Icelandic band Sigur Rós is currently live-streaming a 24-hour drive around its homeland, with the soundtrack of a continuous music track generated in real-time.
Sigur Rós is well-known for its abstract music, activities and promotional work. Today is no different, as the culmination of its 24-hour drive through one of Iceland’s longest highways nears – the drive will come to an end at 10pm tonight.
The basic track underpinning the video is the band’s new song Óveður, but that’s not nearly long enough to last throughout. And, rather than hitting ‘repeat’ on the iPod, Sigur Rós is instead using something called Bronze.
Bronze is “generative music software”, which is a pretty fascinating tool, as it takes recorded material and ‘transfigures’ it on playback, so that it varies in infinite loops.
It seems the artists record through Bronze’s own music software tool, then listen to the resultant endless music through a dedicated player. Essentially, in this case, Bronze will take cues from Óveður – making an abstract band’s abstract song even more abstract – and generate endless variants.
Called Route One, the Sigur Rós video comes at a time of keen interest in the band, as a new world tour is just underway. Beginning at Primavera in Barcelona at the start of June, the band is in Dublin this Sunday (26 June), before moving on to the UK and beyond.
Route One began yesterday for the summer solstice, with a 1332km ring road around Iceland’s coast the scene for the ‘slow tv’ event.
Streamed live on TV in Iceland, the rest of us can enjoy it through YouTube.
“In a day and age of instant gratification and everything moving so fast, we wanted to do the exact opposite,” said Sigur Rós’ Jónsi Birgisson. “Slow TV is counter-active to the world we live in, in that it happens in real time and real slow.”
Main image of Sigur Rós via Christian Bertrand/Shutterstock
