pride week: sigur rós: viðrar vel til loftárása.

Sigur Rós makes music so beautiful it can convey pain. So exquisitely fine that it can carry the darkest feelings we know and make it understandable to everyone.

I really started obsessing about Sigur Rós about five years ago, and I’ve always loved this song, “viðrar vel til loftárása” (which translates into “Good Weather For Airstrikes”) from their second album, “Ágætis byrjun.” And even though the vid dropped in 2002, now that it’s Pride Week in Toronto it feels like the perfect time to take a second look at it.

There’s a certain kind of dehumanization that goes with homophobia. It makes you feel an incredibly specific sort of loss that’s impossible to describe to anyone that hasn’t felt it. Intellectually it can be understood. Morally it can be related to. Human compassion and decency knows that pain is pain and no human should ever intentionally make another human feel it. But it can only be known by those who have lived it.

I think it’s because the most beautiful human emotion – love – is accosted by the most evil human emotion – hatred. Many people are discriminated against for many reasons, but to have your sense of love attacked so caustically by people that don’t know you is a particular kind of poison. It’s like the purest form of our existence being attacked by our darkest. Being told that not only you, but also your universally common desire to share yourself with someone you love is wrong.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t personally experienced it can truly know how it feels. But this video, in combination with the soul-stirring music of Sigur Rós, comes as close as I’ve ever seen. During the week when more than a million people will come to Toronto to celebrate everything that joins and unites us, this vid can give everyone insight into, and hopefully motivation to keep fighting against, the fear, bigotry, and ignorance that some people use to try to separate us and destroy the human right to love.

sigur rós + la blogotheque: a take away show.

La Blogotheque is the shit. Their “Take Away Show” series is incredible: random, nomadic trips around Paris to unexpected locales to film acoustic mini-concerts with some of the world’s best artist. I thought it couldn’t get much better than their last vid with Fleet Foxes, but their newly released episode with the unmatched musical geniuses Sigur Rós has done it.

The sparse filming, pure sound, and honest tone of this vid is the perfect forum for Sigur Rós’ incredible sound. This is a must watch.

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sigur rós: hoppípolla.

I was watching the trailer for “Slumdog Millionaire”, which looks crazy kick-ass and I’m hoping to catch it this weekend, when during the second part of the trailer I heard one of my favourite songs in the history of songs from one of my favourite bands in the history of bands: Sigur Rós’ “Hoppípolla.”

Simply put, this song is what it sounds like to fly. All of the light and happiness and unbridled optimism I can imagine are wrapped up in its melody. “Hoppípolla” is an Icelandic term for puddle jumping, and it’s easy to see how that same energy breathes in the music. That moment where you abandon responsibility and your feet decide, for no legitimate reason other than because it will feel good; to leave the hard, narrow sidewalk and dive, without caution, into water.

There is a great official video for the song, but my fave version of the song is from the trailer for their 2007 live double-DVD “Heima.”

And here is the full version of them performing “Hoppípolla” live from “Heima.”

If I ever got to see Sigur Rós live, in Iceland, huddled inside a vast grassy field surrounded by jutting grey mountains, together with a bunch of tall, blonde, wind-blown Icelanders, as the sun set into a million colours, I think I would absolutely fucking die.

When I do die, I want them to play this song while my ashes fly off a cliff and into the trees. It is beauty itself.

eric lerner: gong.

The connection between colour and emotion is intrinsic in all of us. Universal and without language, there is a common, almost synaesthetic understanding of how different hues reflect what feelings are held within us. In his brilliant short film and unofficial music video for “Gong”, by one of the world’s best bands ever, Sigur Rós, film-maker Eric Lerner explores not only the correlation between colour and emotion but what would happen if these colours were on display for everyone to see. Like a gigantic mood ring on our bodies.  Stripped of the ability to hide our emotions or reveal only what we choose, how do people react to us when they can see our true inner-feelings so easily? And how do their reactions in turn, like the beginning of a cycle, affect our emotions?

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Via Motionographer

sigur rós + ryan mcginley: “gobbledigook”.

I don’t say this lightly, but Icelandic band Sigur Rós are so whacked out they make Björk look almost lucid. For this, obviously, I adore them. They are completely individual, with an ethereal, instrumental, other-wordly sound that seems to follow no musical convention… not any that we know of on Earth, anyway.

The first single from their new album “eð suð i eyrum við spilum endalaust” (With A Buzz In Our Ears We Play Endlessly), is “Gobbledigook”, and for the video they’ve teamed up with one of my favourite artists – photographer Ryan McGinley, who’s also doing artwork for the album itself.

I recently posted about his latest exhibition, the subtly brilliant “I Know Where The Summer Goes”, and I’m thrilled to see how his earthy, naturalist, glowy photgraphic style translated to film. The result is quintessential McGinley: a beautiful, hazy, green, wood nymph-filled romp. Unfortunately, the vid won’t get nearly as much play as it deserves because everyone in it is naked. And for some reason casual, unsexual, artistic nudity is still a gigantic taboo in North America. We are so uptight over here it scares me sometimes…

Click HERE to download a high-res version of the vid. Here’s a YouTube link, but watch it right now. They’re getting taken down faster than they’re going up because the censorship-lovers are flagging it left and right.

(Director: Arni & Kinski.)

Via OMG