Ólafur Arnalds reboots the piano player for the 21st century
Icelandic pianist-composer getting acclaim for compositional software and genre-spanning music
It’s creeping up on midnight Icelandic time and pianist/ composer Ólafur Arnalds — who’s rapidly making a name for himself in the world of instrumental music with a body of work straddling classical, ambient, soundtracks and chilled-down EDM — is up and ready to talk. In fact, he’s going to be doing interviews for at least two more hours.
“It’s normal for me. It’s fine,” he said with a laugh by phone from Reykjavík, where he lives. “I would stay up anyway.”
This somehow seems appropriate as Arnalds’ music — whether it’s his score for the BBC America series “Broadchurch,” his slow-motion, chamber-music reworking of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name,” the downtempo electro of his Kiasmos side project or the hushed tones of his just released 10th solo album, “re:member” — often possesses an ethereal, nightdrive melancholy.
But Arnalds, 31, says it would be a mistake to assume this approach mirrors his overall mood. “It definitely has a melancholy about it,” he said of his music. “But, for me personally, it’s not melancholic to make it. It’s always fun to make. It’s one of my favorite things to do in life, to sit there and make this music, even though it might sound melancholic to the listener.”
Indeed, he has had quite a bit to be happy about over the past few years: “re:member” recently peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s classical-music chart; he won a BAFTA Award (the British equivalent of an Oscar) for his “Broadchurch” score; his collaboration with pianist Alice Sara Ott, “The Chopin Project,” a reconceptualization of the works of Chopin along with original compositions in the same style, earned generally glowing reviews; and the latest film featuring his score, “Let Me Fall,” made its North American premiere on the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
Meanwhile, his upcoming world tour — which kicks off Monday in Moscow — will see him playing such renowned stages as the London Palladium and the Sydney Opera House.
In a genre that rarely produces stars, he’s positioning himself for such a status.
Reinventing the player piano
For “re:member,” Arnalds and colleague Halldor Eldjarn developed new software, Stratus, that reimagines player-piano technology as a compositional tool. It grew out of necessity as a hand injury three years ago had him wondering about his future. In 2011, he had run across player pianos in Asia while on tour with Japanese composer/electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto from Yellow Magic Orchestra.
“I was talking to my friend about these (player) pianos, and he kind of jokingly suggested that, ‘Hey, you should get one of those and all of your problems will go away,’ ” Arnalds recalled. “He said it like a joke, and I started thinking, ‘OK, but what if I did? What is actually possible with them?’
“If you forget about the fact that the (keys) are moving on their own — it looks like a ghost is playing the piano; it’s funny for like 10 minutes — but you utilize that technology to actually be creative and try to break away from the standard form of writing and playing on a piano, then what can you do?”
With Stratus, Arnalds strikes a note or a chord on a standard piano, triggering sounds from two connected, self-playing pianos. “It changes the relationship with the piano completely,” he said. “It opens up possibilities that weren’t there before … I can’t play 24 notes per second, nobody could do that, but a robot can do that. Or whether it’s thinking in ways that a human would never think, making patterns that are not natural for our physical instinct … . This will start moving the piano (sound) around in different ways, helping me come up with ideas that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
More than a pretty melody
It’s all part of a pattern for Arnalds, who never wants listeners to think that his primarily instrumental music should be confused with easy listening or background music.
“I’m not opposed to people listening to my music while doing other things … . (But) I don’t want the music itself to be reduced to something like that … . That can happen with piano music in general,” said Arnalds, who started his life in punk and hard-core bands before discovering film/instrumental music and, through his grandparents, classical music.
“I have to make it bigger than life,” he continued. “Some of my favorite artists did it. If you look at David Bowie, he did it with fashion. David Byrne did it with outrageous stage set-ups with Talking Heads. The music was always bigger than life; it was never just about the melody. I don’t know if I always succeed at that, but at least it’s something I aspire to … that it’s not just a pretty melody.”
He says that though growing up in Iceland — a small country of fewer than 400,000 souls living on a volcanic landscape of stark, rugged beauty — colors what he writes, it’s not necessarily for the reason outsiders imagine.
“A lot of people connect (my music) to beautiful scenery. I don’t necessarily agree with that,” he said. “It’s a very small community, very closeknit community, especially the music scene. People have to collaborate across genres quite a lot. …If I wanted to work with other neo-classical composers, there are one or two people. If I want to work with someone, I have to work with someone from hip-hop or from indie music or pop music. That fact really affects not just mine but all of the output of Icelandic music. It has all these cross-influences across genres all the time.”
That’s one reason he thinks the Icelandic scene — with the success of singer Bjórk (and her previous band, The Sugarcubes), the late Oscarnominated film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (“Sicario,” “Arrival”), and rock acts Of Monsters and Men, Sigur Rós, Kaleo, GusGus and Ásgeir — makes a bigger impact on the world’s musical stage than its small population would suggest. “The people here don’t look at genres very much,” he said. “You’re not trying to make something accessible or mainstream. You just try to be an artist and try to create something.”
Yet even though he spends a lot of time tinkering around and collaborating in his Reykjavík studio, he enjoys playing live. “It’s the only place, even now with the internet and social media, where I can look at someone’s face while I play music,” he said. “You can really get that direct connection with someone and, for me, that’s the point of the whole thing.”
Not a SXSW fan
It may be a while before Texans get a chance to see him. Arnalds says he’d like to come here, but there are no Texas dates on his current swing, and his experience at South by Southwest a few years ago didn’t go so well.
“I don’t think I’ll ever do that again,” he said, noting the general rowdy atmosphere was at odds with the quietude his music evokes. “It was a nightmarish place.”
For much the same reason, he has no desire to move out of Iceland, like some of his contemporaries who either relocate (Kaleo moved to Austin and then Nashville) or split time between Iceland’s chilly isolation and the hustle and bustle of continental Europe, the U.K. or the U.S.
He tried Los Angeles after associates suggested he needed to be there for film work, and had the same reaction he had to SXSW. “I couldn’t write anything … . It’s like the music business without the music,” he said. “And that’s not a very inspiring thing.”