So it is actually faster than it should be and Jónsi’s voice sounds a little bit more childlike or younger when it’s sped up like that. We felt “Starálfur” was a bit too slow as well, so we sped it up on the tape machine, up a half note. So we were always playing around with that.
SIGUR ROS AGAETIS BYRJUN LYRICS SOFTWARE
It was a PC software and you could actually move the cursor of the software with the mouse button. And then we have the backward strings in the end of course, we were always playing around with this music software that we had it was called Soundscape. We did that on a Nord keyboard, there’s a Moog there as well. My piano came late in the process and then doing some sort of a beat. Of course we had eight players not four so we had to photocopy all of the sheet music and we didn’t have a photocopier so we used a fax machine, which was in the office of the studio (laughs).Īnd then, it was difficult to fill in the gaps. And when we came to the studio, the players had all been waiting and had been waiting an hour and were really annoyed. Somebody knew someone who had some notation software and we could save midi files and he could send it over to us and we could print one copy it was all under the RAM. And we couldn’t print out of it, it was a locked format on a PC, which belonged to my parents. Getting these professionals, and we were just over twenty and it was all kind of awkward and we had this really bad notation software that we were using. Yeah we got the string players in and that was a very strange experience (laughs). Georg is always very good with his riffs (laughs).
I think it was actually Georg who played it on synth or something, the original thing. The vocal line, the piano and everything but we had faith in the idea. We actually started out just doing the string arrangements for that song and we started recording that and everything else came later. The original idea was just two chords and then this melody, the string melody at the start was around for a while. “Starálfur” is one of the songs that was not made with everyone sitting together and playing instruments. To start, that sound was also on the beat but we put it on the second beat rather than the first beat of the bar. Which then when you plugged into another amplifier or into a proper sound system, then of course it wouldn’t sound like that, but because it was plugged into this shitty amplifier, it made this submarine type of radar sound.
The high ‘E’ that I play there came out like a radar, like a submarine radar sound. It was called the submarine song at the start because my organ that I was using then, I was plugging it through an amplifier and the frequency aspect of the amplifier and the organ was all wrong. Though Jónsi always has the last say about the lyrics of course because he has to sing it. The lyrics in “Svefn-g-englar” were all co-written, we used to do that quite a lot back then. I think it was probably Georg who came up with the three chord riff. We wrote that in a rehearsal space, in a basement there. It’s a song that we never got bored of, everyone enjoyed playing it. And that idea came to be like being in the womb, like being a fetus or something like that. To me at least it was always like being underwater, like in a swimming pool, you dive to the bottom and you might just sit there and relax your body. Rather than being conceptual and say something important, it was more about what the song was telling us to do. There was more about describing the feel of a song, we used to work a lot like that back then. In this episode, Kjartan Sveinsson talks through the making of Ágætis byrjun on its 20th Anniversary. Their breakthrough record, Ágætis byrjun, was released in 1999. In 1998, Kjartan Sveinsson joined the band on keyboards and guitar and provided the integral arrangements for strings, brass, choir and orchestra. They released their first album, Von, in 1997. Sigur Rós was formed in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1994 by Jónsi Birgisson, Georg Hólm and Ágúst Gunnarsson. A podcast celebrating classic albums, as told by the people who made them. The Making of ÁGAETIS BYRJUN by Sigur Rós - featuring Kjartan Sveinsson
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