In 1994, a young girl in Iceland witnessed Nirvana on MTV
Unplugged. She was a student of classical violin at the time, but
she was hooked, and when Unplugged came out on disc, she taught
herself all the songs on guitar without the help of any lessons or
formal training.
“I’m mixed between an educated musician and a self-taught one,”
Ólöf Arnalds says over the phone from Reykjavík. “I
think my music is more American influenced—I really like
listening to old American folk recordings, and I went through a period
of really listening a lot to that kind of stuff. The Icelandic folk
tradition is only oral and it’s really weak, and because of the
isolation and the poverty, there weren’t any instruments. Also, the
Lutheran Church banned workday singing and that kind of erased the
Icelandic folk tradition. So we don’t really have any, except the
rímur, which is an oral form that’s rhymed, midway
between singing and reciting.”
The delicate acoustic songs on Arnalds’ debut album, Við Og
Við, were each written for a family member or loved one. Her
classically trained, clarion voice moves through gently thicketed
pluckings of guitar and charango, sounding at turns lachrymose and
hopeful. While it doesn’t closely resemble American folk of any
shade—not even the warped harpings of Joanna Newsom—it also
sounds unlike anything else coming from Iceland, be it Björk,
Sigur Rós, or even Múm, the electro-classical-folk band
of which Arnalds is also a member.
Arnalds’ second album,
Ókídókí,
is due out next, and it won’t be as sparse as her debut—she says
it will even include a pop song. “I’ve had [that song] in my system for
seven years, so I sort of just had to record it and turn it into
something. I feel really shy toward that song, and for a long time I
thought about skipping it and not having it on the record, because it’s
a little bit like when you were a kid and you wore sunglasses and
everybody said, ‘Look at you! You’re so cool, you have sunglasses!'”
she laughs. “Of course, having sunglasses in Iceland is mostly only for
the cold, because we don’t really get the sun here.”