Jónsi & Alex

Iceland’s Jon Thor Birgisson (the ethereal-voiced business lead vocalist and frontman of Sigur Rós) and his partner Alex Somers (an associate of the music group Parachutes as well as the developer of a lot of the image get in touch with for Sigur Rós’ albums) create gently atmospheric function in a number of press, encompassing ambient and instrumental music, visual artwork, and video function. The pair started collaborating in 2003, acquiring the name Riceboy Sleeps like a catch-all moniker for his or her interact — the term was the name of a track Birgisson published when he 1st fulfilled Somers, who at that time was destitute, subsisting primarily on grain, and spending a lot of his period sleeping. At least in the beginning, they contacted their creations mainly as an exclusive undertaking designed for their personal enjoyment and fulfillment, discovering a shared visual of natural splendor and simplicity concentrated around organic, hand-made, and discovered components, distressed and textured by age group and put on. Their 1st publicly available task was a skill reserve, Riceboy Sleeps — released in a restricted Iceland-only model in 2006, and reissued internationally the next season — which included 52 wordless web pages of discovered and hand-made pictures. 2007 also discovered the pair delivering their initial gallery exhibitions beyond Iceland (in Arkansas and Melbourne), and launching two bits of music, “All of the Big Trees and shrubs” and “Daníell in the ocean,” both with associated movies. After a half-decade of focusing on their music intermittently and haphazardly, Birgisson and Somers made a decision to get seriously interested in shaping it right into a completed item, and spent Feb of 2009 combining the songs for his or her debut recording — among which, “Joy,” made an appearance in unfinished type on the Crimson Warm Organization’s compilation Dark Was the night time, around this period — while residing at a remote control solar-powered raw-food commune in Hawaii. The recording, which was documented in Iceland completely on acoustic devices, and featured efforts from your string quartet Amiina (longtime Sigur Rós collaborators) as well as the Kópavogsdaetur Choir, premiered in July 2009, though by that point, Riceboy Sleeps was this is the title from the recording, the duo having transformed their name to Jónsi & Alex.