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Heima : Production
Notes
Heima : An introduction
Last year, in the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós
played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the
biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and
now provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least
understood bands captured live in their natural habitat.
The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful
‘Takk…’ album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers
and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider
art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and
the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir*, the band reached an entirely new
spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely
quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth.
The question of the way Sigur Rós’s music relates to, and is influenced by,
their environment has been reduced to a journalistic cliché about glacial
majesty and fire and ice, but there is no doubt that the band are
inextricably linked to the land in which they were forged. And the decision
to film this first-ever Sigur Rós film in Iceland was, in the end,
ineluctable.
Shot using a largely Icelandic crew (to minimise Eurovision-style
scenic-wonder overload), ‘Heima’ - which means both “at home” and “homeland”
- is an attempt to make a film every bit as big, beautiful and unfettered as
a Sigur Rós album. As such it was always going to be something of a grand
folie, but one, which taking in no fewer than 15 locations around Iceland (including
the country’s largest ever concert at the band’s Reykjavik homecoming), is
never less than epic in its ambition.
Material from all four of the band’s albums is featured, including many rare
and notable moments. Among these are a heart-stopping rendition of the
previously unreleased ‘Gitardjamm’, filmed inside a derelict herring oil
tank in the far West Fjords; a windblown, one-mic recording of ‘Vaka’, shot
at a dam protest camp subsequently drowned by rising water; and first time
acoustic versions of such rare live beauties as ‘Staralfur’, ‘Agaetis
Byrjun’ and ‘Von’.
Heima is the first chance to see Sigur Rós live on DVD. November 5, 2007.
* The huge horseshoe canyon at Ásbyrgi was, according to legend, formed by
the hoofprint of this mythical beast. John Best,
Manager Sigur Ros. 15th Sept 2007
www.heima.co.uk
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