Sigur Rós must be what Iceland sounds like, deep inside the quiet and fury of the earth

Smoky-cold, misty thermal clouds of steam rising. Mist off a glacier, silence of snow falling. Slowly melting sharp-smooth shards of ice running faster and faster down a frozen sluice on their way to rejoin the sea from which they came.

These are a few of the things I thought of while listening to Sigur Rós on Friday 19 September at the Bank of America Pavilion. If you weren’t there you might think that imagery means they’re playing music to get a massage by. You know, New Age-y soothing relaxation music. Like what they play on those subliminal tapes you are supposed to listen to while you are sleeping to make you stop smoking or become more alluring to the gender of your preference. The nice people beside me (who kindly agreed to watch my stuff while i was shooting) said at the end of the concert, “You know what they are? They’re a ‘crescendo’ band.” And I knew exactly what they meant.

Continue reading for two photo galleries, show impressions, and shooting notes.

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Click here for Sigur Rós gallery 2

This isn’t Headbangers Ball by any means; some of their music is “relaxing” but you’ve got the wrong idea if you think you’ll fall asleep to it. The ethereal (yet often pounding, somehow) set only enthralled the several thousand people enthralled who braved the chilly weather at the open-air Bank of America Pavilion on Friday. A treat both visually and aurally, the band is characterized by a complex multi-layered audio process, an incredible light show and imaginative use of backdrops to accompany the music, and of course lead singer Jónsi Þór Birgisson’s frequent playing of his Les Paul electric guitar with a cello bow. They also sing a number of songs in both Icelandic and “Vonlenska,” a made-up language used by the band in a fashion similar to what American jazz singers would do with scat, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to understand the language to understand the rest.

Toward the end of the show a shower of a million little pieces of confetti poured out from the sky and down onto the ecstatic audience who tried to catch the fleeting swirls of colored flashes much as a child catches snowflakes. It was beautiful. My camera bag is still filled with those little memories. I don’t mind.

Supporting Sigur Rós was Parachutes, also out of Iceland, who have a similar dreamy quality to their music as that of the headliner. In fact they apparently did a cover of one of Sigur Rós’s songs during their set, which I didn’t realize until I heard people talking about it on the way out. I think that was kind of nice, you know what they say about imitation.

Parachutes

Parachutes

Shooting notes

This was definitely a challenging setup. We had gotten notification on the day of that they were only allowing photographers for the first two songs, which at first annoyed me but then I remembered that their songs are often 6 or 8 minutes long, or more. So that was OK. However, we were restricted to the far edges of stage right or left and not allowed to go in front of the stage at all. In fact we weren’t allowed to step in one single seat’s line of sight for one second. Now I appreciate that the band cares about their fans who paid good money for tickets but this just makes it more difficult for everyone. They get awkward pictures as publicity. I am pretty sure that if I had gone and asked the people in the front row if they would mind anyone standing in front of them–below the nearly 5′ high stage–they would not have minded at all, if they even noticed people there. It’s not like the band is set up on a 1′ riser down at the local dive.

Anyway, I had not brought my 70-200 lens because I’ve worked BoA before and it was absolutely unnecessary. There’s always a good area in front of the barrier and no problem getting clean shots. BIG mistake. I had to use my 24-70 and 85mm only, and the pictures suffered. I’m not thrilled with this set but it happens sometimes. (I also took pictures from my Row J Center seat with my Canon G9 and Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18; some of those actually came out better than with the Nikon pro cameras.) Light was very low for many songs (although increased in brightness along with the music’s heightening) and tended toward green, esp. at the beginning of the show when we were allowed to shoot, but there were enough bursts of light to get something decent. I kept ISO at a minimum of 1600; mostly at 3200 and went up to 6400 for a few; aperture wide open all the time with the DSLRs (not always necessary on the P&S bodies). The biggest problem was that I didn’t really have a long-enough lens. I will NEVER again not bring all of them to a show. The pain of lugging around 15 pounds of glass is worth knowing that if I need them I’ll have them.

Equipment used:

Nikon D300 with 24-70mm f2.8
Nikon D40 with 85mm f1.8
Canon G9, mostly in RAW except when I needed the added zoom power (have to go to JPEG for that)
Panasonic DMC-FZ18, mostly in RAW as with the G9

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Carla at Press Here for setting up the access; to Clare at Bestest for the guest list comp, and as always to Jay Anderson at Live Nation for taking care of everything else for me before and on site.