Icelandic sextet’s experimental airs

Amiina began as a female quartet but have acquired two male performers.

Cork Opera House presents the ethereal amiina at this weekend’s Jazz Festival, says Nicki ffrench Davis.

AMIINA is best known as the string section with Sigur Rós. Separately, the band has evolved an experimental sound, with elements of folk and pop. The Icelandic sextet plays Cork Opera House on Sunday, October 30 as part of Cork Jazz Festival.

“I think maybe the biggest connection we have is that jazz is so varied — record shops have a problem with which CD rack to put us into,” says group co-founder María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir. “Our drummer is a jazz musician but he’s capable of all styles — I think he played with 50 bands last year. It’s a good thing for us to be part of a jazz festival, though. People who are into jazz are often very open.”

The group started as Anima, a string quartet of four female friends in Reykjavík College of Music who played classical music. As they diversified and experimented with unusual instruments, they needed a new name and chose amiina. “We never decide how we will sound when we start a new song. We start with what’s lying around and see what happens. Music is different from other arts, it’s abstract and it connects with different parts of the brain. Defining it takes away the magic,” she says.

The quartet of string instruments no longer comes on tour with amiina. The viola and cello are left in the studio, replaced by an array of instruments. “We’ll be travelling with a musical saw, zithers, small harps, a metallophone, keyboards, a ukelele, a glockenspiel, an accordion and bells. When we compose it’s a multiple layer of sounds — a lot more than we can ever cover on stage,” she says.

Two male band members joined in 2009, the drummer and an electronic artist, and amiina have released one album as a sextet, 2010’s Puzzle. “The addition of the boys is a big difference when we play live,” says Sigfúsdóttir. “When we were just four, we had even more instruments and there was a lot of jumping around, almost like a contemporary ballet. With small stages it was a huge problem, as we couldn’t fit on stage. But the sound world was more settled also — with the boys we can build up more power. We keep the same delicate quirkiness, but it has grown a lot more dynamic, there’s more beat and rhythm.”

Sigfúsdóttir says of her original collaborators: “We had known each other almost forever. Touring four times around the globe, over seven years, we’ve become a family. The boys kind of broke up behavioural patterns; we had a fresh start where we could see ourselves from a distance. We work now in departments more. Two people can work on an idea for a while then throw it to the rest of the band,” she says.

The group has recorded one cover, Lee Hazlewood’s Leather and Lace. The legendary singer, songwriter and producer had been ill for two years when his manager, whom they had met by chance, contacted the band in 2007 to invite them to collaborate with him. “He did a spoken version of one of our songs, Hilli, lying in bed. A week after he recorded it, he passed away. The B-side to the track was this cover, and we released them on a 7” vinyl. We had always admired his work, and his beautiful lyrics,” she says.

Puzzle is the first amiina album with lyrics. “Since the start, our music has always been the result of a process,” María says. “We felt the music was getting too layered and we wanted the focus that a voice brings in. Just going ‘la la la’ all the time seemed boring, but we wanted to have words we all believed in. Writing them worked well once we got our method. We start by asking what’s the feeling of the song, brainstorming descriptive words, then we juggle them around. It’s nice to discover that we can present an idea that’s coming from us all as a group.”

The group last played in Ireland at the 2010 Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, and Sigfúsdóttir brought her family to the Reich Effect festival at Cork Opera House earlier this year.

“We always feel at home in Ireland — with the weather and the people, the Irish are so warm and welcoming. Irish monks were the first people to settle in Iceland and we have a lot in common. We are both oppressed countries of peasant people who found freedom in the 20th century and have a kind of improbable pride. We both made the same financial mistakes and have a habit of being a bit ahead of ourselves,” she says.