Valgeir Sigurðsson

Valgeir Sigurðsson is an Icelandic composer and producer. As much as he could be described as a speculative post-minimalist with a challenging post-punk sensibility and a fascination with glitch and improvisation, conventionally an acoustic classical musician with deep, working knowledge of the astonishing sonic potential of electronics and an unabashed love for the beauty and brains of weird pop, Valgeir Sigurðsson is an inspired, industrious maker of a spectacular northern music, of an uncanny soul music, a fiendish, visceral folk music.

As the editorial and curatorial edge of the Bedroom Community label he founded in 2006, his work with the likes of Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Paul Corley, Sam Amidon and Daníel Bjarnason features a constantly evolving appreciation of the diversity of music in the world. Three previous solo works, Ekvílibríum (2007) Draumalandið (2010) and Architecture of Loss (2013) were followed in 2017 by the intensely reflective Dissonance. 

Elsewhere, with an enterprising understanding of where forward looking, genre liquefying modern music is moving, his collaborations have included Björk, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Feist, Damon Albarn, CocoRosie, Sigur Rós, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Brian Eno, Tim Hecker, Anohni, Oneohtrix Point Never and Alarm Will Sound. This series of prolific personal and professional connections with others has helped him conceive an intelligent, private modern way of producing music that elegantly compresses centuries of patient technique and refinement plus decades of innovative electronic experimentation and post-pop progress into one place.

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists, Valgeir’s first opera based on text by Canadian poet a rawlings, was staged at the Reykjavík Arts Festival in 2014, and won the Music Theatre Now award in 2015. 

As adept at working in electronic and studio settings, and generating evocative soundtracks for film or composing orchestral and chamber pieces, his work for theatre, dance and installations demonstrates how Sigurðsson thinks like a painter and sculptor as much as sound artist and musician.