ABSTRACT
In 2012, Sigur Rós released the music film Valtari #14. It tells a short story of the felt-bodily intensity of a human encounter in the deserted ruins of an old factory. The choreography and visuals, together with the elegiac soundtrack, explore the fragile aesthetics of human connection through movement and music. One dominant trope in the extant literature is that Sigur Rós's music is imbued with a distinctively Nordic aesthetic closely related to Iceland's natural environment. Heeding the call to think of place as more of “an event than a thing” (Casey), I explore Sigur Rós's Iceland as an ephemeral hybrid arising through the engagement of humans with their social and natural environments. My analysis moves away from the familiar binary in which humans are categorically separate from nature. How do cultural practices engage with the energetic forces circulating within a given ecology, allowing for Iceland to emerge in the work of Sigur Rós? I will playfully explore the sonic and visual dynamics of the energetic forces that bring about Valtari #14's atmospheric intensity, exploring Valtari #14 and its relationship to Nordicness less in terms of its discursiveness and representational mechanics and more in terms of felt-bodily affectivity.
