When the Fagradalsfjall volcano erupted in Iceland in March 2021, Sigur Rós singer Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson was stuck in Los Angeles, gripped by both Fomo and homesickness.
It seemed everyone he knew got to be there, right up close, sharing footage of “the fucking earth erupting, right in front of you”. It had been 815 years since the last eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula, and this one lasted for six months – but Birgisson was trapped by the closed borders of the pandemic.
So he indulged in the luxury available to an artist of global acclaim and its resultant resources, who traffics in epic, emotive soundscapes: he made his own volcano. Or what he imagined a volcano could be like.
The result is Hrafntinna (Obsidian), an immersive sound work comprising 196 speakers, which has taken over a small subterranean gallery at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania.
In near-pitch blackness, you sit on a circular platform surrounded by a 25-minute track, spatially arranged in 360-degree sound: field recordings of heady eruptions move into sombre choral arrangements of his layered vocals; unsettling glitches fizz and pop with the intimate ASMR of Birgisson’s breath and mouth; and his instantly recognisable aching falsetto takes a turn around your head. Your nostrils fill with a smokey, salty, of-the-ground smell – made by Birgisson using fossilised amber, the only essential oil mined from the earth – and above is a circle of pulsing light, reminiscent of a James Turrell Skyspace or the mouth of a volcano. Subwoofers encased within the platform rumble and judder with the bass of an eruption, and Birgisson sings as if just for you.
When we meet at Mona’s restaurant before its opening weekend, Birgisson describes what he wanted from Obsidian: a “primal” experience that “goes straight up the arse to rattle your bones”.
Fans of Sigur Rós – famed for emotional, elemental soundscapes that have become so recognisable they’ve cameoed on the Simpsons – might be surprised to find Birgisson as funny and ribald as he is thoughtful and sweet. After we convince each other to have a midday glass of wine, he texts his boyfriend – in Hobart as a plus one – to tell him “he’s allowed to have a glass of wine too”.
Previously shown in New York and Canada, and acquired by Mona last year, alcohol was involved in the backstory of Obsidian as well. Birgisson had a lingering memory of a drunken night after a Sigur Rós gig in France 15 years ago, when he offered a shot to each member of the choir that had toured with them and asked them to surround him in a circle singing his favourite Icelandic hymn. “I just sat there on the ground, very wasted – we were all, like, drunk – but they sung this beautiful hymn, and it was like WHOOOMP. So intense.” For the artwork Obsidian, which has the same name as his 2021 solo album and incorporates some of the same sounds, he wrote his own hymn and recorded himself singing it as a choir.
“Intense” is a word that could describe most of Birgisson’s projects, from his work in Sigur Rós – sawing a guitar with a bow amid building orchestral prog rock, while singing like an angel and looking like an elf – to his solo albums, side projects and soundtracks. Sigur Rós’s elemental 2006 single Hoppípolla is synonymous with David Attenborough’s Planet Earth, and Birgisson’s recent forays into visual art have thrown visitors into the darkness of a flood and the blinding light of whiteout, with one sound sculpture made from PA speakers, chrome-plated butt plugs and a semen-like smell.
His last work in Hobart, Liminal Soundbath, was performed at the 2019 Dark Mofo festival with his then-partner and Riceboy Sleeps collaborator Alex Somers. At the cavernous Mac 02, 450 people lay under blankets on mats in concentric circles for hours in the hazy dark, as layers of music built and built, moving some of us to tears. For an artist who was born blind in one eye, it’s of note that his focus is almost always on other senses: heady smells, cacophonous sound, the rumble of bass. He’s even worked with taste, creating his own schnapps to accompany exhibitions – although there’s not one on offer at Mona.
“You want to move something within people somehow … music and scent are both invisible, and they both move you,” he says. “You can’t really understand it, or explain it very well. It’s this mysterious alchemical thing.”
Smell is a particular fascination. You might call it an obsession. Part of a “very small but very niche” community of scent-makers, Birgisson has a perfumery in the basement of his home in Los Angeles – more than 1,000 essential oils built into an old organ – and spends “maybe an hour a day” working there. “There’s endless smells out there … it’s very difficult, very complicated, but very exciting,” he says.
His white whale is vetiver: “That is kind of the ultimate goal, to make a good vetiver scent – but it is extremely difficult,” he says. Perfumery requires patience, expertise and time; exact amounts of different molecules must be left to marinate before you add something else and wait again, and it’s only at the end you realise you got something wrong along the way. “It’s the most frustrating, most complicated, most difficult experience I’ve had in my life,” says Birgisson, a self-avowed control freak, later describing it as “really humbling” and “a bottomless pit of disappointment”.
(Birgisson still has homemade CBD oil listed on his website, but is no longer making and selling it. “That was an experiment. It didn’t work,” he laughs. “It was fun, though.”)
Visual arts is a new outlet for Birgisson, whose first major solo show was in 2019. “I kind of don’t know anything about art – or I know very little,” he says. But he enjoys the exacting control he can have over it, as opposed to the chaos of playing different venues to different crowds each night. “You can curate a gallery any way you want, you can really control everything.”
Before the end of the year he’ll have a new exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in LA involving one piece in which “every single sound is from my voice … it’s so difficult!”; and another installation of around 100 speakers charged by electricity but making no sound at all.
Silence is one thing he hasn’t worked with yet. “It’s healthy for your brain to try something new.”
Hrafntinna (Obsidian) is now open at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, one of three new exhibitions including Heavenly Beings: Icons of the Christian Orthodox World and Jean-Luc Moulène and Teams. Guardian Australia travelled to Hobart as a guest of Mona
