“Egomania! No other sounds”: Sigur Rós frontman Jón Þór Birgisson’s new artwork is a sensory mindfuck

Ice cracking, trees creaking, techno throbbing, engine thrumming, giant coming, jaguar crying, choristers trilling, fire flickering, sparks fizzing, mosquito buzzing, radio tuning, angels weeping, dire wolves growling…

Pumping – at ear-wobbling volume – from 48 mounted speakers, these are the sounds of Vox, a 25-minute immersive aural/visual/nasal art installation installed at Kunstsilo on Odderøya, an island neighbourhood in Kristiansand. And this is what it indubitably looks like: flashing, dashing light pulses, flickering along narrow, wall-length LED panels that girdle the rectangular space. And this is what they smell like: roots, wood and, apparently, the Nordic soul.

In a box in a silo on a harbour on an island off a town on the southern edge of Norway, the musician colloquially known as Jónsi (Jón Þór Birgisson formally), frontman of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, is playing with our senses. If I factor in the feel of the “music” at its loudest shaking my arse on a bench in the middle of the floor, and the slight taste of painted concrete in this freshly zhuzhed gallery, the artist has collected the sensual set. The experience is both mesmerising and energising. 

Actually, given that I’m sitting largely in the dark in a 10 x 13 metre room, he hasn’t got the sixth sense, proprioception, which – it sez here – allows us to keep track of where our body parts are in space. But even if you’re a multi-disciplinary creative who’s a part-time perfumer and who invented his own singing language (“Vonlenska” in Icelandic, “Hopelandic” in English), you can’t have everything.

All those things I “heard” in the Vox box? All Jónsi’s voice.

“Egomania! No other sounds,” the 50-year-old, clad in comfy black streetwear, says, smiling, in his accented, fluting English. We’re drinking gluten-free lager in a bar round the harbour from the towering gallery spaces of Kunstsilo. “It’s only my voice, treated – solo, a cappella, choir, reversed, distorted, stretched, AI-generated,” he continues. “Every kind of mangle of the voice you can imagine!”

As for my interpretations of what I heard: “There’s definitely some truth in there,” Jónsi says, indulging me. “It does take it to a lot of different places, I guess,” he continues. Which is his considerate way of saying: if you heard wolves and angels and techno, then that’s what you heard. “But the source is always the same.”

Conceptually, the starting point of Vox was “the oldest instrument in the world: the human voice. It pre-dates speech. You connect so well with the voice when somebody’s talking to you – you listen. Somebody singing to you, you have to stop and listen. It pierces straight to the heart, basically.”

Jónsi crafted the audio element in his rented studio in downtown Los Angeles, the metropolis in which he’s lived for nine years. A collaborator, Damon Dorsey – here in Kristiansand, Norway’s bougie-feeling fifth-largest city, to help with the build and installation – designed the LED panels that line the room. Another friend, Isaac Cohen, “a computer, 3D-visuals guy,” wrote the program that translates Jónsi’s treated vocalisations to the light that pulses through those panels. Then, for the scent that’s pumped from small diffusers placed on the floor in the corner, he turned to the family business. Back in Reykjavik, he and his three younger sisters have a perfume business, Fischersund. It’s based in Jónsi’s former music studio, a black-wood hut that’s one of the oldest structures in the Icelandic capital. “My father works there also – he makes incense.”

The Vox fragrance, then? “Very earthy! It’s based on a lot of root materials. Vetiver is like a green grass, but they harvest the roots and distill them into an essential oil. It’s also [aromatic gum resin] galbanum in there,” says Jónsi, a “nose” now 16 years into this nasal hustle, “and a lot of synthetic aroma molecules. The scent is a whole formula [of around] 40 materials.”

Jónsi dates the “starting point” of his periodic artistic pivots from music to 2018. That year he created a soundscape for Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s large-scale installation Reality Projector, presented in LA’s Marciano Art Foundation. Through Eliasson he met the latter’s New York gallerist Tanya Bonakdar. “[She and I] started talking, I had some ideas I wanted to try, [so we decided] let’s just do an exhibition.”

And exhibit he did, in the increasingly lengthy gaps between Sigur Rós albums. In 2023 he debuted Vox in Bonakdar’s LA gallery. The same year he showed ‘FLÓÐ (Flood)’, another piece involving a dark room and sight/scent/sound, at Seattle’s National Nordic Museum. It was followed last summer by a quartet of installations in Reykjavik Art Museum, including a new version of ‘FLÓÐ (Flood)’. In an interview at the time, Jónsi described the piece as “depression, basically. Like an apocalyptic doom forecast ” So what emotion is Vox?

“Hope!” he says, puckishly, in a manner that’s altogether more animated than the shy, jittery Jónsi I know all too well from previous music-based interviews. “Oh, I don’t know. I just love the idea of triggering different senses in people. When you make music, you [yourself] want to be moved. You do it only for selfish reasons because you want to feel something. But hopefully somebody gets moved when they go into Vox. It’s nice if people feel something.”

The simultaneously swish and industrially-rough concrete edifice of Kunstsilo (“art silo”) opened last May. It was designed by Barcelona architects Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, BAX and Mendoza Partida, collective winners of a 2016 design competition that attracted entries from around the world. Their task was to convert 15 towering, 37-metre-tall former grain silos.

Capable of holding 15,000 tonnes of grain, their construction began in 1935 in this shipping hub on the northern edge of the Skagerrak, the strait connecting the North Sea and the Kattegat sea.

Almost a century on, the £51.5m renovation project had the primary aim of hosting the 6000-strong collection of Nordic modernist art (1910-90) amassed by Nicolai Tangen. He’s the Kristiansand-born hedge-fund manager who’s CEO of Norway’s £1.3 trillion sovereign wealth fund. But building on that founding aim of the gallery is a mission to also be a home to contemporary art, whatever the discipline, even several of them at once.

Hence the enthusiasm of Kunstsilo Director Maria Mediaas Jørstad and head of programming Karl Mortensen to bring Vox to this picturesque and bustling port town studded with coastal holiday homes for monied boating folk from Oslo.

Here at the outset of Kunstsilo’s second season, Jónsi’s transporting installation, says Mortensen, is a great fit “in terms of our summer programme but also [in terms of] bringing in sensitivity – and some existentialism into our world,” he says with a playful eyebrow. “You might say it has a Nordic flair to it.”

Mediaas Jørstad seconds that emotion. Jónsi’s bespoke space on the gallery’s fourth floor evokes the “core smell of the Nordic nature”, she tells me in Kunstsilo’s airy rooftop restaurant/bar/café, a space with stunning, 360-degree panoramic views. “It’s beautiful. It moves us deeply [because] it’s where we come from.

“Jónsi’s way of working really fits very well with our profile,” the Director continues, “and [our] vision of breaking down silos. He’s really into all kinds of [artistic] fields and combining them, giving this total experience.”

Was the artist aware of that conceptual congruity, of his un-siloed art unspooling in a fundamentally siloed space? “No!” Jónsi says with a laugh. “I like it, though, it’s cool!” Equally, he adds, the newness and freshness of Kunstsilo was appealing for the European premiere of Vox, not least in the bang-up-to-date facility’s ability to accommodate a piece with what he cheerfully describes as inbuilt “technological complications”: mounting all those speakers, “having a whole computer station hidden away”, housing a sub-bass under the bench in the middle of the space, and basically “tuning the room”.

All told, it’s a “different thing” from his musical day job, even as those days roll ever onwards. Jónsi appears, just, singing on Skrillex’s recent, 34-track album F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3, on the 51-second LOOK AT YOU, the result of a recording session “six years ago or something”. Last year he released First Light, billed as a solo album but actually, he reveals to me, music recorded for EA Sports’ golf computer game ‘PGA Tour’.

“They put it out there, and they kind of cheekily didn’t say that it was for the computer game. I could have put out some statement. But albums are so fast these days – they come out, go down, so I’m like, whatever…” Jónsi says, shrugging, unbothered.

Tomorrow, when he flies back to LA, via a pitstop in New York for a “perfume meeting”, it’s to resume work with his ex-partner Alex Somers on the soundtrack to a film called Rental Family, shot in Tokyo and starring Brendan Fraser. Then, two weeks after the opening of Vox at the start of this month, Sigur Rós are playing in Australia. In September the tour – featuring local orchestras and in support of the band’s eight album, 2023’s ‘Átta’, their first in a decade – reaches Europe, and includes four nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

“You’re on the road with Sigur Rós, and it’s very rock and roll,” says the singer and songwriter. By which he very much does not mean sex and drugs. Rather, routine. “You go in, set up a show, play, leave right after. It’s different in the gallery world. You have a space, you have a room, for two months, six months, and you can create a world.”

For this listener, that world involved – and I’m sticking with this – wolves and angels and techno. An imagination-triggering cocoon rather than, say, a sensory-assaulting CIA black site. Which, certainly, Jónsi is glad to hear. His artistic aim with Vox, after all, is simple: “It’s fun.”