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From Broadchurch to biscuit bowl, Olafur Arnalds channels the sound of Iceland
By Michael Dwyer
There's a horse outside the kitchen window peacefully grazing through a grey Icelandic afternoon. Porkell Joelsson picks up a bowl of what looks like home-baked biscuits and offers it to a friend sitting at the breakfast bar.
A few more guests sit sipping coffee at the table of the cosy timber living room. Oh, and at the upright piano against the far book-lined wall, Olafur Arnalds fills the air with a cycle of soft, modulating arpeggios.
Olafur Arnalds channels the sound of Iceland.Credit: Marino Thorlacius
Floorboards creak as the camera swings slowly to another window in a long, uninterrupted shot, and look: there's our biscuit-baking host in the garden now, playing a deep, rich counterpoint with a French-horns-and-trombone trio.
Unhurried, hypnotic, effortlessly majestic, it could be the incidental soundtrack to any Tuesday in Mosfellsdalur. Nobody bats an eyelid as the tune empties back into ringing silence. Only Arnalds sits back from the piano and raises his eyes to the ceiling in rapture.
This is week five of Island Songs, a film/recording project that led the 31-year-old pianist to seven corners of his homeland in the summer of 2016.
"What I set out to do was to discover what makes people tick in creative industries where the result is usually not money or fame," he says. "Why do people do it? Especially when they live in little towns where not a lot of people will hear what they do.
"I learned a lot about our culture and a lot about where art comes from for people who didn't grow up in a place that has a music industry. For people of my age, we only know music as a thing that's sold to people."
In truth, Arnalds was going to do it anyway, even if it didn't pay. Something about his music, from this distance at least, feels like the weather and the mountains and that horse grazing in the bushes: just there; the soundtrack to a kind of ongoing, uneventful bliss. In Australia, he's perhaps best known for penning the soundtrack to the much-loved crime series Broadchurch, which earned him a BAFTA for Best Original Music.
His latest album, re:member, is another green world of keys dripping like icicles onto glacial strings, as still rooms hum and timbers creak under fingers and feet. To say it sounds like Iceland is stupid, of course, but then again …
"I think music can come from serenity, which can come from landscapes," the composer offers. "And I think it can come from communities that are very much affected by landscapes and nature."
The key conscious ingredient in re:member is something more universal. "My intention," he says, "was to express my creative joy and my exploration in trying to discover new things, not only in music but creating whatever.
"When I was making the album, the one thread I always had in the back of my mind is that no matter what this song sounds like, whether it's happy or sad or whatever, people should always hear that creative joy shining through everything. That was my mission."
Technology has always been key to Arnalds' creative exploration. On his first visit here in 2013, he began his concerts by sampling the audience onto his iPad. Weaving between strings and piano, our choral chord was teased and treated into a recurring motif in the performance that followed.
This time he's bringing something he prepared earlier. Stratus is a software system he devised with audio boffin Halldor Eldjarn, using one piano to trigger two unattended pianos to create unexpected rhythmic and harmonic counterpoints in the music.
"I still have to play it. It doesn't make any music on its own," he explains. "Basically if I press the note, it can turn that note into a rhythm, it can turn that note into a couple of other notes as well. It's a little bit intelligent in terms of what key I'm playing in or what tempo I'm playing in."
So what's with all the creaking and rattling? Surely there's an app for that?
"The creaking and rattling doesn't come from this technology. It just comes from instruments," he says with a laugh. "But yes, I have used this a lot on the record.
"To be honest, in the beginning when I started to record, it was not a conscious thing. I just didn't know any better and the sounds were just kind of in there.
"Today I definitely use it consciously, as a way to remind people that even when you're producing with electronics or orchestrations … that there's a person sitting behind a piano. You can hear the sound of the fingers touching the keys. I think it makes the record a little bit more intimate and you can express a lot of things with those little sounds."
To the soothed ear, it all seems a long way from the body-slamming cacophony of Fighting Shit, Arnalds' old hardcore band, as captured performing Why Everything Else But Deathmetal Sucks on YouTube circa 2008. But "for me", he says, "it's just a very natural continuation".
"I don't look at it as two different worlds that I've been in. It's just the definition of an artist discovering new things and always following my curiosity to wherever it takes me. It has taken me to some strange places but every place has something that I learn from."
In the air-freight sense, this visit will certainly be his heaviest to date.
"There are six musicians, including the string quartet. There's a percussionist who also plays synths. I'm playing piano, as well as my self-playing piano machine … so there's three pianos on stage."
Sounds expensive.
"I have to pay a lot more transportation costs than I would pay in wages," he says, laughing, "but it's really fantastic to tour with this. It's very inspiring on stage for me, because this generative thing responds slightly differently every night. Every show is unique in that way."
Olafur Arnalds performs at Brisbane's QPAC, November 27; Sydney Opera House, November 28; Canberra Theatre Centre, November 29; Melbourne Recital Centre, December 1 and 3.