What are you reading right now?

innerspaceboy · 03-20-2016, 12:35 PM

Just finished Ethan Hayden's critical analysis of Sigur Ros' ( ).

Ethan Hayden is a linguistics expert, composer and performer currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music at the University at Buffalo, US. I had the pleasure of attending one of his performances of his work, "…ce dangereux supplément…" in 2015. The work is a set of phonetic studies for voice, video, and electronics in which Hayden makes a wide range of vocal sounds, none of which are coherent expressions of any known language.

This made Hayden a fitting author to tackle Sigur Ros' ( ) album for an edition of the popular 33 1/3 book series. The parenthetical album is sung entirely in the nonsense Hopelandic language created by the members of Sigur Ros.

So what does one write about an album with no discernible theme or statement? And how would one begin to describe the nonsense sounds of the Hopelandic language? Over the course of 150 pages, Hayden expertly addresses these questions, and presents both a critical analysis of Hopelandic and a philosophical perspective on the recording itself. The book adds a fascinating critical dimension to the album and works like it and it aims to help listeners approach these works with a greater sense of understanding.