Dean DeBlois, who is mostly associated with animated films like Lilo and Stitch, rescues th film after the original summer shoot with a fine job of weaving together environmental concert footage, the audiences, and beguiling Icelandic landscape into a really wonderful experience. There are local guest artists that collaborate with the returning popstars: a brass band, an artist who makes stone xylophones, a local choirs and a Icelandic rhyme expert. This is not your typical concert documentary
The music of Sigur Ros is described on their Wikipedia entry as "Post-rock, Dream pop
Ambient. and Shoegazing." Simply hearing it via the net did not connect with me. A colleague compelled me to take a closer look. After hours of their music in the mancave this summer, its hard to believe that anyone couldn't find this music compelling and intriguing, but I grant you I took some time and energy to connect with it here.
As I mentioned in my first post about this band a few weeks ago, I started at a YouTube delivered clip of the film's finale, a song eventually given the title Pop Song that was mainly filmed at their Reykjavík concert which was broadcast live over Europe with a crowd estimated at 10% of the entire population of Iceland. It is a major event and you sense the band is pulling out all the stops for this number that starts out lyrical and ends intensely.
Heima is the type of film or video experience that makes one want to know more about it. The audio commentator by the band's manager, John Best was actually pretty instructive about the band, the film, and the tour. One of the most interesting comments for me regards the background inspriations for the film. Best says there were three major inspirations they "nicked." To show the relationship between audience ,band and enviroment, they were inspired by Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer Day. Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout provided the inspiration for the way the Iceland's landscape would be presented. And they used the slow tracking and well framed performance photography of Pink Floyd Live at Pompei as a template on how to display Sigur Ros' music visually.
This example of inspirations provides for me evidence about how well envisioned this band's tour and film were for this project. I hope it serves its purpose in passing along the wonders of this band its heima.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:07 PM
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