Interview with Amiina

Most people familiar with Icelandic quartet Amiina first discovered them accompanying Sigur Rós during one of their many stops around the world. Now, Amiina have stepped out on their own with ‘Seoul’, a new single taken from their debut album, due early in 2007.

Tell me a little about how Amiina began.
The four of us met when we were in music school together here in Iceland when we were teenagers. We played some classical music together for years and really liked working together. Slowly we got more and more into doing studio work with different Icelandic bands and in 1999 we were asked to work with Sigur Ros and started touring and recording with them. Doing non-classical music together, and working differently with our instruments inspired us in wanting to do our own music and about two years ago we finally had the chance to do some. We recorded our first EP, AnimaminA in the summer of 2004 and then the ball started rolling.

Your live performances are what have introduced most people to your music. How have the performances evolved over time?
Now that we are doing our first headline tours we try and take the space and time we need on stage. We try and connect the songs together with sounds and stuff we sample live. We play a lot of instruments in our set, we move a lot around the stage and we are more and more using that as a big part of our performance instead of rushing around trying to hide it. We have also made some special live versions of some of our songs. We basically want to create a special atmosphere, a journey that we take our audience through.

Can you tell us what some of the many instruments you play onstage are?
Well, if I just make a list, these are the main ones:

Electric strings, a saw, a glassophone, a metalophone, harmonium, cuadro (small 10 stringed guitar) electric guitar, a mandolin, bells, glockenspiels, a music box, a celtic harp, table harps (cimbalos), a micro korg.

The glassophone and the table harps are partly home made, they have some contact microphones on them. The music box has that as well. It’s the kind were you make your own melody on it by cutting holes in a paper strip that you run through it. The saw is just a musical saw, with its teeth and everything.
We just like to pick up instruments and sound sources along the way that fit into the songs we are working on at the time.

One of the things that comes across so well in your performances is how confident each of you are with the many different instruments you play. Are there any instruments that were particularly difficult to learn?
Hmm…well, I wouldn’t really say that we know how to play all these instruments very well. If a professional player would see us he would tell us that we were playing them all wrong. But that is maybe a big part of our sound; we have a fresh approach to these instruments, because we don’t really know what is the right way to play them. 
I can’t really say if there is a more difficult one, they are all so different.

I know that Iceland and Reykjavík, in particular, is small, but how did you begin working with Sigur Rós?
They had heard of us through our work with other bands. They needed a string quartet to play with them on the release concert of Ágætis Byrjun in 1999. We all liked working together so a year later they asked us if we were up for touring with them. And so we did for 6 years!

There are many aspects to the music you create. Strings, bells, percussion, computers: Are there particular roles that each member of Amiina fills?
No, not really. We write all the music together, one of us might be playing around with a simple idea and the rest joins in on whatever instrument they feel like fits in. Then the song slowly takes on its shape. However there are some instruments that only one of us plays, like the saw and the glassophone.

The instrumental music we¹ve heard so far is quite beautiful. Are there plans for any future Amiina songs to include singing?
We have already started singing in our songs. There is one with singing in it on our upcoming EP and even more on the next album!

What are some of the inspirations you draw upon when composing?
It’s hard to pinpoint. We don’t think about it a lot. I guess we are just inspired by everything in our lives, our environment, people and music around us. It’s all a big melting pot of the four of us.

The main concept of our website is CD recommendations, in small groups. Would you list for us 7 current favorites from Amiina?
I can only answer on the behalf of myself, but I think the others like them as well. Colleen, Joanna Newsome, Efterklang, Ólöf Arnalds, Sufjan Stevens, Four Tet, Final Fantasy, and, of course, our friends Sigur Ros.