A Night With Sigur Ros: Heima

Sigur Ros has gained tremendous popularity in the independent and critical scene, but has only recently begun to receive mainstream attention.  I first discovered Sigur Ros when I watched Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which featured a Sigur Ros song, which was played as Team Zissou finally discovers the jaguar shark.  

For those who have not heard of Sigur Ros, they are a difficult band to describe.  I'm not sure giving them a label does them justice.  The best way I can describe their music is as follows:  Each year, there is an international organization that looks at several population statistics and ranks the countries around the world in order to determine the "happiest places to live."  Iceland is consistently in the top three.  It is regularly described as a country of people who have discovered inner peace and tranquility.  As you watch Heima, the documentary dvd by Sigur Ros, you begin to understand why these descriptions are so common.  

Sigur Ros' music is introspective and inspiring.  Heima blends the best of their music with some amazing footage of the Icelandic countryside.  I recently lent it to a friend, suggesting him and his wife buy a couple of nice bottles of red wine, get a fire going and watch this dvd on a weekend night.  When I talked to him a week later, he thanked me.  

Here is Sigur Ros' description of Heima:

"Last year, in the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and now provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands captured live in their natural habitat.

The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful ‘Takk…’ album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir*, the band reached an entirely new spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth.

The question of the way Sigur Rós’s music relates to, and is influenced by, their environment has been reduced to a journalistic cliché about glacial majesty and fire and ice, but there is no doubt that the band are inextricably linked to the land in which they were forged. And the decision to film this first-ever Sigur Rós film in Iceland was, in the end, ineluctable.

Shot using a largely Icelandic crew (to minimise Eurovision-style scenic-wonder overload), ‘Heima’ - which means both “at home” and “homeland” - is an attempt to make a film every bit as big, beautiful and unfettered as a Sigur Ros album.   As such it was always going to be something of a grand folie, but one, which taking in no fewer than 15 locations around Iceland (including the country's largest ever concert at the band's Reykjavik homecoming), is never less than epic in its ambition.

Material from all four of the band’s albums is featured, including many rare and notable moments. Among these are a heart-stopping rendition of the previously unreleased ‘Gitardjamm’, filmed inside a derelict herring oil tank in the far West Fjords; a windblown, one-mic recording of ‘Vaka’, shot at a dam protest camp subsequently drowned by rising water; and first time acoustic versions of such rare live beauties as ‘Staralfur’, ‘Agaetis Byrjun’ and ‘Von’."