Hey Music Mag - Issue 3 - December 2018

station’s Slow Sunday was a beguiling slice
of contemporary electronica and featured a
track by the band he would most like to be
in: Radiohead.
Is the glacial cool that he exudes in the
studio a characteristic that he shares with
his fellow Icelandic musicians, Sigur Ros and
Björk? Florid descriptions of them in the past
continually fell over themselves to link their
music to its place of origin. Unsurprisingly,
Arnalds is sanguine about critics using his
place of birth as a metaphor for his music.
“Yes, it’s easy, but it’s good that it’s
easy because it gives people an image of
Icelandic music. If it wasn’t so easy, they’d
probably have no image. Their [Sigur Ros
and Björk’s] success helped because it
encouraged people to listen to me — “Oh,
he’s from that place.’”
So there you have it; an Icelandic
polymath, who defies description but
allows for bewilderingly complex
narratives in any case. Best just to listen.
And float downstream.
what synths can do and why pianos could
not do the same, and set out to combine it.”
He’s described the improvisational process
as being akin to being in a jazz trio – but
with robots. “You have these other players
insisting, ‘I’m going to do something
different’. Anything I play on my piano gets
turned into rhythmical textures on the others.
I then hear those and react to them in turn.”
Whatever the method, the results are
spellbinding. Across 12 tracks, Arnalds
skates around the ambient-electronic-folksynth-pop
melting pot with assured dexterity.
There’s little wonder he was pinpointed
by the influential British radio station,
6 Music, as one of the primary exemplars
of downtempo recently – his mix for the
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