Who let the strings out? Why Sigur Ros reinvented their music for this Australian tour

If ever a band was suited to performing live with an orchestra, it is Sigur Ros. The Icelandic trio’s music is hard to categorise, but sounds like it comes from another planet – it is sung largely in the invented tongue Hopelandic and dotted with creative elements, such as a guitar played with a cello bow. Textural and complex, this music doesn’t need language to be understood on an almost spiritual level.

Sigur Ros will be touring Australia with their music reinvented for an orchestra.Credit: Chloe Kritharas

“Sigur Ros and an orchestra is something that a lot of people have been waiting for – and actually, we’ve been waiting for as well,” says the band’s bassist, Georg Holm.

“We’ve been waiting for the right opportunity and the right way to represent it.”

In 2023, this long-held vision finally came to life – and what began as an experiment has bloomed into an ongoing tour around the world. Holm makes an important distinction between this show and other rock bands performing with orchestras.

“It was important for us that it wasn’t a band with an orchestra, but rather the orchestral version of the band,” he says. “We wanted to take everything we had, dismantle it and rebuild it into something different.”

This version of the Sigur Ros live experience has more in common with a classical music recital than a rock show: a sit-down affair in some of the most beautiful concert venues in the world.

Many of the band’s songs had to be reworked to suit this new setting. Keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, his wife Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir of the Icelandic band Amiina (also formerly a touring member of Sigur Ros), and British conductor Robert Ames composed the new arrangements. Some songs are only performed in part during the show, as the music all swirls together in this magical space.

Holm refers to this process as a reinvention of the music. “Songs where I’d usually be playing very loud with a distortion pedal on the bass – that’s not happening now,” Holm says. “And the opposite as well – parts I’d usually play quietly, I now play loudly. [They are] subtle differences, but for us, it’s very different.”

The collaboration began with the Wordless Music Orchestra, a New York City-based collective, but as the tour has made its way around the world, the band has been performing with local orchestras at each stop. In Australia, they’ll perform with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra.

The logistics of co-ordinating 45 people on stage, and often only having a few hours to rehearse with the local orchestras before each show, means that the set list has remained unchanged since the tour made its debut. It includes songs from the band’s latest album, 2023’s Atta, as well as highlights across the group’s three-decade-strong career.

Playing with an orchestra gives Sigur Ros the opportunity to perform some of their grand, sweeping songs that never quite worked before in the rock band setup. One of them is Staralfur, a cinematic, string-heavy number best known for its use in the climactic scene of Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Life Aquatic.

“[Staralfur] was never a live song because it just didn’t work,” Holm says. “It has a big orchestra … We did try playing it live as a trio, without any strings, and it was an interesting version, I have to say. That’s a moment I find quite beautiful – finally being able to play it properly.”

For those who can’t make it to this special tour, fear not – Holm hints at the possibility of a live orchestral record in the near future. “I don’t think I’m saying anything I’m not supposed to – I definitely think there should be a live album of this,” he says. “It should be available to listen to without going to a show.”

Holm and singer Jonsi have been in Sigur Ros since the band was formed over 30 years ago. The bassist is amazed and grateful they’re still going strong.

“It’s weird growing up in a band – we formed it when we were 17 or 18, and it’s basically been my job since then. I’m almost 50 now,” he says. “Being in a band is a relationship – we’ve had to work on it, it’s had ups and downs – but we’re still really good friends, which is amazing after all these years.”

The orchestral tour has allowed the band’s music to continue to evolve, surprising even the people who wrote it. “Just recently, on the last leg of this tour, I was playing a song from our first record and thought, ‘Wow, we’re still playing this. It was written in 1994’,” Holm says. “And yet it sounds completely different from how we recorded it and how we’ve played it through the years. It’s had a new lease of life.”

Sigur Rós will be performing in Melbourne at Hamer Hall on May 19 and 20, and the Palais theatre on May 21; in Sydney as part of Vivid Live at Sydney Opera House from May 23-25, and at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre on May 27 and 28.

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