Sigur Ros Agaetis Byrjun (Fat Cat)
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Listening to Agaetis Byrjun (“A Good Start”), while talking, thinking, writing, watching TV, or serving raclette and merlot is akin to sleeping by the ocean–it’s a subtle distraction, easily overcome. Paying close attention to it is a bit more difficult. In Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, the title character stands at the seaside trying to observe a single incoming wave. He concentrates on making out each distinct feature of each subsequent wave, reasoning that when the waves cease to exhibit any new or unique features, that he will have properly seen a wave–digested it, understood it. He tries to fix his focus on a limited field. But the borders of the square are fluid, and soon he realizes that his eyes have drifted and that he’s no longer looking at the same spot. He can’t be sure whether what he’s seeing is one contiguous wave or different waves, breaking at different points, for different reasons. And although one iteration of the form may share certain features with another, it would be inaccurate to find design or intent in these unrelated incidents.
To be ambient is to be part of the atmosphere or indiscernible from the environment. Whole artistic movements have been devoted to toying with this notion. Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down and put it in an art gallery. More recently AMM guitarist Keith Rowe put a local audience on edge by telling them they should feel no more obligated to applaud his art than they would any other ambient sound. What his demurral ignores, possibly on purpose, is intent–and the audience’s essential relationship to that intent. Artists like Duchamp and Rowe count on the audience to evaluate their work in light of their intent–even if, as in their cases, it’s to call into question the distinctions we make between art and not art.
The fifth track, “Ny Batteri” (“New Batteries”), is a repetitive, trancy two-chord ballad not unlike something by Radiohead or even Stereolab. It chugs along drumless for the first four and a half minutes, testing the listener’s patience (a recurring theme on Agaetis Byrjun). When the drums do arrive, they’re thunderous and distorted–the overdriven high-hat opens on impact, sounding like metal plates being stamped by some enormous apparatus on a dark assembly line. Sigur Ros knows that pop music has trained our ears to expect them to kick in each time the structure returns to the top. By holding that grand entrance at bay for longer than the length of the average song, they are acknowledging our complicity. Near the end the song dissolves into an alley-cat chorus of horns, then reinflates in a final reprise from which emerges a mournful, muted trumpet solo.
