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PRESS:
“The combination of Muhly’s formidable modern classical chamber compositions and Valgeir Sigurðsson’s greatly textured and varied production makes for some pretty remarkable listening.... If you’re after one of those records no one’s heard off but that everyone will want to own once given an airing - this is the real deal. Gorgeous.”
- Boomkat
"Some people are getting rather over-excited about Nico Muhly. They are right to do so."
- The Wire
“The first recording by a young composer on the rise blends ancient modes and contemporary gear to timeless ends.”
- Time Out New York
“Muhly’s range is expansive, the relationship between the emotional seriousness of his music and its boundless sense of humor is complex and rewarding”
-Fader Magazine
“a highly evocative and beautiful album...”
- Vital Weekly
“This is a dazzling album...a brilliant stylistic uniqueness.”
- Touching Extremes
"the sound of a future in which aesthetic worlds mingle and merge."
"This is how something old and dead becomes exuberantly lurid and new."
"an enthusiast's compositional strategy: I like it, therefore it's mine."
-Newsday
"small, elegant parcels filled with clear melodies, pulsating rhythms and the occasional alarming abrasion"
"[he has] a capacity to express emotion through circumspect means."
-New York Times
"It makes a change to come across an album of contemporary music that's not merely a document of a "performance" but a piece of creative recording in it's own right".
-Paris Transatlantic Magazine
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PRESS:
"...the compositional complexity of Arvo Pärt and the sonic nothingness of Wolf Eyes...Yes, it is that good"
-Vice Magazine, USA
“…simply awesome… Frost reminds us that minimalism was never just the polished sheen of Reich and Glass, but also the sweat and grime of Michael Gira's Swans... A deeper, darker minimalism- menacing and claustrophobic... This is Arvo Pärt as arranged by Trent Reznor... Magnificent”
-THE WIRE Magazine
"Arresting and exquisite... A truly elemental creative force.. "
-Maryanne Hobbs, BBC Radio One
“Frost creates a blissful symphony of machines… showing that finally we really have moved on. Without a doubt one of the most essential albums you will hear this year – ‘Theory of Machines’ is the future of electronic music”
-Boomkat
"Sonic Youth has softened guitar rock audiences, Lightning Bolt has done the same for many punks, and Fennesz has shown the possibility for melody among noisenik laptoppers... if there is a list of noise artists that could permanently change how music listeners view the genre it may be time to add Ben Frost to it. A-"
-Stylus Magazine
"Recalls the dense, relentlessness of the Swans, A sublime condensation of experience - dynamic, expansive and epic... Like the sound of icebergs breaking slowly apart"
-Cyclic Defrost Magazine
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£11.99
PRESS:
“The strength of Ekvílibríum is in the organic way Sigurdsson weds the electronic to the human... The result is a singular album, as ornate as it is direct.”
-The Fader Magazine
“Valgeir Sigurðsson is the most welcoming and thoughtful of hosts and, as he leads his companions through various narratives, he orchestrates one of the most exhilarating and perfect records you’ll hear this year.”
- The Milk Factory
"...on the whole, this is wonderful stuff." 4/5
-The Times UK
“...almost collapses under the power of its own trembling beauty... Valgeir Sigurðsson delivers his bonded masterpiece... prepare to be dazzled.”
-God’s In The TV
“an album for all connoisseurs of recorded sound, marrying exceptional electronic detail with real instrumentation on a grand scale.”
-Boomkat
Sigurdsson’s magic is in the instinctive weaving together of all of this musical gossamer to create a new work of beauty. If the wind blows the right way, getting caught in this may be inevitable. Don’t say you weren’t warned…
- Mapsadasical Wordpress
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£11.99
PRESS:
“sky-scrapingly great ... All Is Well is viscerally stunning, comforting, upsetting, entrancing; as long as he can make art like this, Amidon can skip the formality of 'writing songs' forever”
-Stylus Magazine
“With All Is Well, Sam Amidon has crafted a precious gem of a record, all in nuances and shades, with delicate overtones and airy harmonies. Sigurðsson’s production is light and subtle yet it gives these songs fantastic depth and contrast without ever overshadowing Amidon’s delivery. “
-The Milk Factory
“A soaring and beautiful butterfly of an album, rich with tuneful wonder and epic song craft.”
-MusiqueMachine.com
“ A veritable classic, a standard for comparisons in this genre from now on. Not to be missed.”
-Touching Extremes
"a great leap forward... the trio of artists responsible for the record [...] create a very specific space with these arrangements... a very forward-thinking album... Amidon doesn't just update the old world to the new, but finds the roots of the new world in the old.
- Pitchfork
"...something of a revelation. Amidon took a collection of traditional songs, wrote new arrangements and [...] turned them into a bedroom rock classic."
-Dusted Magazine
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PRESS:
“the three extended sound collages here are radically different in conception but are lent unified coherence by the central role of the various singers, all deployed at the extremes of human vocal expression.”
- Uncut
“Weird, and intermittently wonderful.”
- The Independent
“Muhly’s abundance of talent lights up the sky like fireworks from the start of his second album for the sparky Bedroom Community label... Later Muhly weaves found sounds of jarringly mundane origin (someone showers and cooks breakfast) into this glorious tapestry...
As accomplished as Muhly’s debut was, I wasn’t quite ready for him to unfurl the full length of his ambition in the way he does on Mothertongue.”
- Mapsadaisical
“Muhly always wants to be perceived, and here, we witness the junkyard of his memory being spun into something at once utterly ordinary and utterly strange.”
- Pitchfork Media
An eclectic and forward looking record label formed in 2006 and run out of Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavík, Iceland. Bedroom Community is a small, close knit core of friends and family operating between borders.
Our current roster of artist is split 50/50 between New York City and Reykjavík.
Read below for details on all our releases to date and look out for more exciting offerings coming in 2009. You can listen to the albums here on the left, share it with friends and watch our videos in the player below. If you like what you hear please don't forget to utilize one of the many purchasing options, be it a digital download or a mailorder CD - or even both. Some of our music is also available as a limited vinyl edition. There is more to be found on each "band members" ( Bedroom Community artists in this case) MySpace!
In our Friend Space below you'll see a number of people - familiar faces and others that might be less familiar - some of them are actual 'real life friends and colleagues' but others suggest a musical reference; music is a very personal thing that is hard to describe with words. If you like what you hear send us a friend request or sign up to get our newsletter, if you are a band and want to become a friend just send us a message to add you, and we will.
You can visit us outside of MySpace, at our 'real' website Here , and read more about us in this Reykjavík Grapevine article Here ,
In just over a year, Icelandic imprint Bedroom Community, headed by Björk and Bonnie Prince Billy (amongst others) collaborator Valgeir Sigurðsson, have distilled some of the most interesting records around, first with Nico Muhly’s delicate Speaks Volumes, then with Ben Frost’s textural Theory Of Machines, and, more recently with Sigurðsson’s own stellar pop opus Ekvilibrium.
Joining them is folk singer Sam Amidon, a twenty-six year old musician from Brattleboro, Vermont, who currently lives in New York. He shares his time between his solo project and various bands, including Doveman, Stars Like Fleas and The Amidons, a band formed by his parents and dedicated to traditional dance and music forms. Earlier this year [2007], Sam returned with 'But This Chicken Proved Falsehearted', a collaboration with Thomas Bartlett, published on Plug Research, which focused on songs cherry-picked from the vast repertoire of traditional American folk music.
The same process informs 'All Is Well'. Ten songs, lifted from the Appalachian folklore and given a resolutely fresh sheen under the expert hand of Sigurðsson. Sam, who, besides vocal duties, also plays banjo, acoustic and electric guitar and fiddle on one track, is surrounded by brother Stefan (drums), Nico Muhly (piano and orchestral arrangements), Ben Frost (programming and bass), Aaron Siegel (percussive textures and glockenspiel), Eyvind Kang (viola), Morse (additional vocals), and Sigurðsson (bass, electronics, harmonium and percussion).
'All Is Well' is a rather beautiful collection of delicate traditional songs set against intricately woven backdrops. Things kick off pretty low key with Sugar Baby, on which acoustic and electric guitars provide the bulk of the accompaniment. Later, O Death appears to head in a similar direction at first, with the voice casting a shadow on a single melody played on the banjo, but the outlook becomes more inviting as elements are discretely added, while the delicate acoustic ornamentations of Fall On My Knees and Prodigal Son benefit from a more elaborate treatment, but retain the sparkle of their acoustic shell.
With 'All Is Well', Sam Amidon has crafted a precious gem of a record, all in nuances and shades, with delicate overtones and airy harmonies. Sigurðsson’s production is light and subtle yet it gives these songs fantastic depth and contrast without ever overshadowing Amidon’s delivery. The Bedroom Community family is growing, but the standards are as high as ever.
Valgeir Sigurdsson first glimpsed the possibilities in being a music producer as a teenager in Iceland, when he connected the dots between beloved albums by Roxy Music, U2, David Bowie and more experimental records like Ambient 1; Music for Airports and Here Come the Warm Jets. He realizes that they all led back to one exceedingly brilliant, bald visionary named Brian Eno. "I really liked the way he worked with other bands" Sigurdsson says. "The way he incorporated his sound, but also took their sound further."
After cutting his teeth on four albums by Björk, Sigurdsson decided that it was time to strike out in new directions. Most recently, he has produced and engineered albums for Will Oldham, CocoRosie, classically trained composer Nico Muhly and avant-garde electronic musician Ben Frost, drawing the artists to his home studio in Reykjavík.
In July, Sigurdsson will also release his first album of solo material on Bedroom Community, his newly minted label. Ekvílibríum is a synthesis of elements that have surfaced in Sigurdsson's other projects, but here they are given full stage. There are bouncy, flickering beats, the symphonic touches, the use of acoustic instruments in ambient soundscapes and the electronic washes. The album is also interspersed with vocal performances from past collaborators like Oldham, Faun Fables' Dawn McCarthy and Machine Translations' J Walker, but in settings that are very much the producer's own.
And while Sigurdsson is known for making heavily textured electronic soundscapes and beats, it is the human performance he says, that resonates with him most deeply. The strength of Ekvílibríum - as with all of Sigurdsson's projects - is in the organic way he weds the electronic to the human. If the artists that Sigurdsson works with have something in common, it's that they are not afraid of big emotions, and Sigurdsson uses his technical expertise to spotlight them. Nowhere is this clearer than on Oldham's recent album (released under his Bonnie 'Prince' Billy moniker), The Letting Go, where Sigurdsson's studio choices give expression to the full emotional possibilities of Oldham's songs. The interplay of electronic squalls with dramatic string arrangements, manipulated drum textures, plaintive harmonies and theatrical lyrics pushes Oldham's sound into spaces it had never previously been.
The result is a singular album, as ornate as it is direct.
From the ominous darkness and intensity of its opening moments, one might expect a death metal album to break out in an instant, but Theory of Machines is an album whose design is as symphonic as it is confrontational—the tempo doesn't pick up, no hooks or vocals arrive, and when the drums finally kick in they're as fragmented and corroded as they could possibly be and still resemble a groove.
In Theory of Machines, Ben Frost exploits every extreme of pitch, volume and timbre, the changes in this music sometimes seem as gradual as changes in the weather—and sometimes as violent. As the music changes it changes only in texture, colour and intensity so that the sense is not of something being created, altered or even developed, but of something already present being slowly illuminated. ''
-Adapted from the liner notes by Daniel Johnson''
This is Frost’s first release for the Icelandic Bedroom Community Label. At 26 he has already released such critically-lauded works as 2003's guitar exploration LP, Steel Wound on the Room40 Label, which Pitchfork Media USA marked as ''"...An exemplary ambient experience"'', and the harrowing, self-titled 2005 opus School of Emotional Engineering, which Db Magazine called ''...An atmospheric masterpiece.''
In addition to his solo work, Frost produces his work internationally in various forms including gallery-based installations, scores commissioned for film, dance and multimedia productions (for the likes of The Icelandic Dance Company and as part of A/V installation collective Cicada) and collaborative works, remixes and productions for artists such as Björk, Steintryggur, Neotropic, Lawrence English, Stars Like Fleas and Ai Yamamoto.
A resident of Iceland, Ben Frost operates primarily in Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavík under the wing of producer and founder of the Bedroom Community's label/collective Valgeir Sigurðsson. Theory of Machines fully exploits the sonic resources of this unique environment with collaborators such as Valgeir and Sigtryggur Baldursson (The Sugarcubes).
As classical composers, critics, musicians, orchestra directors and bloggers wonder what can be done to Save The Music and find new audiences, for those of us who probably are that indeterminate new audience, its mostly a question of vocabulary. Were simply looking for an entry point into the genre. Not a Beginners Guide or a list of major works we should download or Classical Music For Dummies, but the opposite: music that we share some words with.
Speaks Volumes, an album by New York-based composer Nico Muhly, might be the answer. Muhly worked with Björk on Medulla and Drawing Restraint 9, he holds down a day job at Phillip Glasss studio, and I once saw him accompany Antony for a version of Hope Theres Someone and Lou Reed for a version of Perfect Day in the same night. The American Symphony Orchestra premiered his orchestral work Fits & Bursts at Avery Fisher Hall when he was 22, and meanwhile, critic-with-a-blog Alex Ross posted an email from Muhly that explained exactly what the Neptunes did with that ultra-satisfying triangle ding in Keliss Milkshake. Muhlys compositions have titles that sound like stolen snatches of conversation among friends (It Goes Without Saying, You Could Have Asked Me) and if you ask him, hell tell you why he listened to a shit-ton of Destinys Child when he wrote music to accompany an edition of the grammar-hound handbook Elements Of Style. In other words, the flurry of conversation that bounces around Muhlys work feels like something we can take part in.
Pillaging Music from Speaks Volumes is an extreme and exuberant example of Muhlys trademark playful, hyperactive mode. At first it alternates between glittering corals of arpeggios and plonky, sputtering chunks of melody; by the end hes chopped the melodies into randy statements that roughhouse with slap-happy percussion. Muhly is in a very different mode, however, on album-closer Keep In Touch, in which a terribly isolated and hurt viola finds a similarly damaged duet partner in a manipulated recording of Antony cooing and hiccupping, wordlessly emoting over a palette of subtle organs and snap-clomp programming. Muhlys range is expansivethe relationship between the emotional seriousness of his music and its boundless sense of humor is complex and rewarding.
During one conversation with the composer, I asked if he had anticipated the success Antony had in 2005, and Muhly said, Well I would listen to his music and it was like, How could people not love this? I replied that lots of great music never really finds its audience, but as soon as I said it, it sounded like something to say, not anything to believe. They were wasted words, something Muhlys music has no patience for.
marvelous presentation in madrid last friday night. damn the government! wish we could have heard more of you guys... best wishes for the rest of the tour.
Our new album "Herbarium" is
out now on CdBaby (MP3 so far, physical CD is on its way).
Diverse palette of styles (post-rock,
ambient, electronica, trip-hop, with elements of noise, dub,
neoclassic and free improvisation), united by cinematic, slightly
pensive mood.
«Herbarium» is called so
because of heterogeneity of «songs», which can be
compared to miscellaneous leaves in the album, still being belonged
to the family of trees. Trying to avoid non-alive metaphors here,
only thought of diversity and warm and innermost feeling that
herbarium is capable to conjure up. «... This leaf I picked up
in the park where I met her, and this - I sat by the river,
contemplating...». So tracks were created – one was captured
in some magic jam, another – recorded layer by layer and
meticulously mixed then, next – cut from previous sessions and so
on.
All compositions are united by Poostosh
sense of music – mostly pensive, spatial, tender and experimental.
There's a lot of soul and charisma in every leaf... So please let
your soul look over our HERBARIUM.
Svarte Greiner (Deaf Center/Miasmah/Type) explores deep into a dark, mysterious and disturbing universe. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Earth, Volcano the Bear, David Darling & Deathprod, the music is draped in Lynchian mysticism and horror film cinematics. "The music of Svarte Greiner is practically perfect. It's like that sound in our heads we've been imagining for ages but had never actually heard." - Type Records.
The Sight Below (Rafael Anton Irisarri/Miasmah/Immune) draws as much on modern genre progenitors like Brian Eno, Robin Guthrie and My Bloody Valentine as it does from the more historic traditions in neo-classicism from Erik Satie and Olivier Messiaen. His album Glider has appeared on Thom Yorke's radar in making the Radiohead's lynchpin's top ten playlist.
His debut album Navigare soon to feature on the Miasmah label, Simon Scott (former Slowdive) is set to be a household name in conceptual music. Simon is the former Slowdive drummer, co-producer of Televise, producer of Seavault, and owner of KESH Recordings label.
