the making of “go”
16/12/2009
jónsi’s official site jonsi.com has been updated with the weekly batch of “making of” photos, a video clip from the album’s mixing, and a quick peek into the upcoming tour’s visual inspiration. you can also follow the latest updates on jónsi’s twitter (most recently tweeting about album artwork & his grandmother).
here is what longtime friend and manager john best had to say about jónsi’s solo album and how it came to be:
for years – i mean literally since i’ve known him (10 years now) – jonsi has been beavering away in his kitchen, bedroom or living room making music extra-curricular to sigur ros. to be honest we’d kind of gotten used to these being drawing board propositions only – the ambient album, the electronic album, the pop album, the acoustic album, etc. it’s not that we didn’t doubt his work ethic; these things certainly existed, it’s just that they seemed more conceptual than real; creation to sate jonsi’s enormous energy rather than anything we’d ever have to put on a release schedule. but then last year he went and finished ‘riceboy sleeps’, an album that had existed as a soundtrack to his and alex somer’s artwork far in advance of being an actual record. and then he started on about the *acoustic* album and bounced straight off the back of ‘med sud i eyrum…’ into the studio (alright, apartment) with icelander-by-proxy nico muhly.
it seemed apparent to us that it would be missing a trick to limit a bona fide jonsi solo album to being a small scale acoustic project, so some subtle cajoling and encouragement to reach beyond his comfort zone was the order of the day. we shot the breeze about producers and peter katis’s name came up off the back of his work with fanfarlo and the national. jonsi weighed in with drummer samuli from mum, who he’d heard playing with alex in nordic art supergroup kira kira. suddenly the *acoustic* record wasn’t looking so acoustic after all. from then on it’s been a slow and ineluctable slide towards the full-on, barely contained, glorious mayhem soon to be available on ‘go’.
everything about this record has a seat of the pants feel about it, its wildly shifted focus, the way nothing (including the album itself) had a title til about an hour before the news hit the blogs; the fact that as i type i still have no idea what is going to be on the cover; or that, even though jonsi is currently on a plane to new york to master the record we’ve no clear idea of what order the songs are going to appear in, or even, in some cases, which versions of songs are going to be used. it’s edge of the seat, it’s exciting, it’s infectious. i think we are beginning to sense that maybe jonsi has created something super special here. more than that in fact, i think he has created something really special here. i’m not sure i’ve felt this excited about a project since the time i first heard agaetis byrjun, right back in 1999. holy fuck. are you ready?
– john best, manager, 7 december 2009.
