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Sigur Rós - Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do (Geffen/EMI)
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There's something about Sigur Rós that invites - shall we say - asymmetrical
eyebrows. An unpronounceable album called '( )' sans either tracklist
or artwork; songs with lyrics in a nonsense language called 'Hopelandic';
a song called eighteen seconds before sunrise consisting of eighteen
seconds of silence; a professed aversion to publicity; and a cultivated enigmatic,
capitalising on the elemental/mythic - the poetics of that explosive interface
between the volcano and the glacier - that particularises Icelandic culture.
They have flirted with pretension in a shamelessly winsome way since the beginning,
and continue to get away with it because, first, for each one of us who might
be tiring a little of the tease, there are ten who have just discovered the
glory that is Ágætis Byrjun - one of the outstanding albums of
the last ten years - and, more importantly, 'pretension' presupposes insubstantiality
- a fart in a bubble - and SR's music has more substance in it than a random
thousand of the Q queue of posing pretenders.
Ba Ba ... is a studio mastered version of a semi-improvised performance
given in October 2003 in New York, and again in December 2003 in Paris, when
SR and Radiohead accompanied a new dance piece - Split Sides - by the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company. Split Sides was made up of two alternative pieces
of choreography, costume and set design, and music. The way the elements were
put together was decided on the night by a roll of the dice.
Cunningham's entire nigh-sixty-year choreographic career has been concerned
with exploring such notions of randomness. In his work, the choreography is
developed independently of the music so that any perceived significance in
the performed relationship between the music and the dancing is the result
of chance, not design. Together with his late long-time partner, the composer
John Cage, he is also known for working with eccentric sound-sources. Dancing
to an amplified miked cactus was typical.
SR entered into the spirit of this occasion with unexpected and charming aplomb:
they improvised a 20-minute section of music over a previously recorded backing
track using two sheet-fed music boxes, a glockenspiel and a specially homemade
percussive instrument (dubbed 'bummsett' in Icelandic) comprising eight ballet
shoes on a rack. The backing tracks incorporated recordings of Merce Cunningham's
voice and the sound of his tap-dancing feet, as well as the sounds of the
dancers' footfalls, recorded at the Company's studio in Manhattan.
The Cunningham/Cage homage continues, in this EP (first released as an iTunes
mp3 download), in the (tongue-in-cheek?) suggestion that the three sections
can be played in any order (thus perhaps laying claim to this being the first
mp3 release to consciously incorporate the iPod shuffle as a creative device).
This works up to a point, in that each part begins and ends in a similar way,
so that any end will dovetail, theoretically, with any beginning. Having dutifully
tested half of the six possible permutations, though, I have to say that the
default order (ba ba - ti ki - di do) isn't seriously improved by the
shuffle, and that this betrays the kind of unedited art-school gimmickry that
little princelings tend to get indulged in, and is neither illuminating nor
original (sorry guys - Eric Satie was doing random shuffling in 1910).
What begins as a querulous, fragile, bottom-of-the-glacier piece, quite unlike
the widescreen epic soundscapes of ÁB or ( ) - (this
is more like Björk flitting about in one of her wonderful glittery fairy
dresses trying to decide between Fourtet and Mike Oldfield) - takes the same
basic thematic components on a chilly ride through three quite different and
progressively more complex environments. Each section conforms, though, to
a familiar SR template of letting a deceptively simple sonic idea expand,
slowly and delicately, to define a particular aspect of the shared space,
and then, just when you thought that was it, adding a final element that transforms
it utterly. It's a breathtaking formula, like adding a drop of scarlet dye
to a bowl of milk. And in di do there's further embellishment to the embellishment,
in that there's a noisy middle section consisting of a sudden and unexpectedly
violent aerobraking skim through some Heaviside layer of the unconscious where
fragments of an impenetrable monosyllabic language orbiting in this electronic
limbo are randomly scooped up and injected into a cascading multirhythmic
collage where the background of the tinkling, whirring music box provides
the only stable point of reference.
Ba ba ti ki di do. What's to be made of those syllables is anybody's guess.
"Left a bit - right a bit - steady - d'oh!" in Aztec, maybe. It
hardly matters. Judged simply as what it was - a near-busk around a set of
deliberately imprecise performance parameters - it's brilliant. Its continued
life on disk (after being given a lick and a polish in their Sundlaugin studio
by Biggie the Gus Gus genie) occupies a significant moment of transit between
these past few friendly indie-years with Smekkleysa and Fat Cat and the scary
future in thrall to the men in suits at EMI, to whom they signed earlier this
year. Under EMI's auspices they are due to provide the first of three contracted
albums in the autumn of 2004. This refreshing little EP might well be remembered
as both a toodle-oo to the astonishing variety and fertility of this early
period and a hey to mainstream global dominance and endless slightly varied
reiterations of best-selling tracks, cynically referred to as the Coldplay
effect. Or not. Fingers crossed.
21st March 2004
