Sigur Ros
Before the next track (and the second half of the album) begins, you’re forced to sit through 35 seconds of silence. Only it’s not absolute silence. Listen closely and you’ll hear an almost imperceptible hiss, the song’s death rattle. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang or a whimper–with a whisper.
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Of course, not everyone who’s plopped into this sonic wasteland turns to T.S. Eliot for comparisons. After hearing Sigur Ros perform over half a minute of silence at a recent concert, the Boston Herald’s Brett Milano confessed, “I can’t recall a time when I’ve ever been more tempted to yell ‘Free Bird!’ or ‘Rock and roll!’” Does stillness bother us so much that we have to fill it with our own voices? Ask John Cage, who spent a lifetime insisting that true silence doesn’t exist–and did his best to keep it nonexistent by interminably yammering about his theories on the college lecture circuit.
Of course, at a certain point the mind screams uncle. Or at least mine did. At a recent Sigur Ros show, I almost had a panic attack. Sitting in the middle of hundreds of fans, I finally understood the band’s album title: I felt trapped in the middle of a giant set of parentheses. A bow was threaded over guitar strings, a keyboard’s chords melted into single notes, a tiny crackle escaped through Birgisson’s microphone–everything seemed to happen at once. The string section swelled and the more mundane melodies plodded–yet, loud or soft, neither took precedence over the other. There was no dominant melody, and my ears refused to create a hierarchy of sound. I felt claustrophobic.
