Sigurður Interview

 

1. Can you give us an update on what has been going on with the solo project since the recording of the new album?

Perhaps I should give you a little context first, because although SIGURÐUR is a new project, I am certainly not new to recording. Over the years, I have participated as a singer and musician on roughly twenty-five albums. Professionally, I am a musicologist; I publish academic work, write books and studies, and for many years I have been involved with subjects such as music theatre and Richard Wagner. At the same time, I have always remained an active musician.

Níu líf Einars hrafns was created under rather specific circumstances. My family and I live between the Czech Republic and Iceland, and I wrote a large part of the album in Iceland, where we spend part of the year. I recorded essentially the whole thing myself, and the entire process, including post-production, took approximately three and a half years.

But that does not mean I spent three and a half years locked inside a studio. The album was being made alongside my normal professional life. At the time, I was the director of a large art school with approximately 1,300 students and more than sixty employees, while also working academically at the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Ostrava. On top of that there were concerts and other musical activities. So SIGURÐUR was often created at night, on weekends, or whenever I could find some space for it.

Once the album was finally finished, everything began moving much faster. We found common ground with Hypnotic Dirge Records, and preparations began for the physical editions, videos, visuals and the gradual release of individual tracks. The album will be released on November 6 on CD, vinyl and digitally.

And then the first reactions started coming in, and honestly, some of them surprised me. It meant a great deal to receive support from musicians whose work I have known and respected for many years. Blackie of Master's Hammer and Nifelheim, for example, described the album as an excellent recording and a refreshing presence among less adventurous and musically less convincing black metal releases, praising both the record and its production and saying that this is how contemporary black metal should sound.

René Wagner of Nargaroth wrote to me: “It is very well composed and put into music. I like the diversity of your vocals as well as the opera accentuation. Even the cover art does fit your music. And I meant every word I wrote you.”

When I began writing this music in Iceland and then gradually recording it at night alongside my work, of course I could not have predicted any of this. That makes it all the more interesting now to watch the album beginning to develop a life of its own.

2. In November you have your first full length coming out. Can you tell us a little bit more about the musical style that you went for on the recording?

It is actually quite difficult for me to assign Níu líf Einars hrafns to one precisely defined subgenre. Its foundation is unmistakably black metal, but while composing it I never told myself that I wanted to make atmospheric, funeral or symphonic black metal and therefore had to obey the rules of a particular style. I was looking instead for musical devices that suited the character of each composition. As a result, the album contains very slow, almost funeral-like passages, but also traditional fast black metal, strongly melodic sections, acoustic moments and, at times, monumental, almost ritualistic passages.

As a musicologist, I naturally think about musical material in terms of its internal construction as well. Modality is important to me. Alongside minor tonality, I work, for example, with the Dorian mode and more generally with devices that can evoke older European music without attempting to reconstruct it literally. The tritone also plays an important role – an interval whose inherent instability and historical associations naturally create tension. But I do not use it as some obvious diabolus in musica cliché; I am primarily interested in its sonic and harmonic function.

I also work extensively with contrast. Not only between speed and slowness, but between consonance and dissonance, dense electric masses of sound and very sparse textures, or between the repetition of a particular motif and its subsequent transformation. Certain motifs return in different contexts, so there is an internal motivic connection throughout the album. Perhaps my long-standing fascination with music drama and the principle of the leitmotif reveals itself here – not in the sense of copying Wagner, of course, but in the conviction that a musical motif can carry both meaning and memory.

The vocals form another specific layer. For me, the voice is not merely a vehicle for the lyrics but another compositional instrument. Alongside traditional black metal vocals, I therefore use deeper registers, clean singing, multi-layered voices and also my classically trained voice. I was originally professionally trained as a singer, so it would seem absurd to hide that experience simply to satisfy some idea of what black metal is “supposed” to sound like. What interested me instead was whether these different vocal techniques could be combined without sounding like an operatic singer making a spectacular guest appearance on a metal song, but rather as organic parts of a single musical language.

I approach the whole album in a similar way. I did not want to make retro black metal, nor did I want modern, overproduced metal. At the same time, I did not want to deliberately create a bad sound simply for the sake of appearing authentic. I love the rawness of black metal, but rawness does not necessarily have to mean sonic illegibility. It was important to preserve dirt, coldness and a certain roughness while still allowing the listener to hear the individual layers, motifs and details of the arrangements.

So if I had to describe the album briefly, I would say that it grows out of black metal and at times comes quite close to funeral black metal and atmospheric black metal, but I use these more as expressive devices than as genre rules. It is much more important to me that every composition has its own dramaturgy and that the album works as a complete musical entity than that it perfectly fits the definition of any particular subgenre.

3. The lyrics on the new recording form a concept album. Can you tell us a little bit more about the story you covered with this release?

Yes, Níu líf Einars hrafns was conceived as a single whole from the very beginning. The English translation of the title is Nine Lives of Einarr the Raven. But I did not want to write another album that simply retells familiar stories from Norse mythology. The Eddas provided the mythological and symbolic material from which I created my own story.

The central character is Einarr, the Raven, who passes through nine lives or states of existence. “Lives” here does not mean nine separate biographical stories in a literal sense. I see them more as nine encounters, transformations and stages of knowledge. Einarr gradually comes into contact with forces and beings greater than himself, and every encounter leaves something behind in him. His journey therefore takes place simultaneously within a mythological space and within the character himself.

The album opens with Formáli, a prologue that introduces the listener to this world. Then come the individual chapters – Erda, Lóðurr, Kólga, Fenrir, Miðgarðsormr, Hœnir and Óðinn – followed by Eftirmáli, the epilogue. Each of these beings or forces represents a different principle and a different experience. I therefore did not want the individual songs to be merely portraits of mythological figures – “now I am going to tell you the story of Fenrir.” What matters more is what their presence means to Einarr and how they change his journey.

I use the original mythological material quite freely in the lyrics. Some references are very specific and will probably be recognised by someone familiar with the Poetic and Prose Eddas. Elsewhere I have dismantled an original motif, shifted its meaning or placed it in an entirely new situation. I was not interested in historical or literary reconstruction. Mythology remains alive precisely because its symbols can acquire new meanings in different periods.

The raven itself is also very important to me. In the Norse tradition it is, of course, strongly associated with Óðinn, but Einarr is neither Huginn nor Muninn, nor is he intended as some new version of them. He is an independent character. Here the raven is an observer, a wanderer and at the same time a being moving along the boundaries between different worlds. It sees things from above and can cross great distances, yet it is constantly present wherever death appears. That ambiguity fascinated me.

Gradually, it also becomes apparent that this is not a conventional heroic journey. Einarr does not accumulate victories or become increasingly powerful. Every encounter has its price. Knowledge in this world is not a reward – quite often it is a burden. Óðinn therefore represents a logical culmination of the journey for me, because in Norse mythology he himself is willing to pay an extreme price for knowledge.

I do not see Eftirmáli as either a conventional happy ending or an unequivocal tragedy. It is more the moment when the circle closes. Einarr is not the same being at the end as he was at the beginning, but at the same time you cannot simply say whether he has won or lost his journey.

And that is probably the most important principle behind the whole album: I did not want to illustrate Norse mythology. I used it as a language through which I could speak about much more universal things – knowledge, fear, death, transformation, solitude, fate and the price one pays for wanting to see further than perhaps one should.

4. A lot of the lyrics and the project name are inspired by Norse mythology. Can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in this topic?

I think it is important in my case to say that my relationship with Norse mythology did not arise from a need to create a black metal image. It is really the other way around. My family and I live between the Czech Republic and Iceland, we spend part of the year in Iceland, and gradually it has become our second home.

When you actually live somewhere, it stops being an exotic destination or a romantic idea. You begin to experience the weather, the distances, the long periods of daylight and darkness, everyday life, the people and, above all, the landscape in a completely different way.

And I think the Icelandic landscape fundamentally changes the way you read the old texts. Of course, you can read the Eddas anywhere in the world. But when you stand somewhere in the Icelandic wilderness with practically nothing around you, when the weather changes within minutes and you see the ocean, black rocks, mist and mountains, while knowing that people have lived in these places for centuries, you begin to understand much more clearly why their imagination created precisely this kind of world.

Suddenly these are not merely fantastic stories about gods, giants and monsters. You begin to feel the landscape behind them, the fear, the respect for nature and the awareness that human beings are certainly not the ones who control everything.

I am also fascinated by how naturally different historical layers coexist in Iceland. Christianity, pre-Christian beliefs, the sagas, the Eddas, folk stories about huldufólk, elves, trolls and various beings associated with particular places – all of these overlap. You do not have to believe in them literally for them to influence the way you perceive a place. That boundary between actual landscape and story is enormously inspiring to me.

Naturally, I also approach this as a musicologist. I was interested in myth and its use in music long before SIGURÐUR existed. For many years I have been fascinated by Richard Wagner and the way he worked with Germanic and Norse mythological material. What fascinates me is that you can take very ancient archetypes and create a new work from them that does not speak only about the past. Myth survives precisely because it is not a museum exhibit. Every generation can discover something different within it.

And then there is the name SIGURÐUR itself. I deliberately chose the Icelandic form of the name rather than a more internationally accessible version. I did not want to invent some universal “Viking” name that would look good in a metal logo. For me, it represents a personal connection to a particular country, language and culture that have become part of my life.

Perhaps that is also why I have a slight problem with the romanticised idea of the North that sometimes appears in metal. Iceland is not a land of eternal snow, Vikings and runes to me. I also know it as a place where you repair something on the house in the morning, drive dozens of kilometres for something completely ordinary, curse the weather and sit around a table with friends in the evening. And then you step outside and the landscape can convince you again within seconds just how small you are compared to it.

SIGURÐUR probably exists somewhere between those two poles. It is not my fantasy about the North. It is a musical reflection of an environment that has gradually become part of my real life.

5. Can you tell us a little bit more about the artwork that is presented on the new album cover?

The artwork was created by Martin “Zyca” Richter, who also designed the SIGURÐUR logo. From the beginning, we did not see the cover merely as an illustration for the music. I wanted it to have its own artistic value while functioning as a visual parallel to the atmosphere of the album. That is why we avoided literal imagery – no illustrations of Norse gods, Vikings, runes or other easily recognisable genre symbols.

What I particularly like about it visually is the use of darkness, texture and a restricted colour palette. The image is not descriptive; instead, it creates a space that the viewer has to enter. Some elements are almost tactile, while others dissolve into darkness. I think this ambiguity corresponds very well with the music on the album, which also moves between a concrete narrative and something much more abstract.

The raven is, of course, the central visual motif, but I did not want it to become a conventional metal emblem. It is more like a presence permeating the entire visual concept. This becomes even clearer with the vinyl gatefold, where the front cover is not an isolated image but part of a broader composition that continues inside.

I love albums where the physical format still represents an artefact in its own right. It was therefore important to me that the music, lyrics, typography and Richter's artwork should function as one complete entity.

6. With this project you work mostly solo. Are you open to expanding into a full line-up or playing live?

The fact that SIGURÐUR is created primarily as a solo project does not come from some need to work alone at all costs. I am certainly not someone who has a problem collaborating with other musicians – a large part of my musical life has always been, and still is, based precisely on collaboration with other people.

The reason is much more practical. I genuinely have very little free time and I have to use it quite rationally. When I compose and record on my own, I can work on the music when I have two hours free in the evening, a free morning or several days in Iceland. I do not have to find a date when four or five people are all available. In fact, that flexibility is one of the reasons SIGURÐUR could exist at all.

But that certainly does not mean it has to remain a studio-only project forever. The idea of bringing this music to the stage interests me. I simply would not want to assemble a band just so I could say that SIGURÐUR has a complete line-up. If it happens, I would want to find musicians who understand the music and can give it another dimension in a live environment.

Nor would I insist on a live version mechanically reproducing the recording. Studio work allows you to layer sound in ways that may make no sense on stage. A live incarnation should respect the essence of the compositions while taking advantage of the energy and possibilities of an actual band.

Given my schedule, at the moment I can imagine a number of carefully selected concerts or festival appearances rather than a constant touring cycle. But if the right opportunity and the right people appear, I am definitely open to it.

7. On the new album you also have a few guests. Can you tell us a little bit more about who they are and their contributions to the recording?

Yes, but there is one thing that is important for me to say: Níu líf Einars hrafns was never created as an album built around guest appearances. The music, the story and my idea of the character of each composition existed first. Only then did I begin thinking about whether there were particular people whose personality and musical voice could add something to certain moments that I could not create myself. In that sense, I see the guests almost as the quintessence of particular moments on the album.

Aðalbjörn “Addi” Tryggvason of Sólstafir naturally represents a very strong connection with Iceland for me. What has always fascinated me about his delivery is that he does not need technical exhibitionism to create enormous emotional tension within a few seconds. His voice is instantly recognisable and carries something raw, vulnerable and monumental at the same time. That is why I wanted him on the record – not because I wanted the name Sólstafir on a list of guests, but because of the colour and authenticity he could bring to that particular moment.

Ashok is a completely different type of musician. He is an extraordinarily accomplished guitarist with a huge stylistic range and experience from Cradle of Filth, but what matters more to me is his musical intelligence. He can understand very quickly what a composition needs and enter it without simply trying to demonstrate everything he is technically capable of doing. I therefore see his contribution as a genuine part of the composition rather than the obligatory “guest guitar solo.”

With Jiří “BigBoss” Valter, it is more personal still, because Níu líf Einars hrafns was certainly not our first musical encounter. I had previously appeared as a guest on a Root recording and had also sung with them live. So this was not a case of approaching some distant legend of Czech black metal simply to put his name on my record. We already had a shared musical history.

Root, of course, remain one of the bands that fundamentally shaped the distinctive Czech black metal scene, and BigBoss has a voice that is impossible to confuse with anyone else. It carries authority, darkness and an almost ceremonial quality. His presence on this album therefore feels like a natural continuation of something that existed between us before SIGURÐUR was created.

And then there is Veronika Rovná. Her presence is somewhat different because this is not about a recognised name from the metal scene, but about a particular voice and the ability to create a character. In Kólga, I did not simply need a “female vocal” to contrast with a male voice – that would have been far too easy. I needed Kólga to acquire an identity of her own. Veronika is a classically trained singer and she was able to approach the voice dramatically, not merely vocally. Because of that, I do not see her simply as a guest vocalist but as a genuine part of the narrative.

So all four come from somewhat different musical worlds, and that is precisely what I enjoy about it. I did not want to create a parade of famous names. I wanted several very specific human and musical characters who appear at exactly the moment when the story needs them.

If their participation works properly, the listener should not think, “Here comes the guest.” They should feel that this is simply how the song had to sound.

8. The new album is going to be released on Hypnotic Dirge Records. How did you get in contact with this label?

I approached Hypnotic Dirge Records myself when the album was already completely finished. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to work with a label outside the Czech Republic. But I was not simply looking for someone willing to manufacture and release the record. After three and a half years of work, I wanted to feel that the person on the other side genuinely understood what I had created and had some personal connection to it.

I spoke with several labels. Negotiations with one Dutch label went quite far, and eventually I was also considering possibilities in Stockholm and Helsinki. So Hypnotic Dirge was not the only option I had on the table.

What ultimately made the difference was Nicolas and his approach. From our first communication, I could tell that he had actually listened to the album, thought about it and was genuinely fascinated by it. It was not business communication along the lines of “send us the master, let's agree on the number of copies and a release date.” I could feel genuine enthusiasm for the music and a willingness to put energy into the project.

In the end, that mattered more to me than geographical proximity or other practical considerations. With such a personal record, it seemed much more important to have someone on the other side who genuinely believed in it. Nicolas and I quickly understood each other both personally and in terms of how the album should be released, so we agreed to work together through Hypnotic Dirge Records.

Looking back, I feel it was the right decision.

9. On a worldwide level, how has the reaction been to your music by fans of black metal?

Honestly, I am slightly surprised by how quickly the music has begun to travel beyond the environment in which it was created. The album has not even been officially released yet, and reactions are already coming from listeners, zines, radio stations and labels in different parts of the world – from the United States through Europe to places where I never expected SIGURÐUR to reach at this stage. Recently, for example, I received a very positive reaction from Nepal.

At moments like that, you realise how strange the underground is today. You can sit somewhere in Iceland or the Czech Republic, write very personal music, and after a while someone on the other side of the world is listening to it.

I am very pleased that the reactions are not focused on just one aspect of the album. Some people respond primarily to the atmosphere, others to the composition, the vocals, the mythological dimension or the production. That is perhaps the most interesting thing for me, because the record contains a number of elements where I was not sure how a more orthodox black metal audience would react – for example, the combination of extreme vocals with a classically trained voice, or some of the slower and less conventional passages.

I also have to say that I greatly respect the expertise of some of the reviewers. I have worked in musicology and music journalism for many years myself, so naturally I can tell the difference between a text that merely repeats the press kit in different words and a review written by somebody who has genuinely listened to the album repeatedly and gone analytically beneath its surface.

Some of the international reviews have genuinely surprised me in that respect. Their authors have noticed compositional details, the treatment of motifs, changes in vocal registers or relationships between the music and the narrative that we had never explained to them beforehand.

In some ways, that means even more to me than a positive rating itself. When somebody can identify something that I consciously placed into a composition several years ago while writing somewhere in Iceland, and discovers it while listening on the other side of the world, then for me the musical communication has genuinely worked.

Of course, I have no illusion that everybody has to like this music. Nor would I want that. Black metal is an environment where people often have very precise ideas about what they consider authentic. That is exactly why I am pleased that the album's less conventional elements have so far generally been received as organic parts of its musical language rather than something added simply for effect.

I also appreciate the reactions from people in other bands and labels. One thing that continues to fascinate me about the underground is that alongside a certain degree of rivalry, there is an enormous network of people exchanging music, recommending new bands to each other and still being capable of becoming genuinely excited about something.

Perhaps that has been the greatest surprise for me with SIGURÐUR so far. When I was creating the album, I never thought about whether it would work in America, Germany or Nepal. I was trying to make exactly the record I wanted to hear myself. And now I am discovering that people in countries with which I had absolutely no connection when I created it are finding their own way into the music.

That remains one of the most beautiful things about music.

10. Where do you see yourself heading as a musician in the future?

At this point I can answer that fairly specifically, because SIGURÐUR definitely does not end with the first album. The second record already has a title, Huldufólk, as well as a story, a dramaturgical structure and the first musical material. At the same time, I have no desire to make Níu líf Einars hrafns again. If continuing this project is to have any meaning, its musical language has to keep developing.

Huldufólk will be much closer to a form of music drama. It is conceived as a tragedy in three acts, and this time it will not be a journey through a mythological landscape in the same sense as the debut. At its centre will be a specific story, several characters and their fates. One of the central characters is a young girl called Dimma, and her mother also plays an important role, as does the Guardian – Vörður – who stands partly within the story and partly outside it.

At the same time, the second album will be even more firmly connected to actual Icelandic landscapes. Some of the places within the story really exist – Hrafnaklettur, Dvergasteinn, Álftafjörður and others. That is one of the things that fascinates me about the whole concept. You can stand in a real place, touch a particular rock and at the same time discover that stories about another world have existed around it for generations. In Iceland, the boundary between landscape, historical memory, folklore and imagination can sometimes be incredibly thin.

This time I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of huldufólk – the “hidden people.” But I do not want to make a folkloric catalogue of Icelandic legends, nor an album about charming elves. I am interested in a much darker question: what happens when a human being crosses the boundary between two worlds and discovers that returning may not be a matter of course?

The story will deal with loss, searching, guilt, motherhood, fear and the human need to enter places where perhaps we should not enter.

Musically, I want to take some of the principles already present on the debut considerably further. The dramaturgy of the whole will play an even greater role, as will the return and transformation of motifs, the use of silence and contrast, and the human voice as the carrier of individual characters. Some sections will probably be even darker and slower than on Níu líf Einars hrafns, while others will be extremely fragile. I do not want to be afraid of moments that move quite far away from black metal if the story requires them.

One important musical moment will also involve Icelandic spiritual tradition. At a particular point I am planning a four-part treatment of Heyr, himna smiður. Not as a decorative “Nordic” element, but as a dramatic part of the story. These are precisely the kinds of collisions that interest me most today – extreme music confronted with something very old, simple and human.

Perhaps this is a natural consequence of my relationship with music theatre. I increasingly think of an album less as a collection of individual songs and more as an enclosed dramatic space in which music, text, characters, motifs and sound tell a single story.

So where am I heading as a musician? Probably towards even greater freedom. Black metal remains the fundamental language of SIGURÐUR, but I do not want it to become its boundary. If the story requires funeral-like slowness, a choir, acoustic music, almost complete silence or, conversely, several minutes of absolute chaos, I want to be able to go there.

And if one day a listener can recognise within a few bars that they are hearing SIGURÐUR without being able to say precisely which black metal category the music belongs to, I will consider that a far more interesting result than loyalty to a single subgenre.

11. What are some of the bands or musical styles you are currently listening to nowadays?

I listen to an extremely diverse range of music, but if I had to define my natural home, black metal would obviously occupy a fundamental place within it. I have been listening to it since my high-school years, and it was never simply one musical phase that I abandoned after a few years. What changes over time is rather what I look for within it.

I am very interested in the Icelandic scene – Svartidauði, Misþyrming, Auðn or Dynfari. Each of those bands is quite different, which to me demonstrates that there really is no simple, uniform “Icelandic black metal sound.” I also continually return to Norwegian black metal, to bands such as Tsjuder, Djevel, Sarrath and others. What still fascinates me about black metal is the enormous expressive territory that has grown from what was originally a relatively narrow set of musical devices.

My actual musical backbone, however, is broader and rests on several names that have accompanied me for a very long time: Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Pink Floyd. It may sound like a strange combination, but I see connections between them.

With Bach, it is the architecture and logic of musical construction. With Beethoven, the treatment of motifs and the ability to generate enormous tension from minimal material. Wagner fundamentally influenced the way I think about music drama, leitmotifs, myth and the integration of the different components of a work. And Pink Floyd are, among many other things, proof to me that an album can genuinely constitute a world of its own rather than simply being a collection of songs.

I also return cyclically to Richard Strauss at different periods of my life. I am fascinated by his musical language and by the expressive world of early twentieth-century music in general. In works such as Salome or Elektra, Strauss can treat the orchestra almost as a physical force – colour, harmony and dramatic tension are sometimes pushed almost to the limits of endurance. Then I move away from this music for a while, and after some time I realise that I need to hear it again. And every time, I discover something else within it.

At the same time, I do not want to listen only to music that has some obvious connection with what I compose myself. I love old-school death metal such as Entombed or Grave, Czech grindcore like Spasm and Gutalax, and I also listen to punk and Oi!. I feel no need to artificially separate these worlds. If music has energy, conviction and a character of its own, the genre label is secondary to me.

Folk music is also extremely important to me. Not as something picturesque or as folkloric decoration. I believe that an authentic folk song contains a certain kind of human truth. For generations, people sang about death, love, fear, solitude, nature, war or loss without needing to explain these things intellectually. In that sense, an old folk song can paradoxically come quite close to what I also search for in black metal – the ability to touch something fundamental, dark and real.

Diversity is one of the most beautiful things about music for me. I see absolutely no contradiction in listening to Norwegian black metal one day, Bach the next, then Pink Floyd, grindcore, Oi! or an old folk song.

But black metal remains the music I have returned to throughout my life. Not only as a listener – it is the language in which I eventually began telling my own stories.

12. Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any final words or thoughts?

First of all, thank you for giving me this space and for asking questions that genuinely went into some depth. Níu líf Einars hrafns represents three and a half years of my life, during which I composed, recorded and changed this music, sometimes put it aside and then returned to it again. So it feels quite strange now to watch something that was very personal gradually become music with which people I have never met are beginning to form their own relationships.

The album will be released on November 6, and I will be happy if listeners give it some time. I have always loved records that do not reveal everything on the first listen and that give you a reason to return to them.

And I am grateful to everyone who, in an age of endless streaming, is still willing to listen to an album as a whole, read the lyrics, pick up a vinyl record or CD and give music their genuine attention.

Níu líf Einars hrafns is the first chapter of SIGURÐUR.

Definitely not the last.

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