Jonsi

By annielin

Conference season has taken over my life recently: SXSW followed by the numerous parties, mixers and other miscellaneous brand-sponsored drinking experiences associated with ad:tech, the Twitter conference, the Facebook conference, Grammy Soundtables and so forth. In the midst of all of this, I have regrettably been remiss in updating and contributing to this blog, which is a shame because it is also live music season here in San Francisco.

As bands have made their way to and from Coachella, they have also stopped by the Bay Area to grace the stages of San Francisco’s finer independent music establishments. Because of this Coachella runoff phenomenon, I recently had the pleasure of watching both Jonsi perform.

Jonsi is best known as the front man of Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros, whose music my friend Chason (of SMBC Comics fame) has always said serves well as music for making out. “It doesn’t have too much going on, and you can’t get distracted by the lyrics because they’re Icelandic,” he once pointed out to me.

Because of this, I’m pretty sure that at least some substantial portion of the audience at the Zellerbach Auditorium in Berkeley consisted of Sigur Ros fans expecting to hear the Icelandic answer to Explosions In The Sky. Matador Records had invited me to attend the show, and despite the fact that I’ve had very little free time of late, I said yes to the invitation. I was a little curious, and my motion graphics designer friend Emie, who loves European post-rock, had agreed to be my +1.

Jonsi’s elaborate touring stage show, which made the pages of the Wall Street Journal, was an artistic spectacle right out of the pages of Where The Wild Things Are. This was no everyday band rocking Marshall half-stacks in skinny jeans; this was poignant, epic rock, half in English and half in I don’t know what, performed by a troupe of performers who managed to be enveloped by the music, to become completely invisible, despite the headdresses and the colorful sleeves woven from tattered flags.

The genius of the stageshow assembled by 59 Productions, the London-based creative house behind the visuals, was that it brought attention to the music itself, rather than to the performers. Many performers, such as Rob Zombie, will go the extra mile to incorporate video projections into the rock show. But the colored lights and images are usually little more than eye candy, and they are designed to either distract from or draw attention to the performer.

Jonsi’s set resembled a decrepit warehouse in a forest or downed plane moored in a jungle. Projectors turned the panels into windows streaked with rain or glimpses of nature that mirrored the flow of the music. At times during the show, I felt as if I were flying because of the way that the images soared in parallel to the music. It transformed an album that was otherwise destined for a single in-office reference spin, which I give most of the CDs that cross my desk, into something I felt compelled to understand by listening over and over the next day, much to the annoyance of our new intern. There was something very stirring and unexplainably deep about the music that the show that delineated to me.

I’m not prone to superlatives, but the Jonsi show was the best I have seen in 2010 thus far and may be one of the best shows I have ever seen.