Við Ólöf Arnalds

Olafur Arnalds new album, some kind of peace is his most revealing and vulnerable work to date and features Bonobo, Josin and JFDR. Within, you'll find a self-confessed perfectionist grappling with the messier realities of everyday life: the possibilities of love, of settling down, and how to navigate all of that during a global pandemic (the album was half-written prior to lockdown, and completed at Arnalds' harbour studio in downtown Reykjavik). What's emerged on some kind of peace is a record about letting your guard down, and ultimately what it means to be alive.

Ólafur Arnalds will release his next album re:member, through Mercury KX in August. The Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and composer's fourth solo LP finds him working with Stratus, a piece of computer software he programmed over two years in collaboration with Halldór Eldjárn. It uses MIDI values triggered by what Arnalds plays on his primary piano (equipped with a Moog Piano Bar) to generate different sequences on two player pianos. The process can create randomized feedback and lead to progressions that might be unplayable by conventional methods. Arnalds has described it as a way to change up his creative thinking: "You get ideas that you would never get otherwise, just because this inspired those ideas."

Four years in the making, "Are You Still Somewhere?" sees Lavinia Meijer combine original compositions with her long stated dream of interpreting modern composers and musicians for the harp. Works by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ólafur Arnalds, and Alexandra Stréliski all feature, as do collaborations with Dutch pianist Pieter de Graaf and punk legend Iggy Pop. Over the years, Lavinia Meijer experimented with electronic music, jazz, theatrical music, and avant rock. It was these experiments that led her to the ideas behind "Are You Still Somewhere?", and provided inspiration for her own compositions.

The band was created in the summer of 1988 around Þorvaldur Bjarni Þorvaldsson, a renowned vocalist, guitarist, and record producer in Iceland. In the beginning, all 3 members were part of local bands and studying at the Reykjavík College of Music in May 1989. "Sameiginlegt" was the name of their first demo, which made it onto the first studio album, Betra En Nokkuð Annað…