SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Despite its small population, Iceland has become known as a sort of music hub, with artists like Sigur Ros and Bjork finding worldwide fame and acts on the rise like the duo Kiasmos, who just released their second album together.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "BURST")
OLAFUR ARNALDS: It's a small community here, which has required artists to work together in ways that I don't think are that usual in that many other countries.
DETROW: Olafur Arnalds is one half of Kiasmos and says the smallness of Iceland's music scene, it's kind of a superpower.
ARNALDS: Like, one good example of that is genres. Like, let's say if I only wanted to work with other people in the neoclassical scene, there would be, like, two of us, you know?
DETROW: That freedom from genres has allowed Kiasmos to be experimental. They exist somewhere at the cross section of neoclassical and EDM.
JANUS RASMUSSEN: I like to just call it electronica in a way, as it doesn't define a genre around what we do.
DETROW: That's Janus Rasmussen, the other half of Kiasmos. He says on their new album, "II," they tried to create sounds and textures they had never heard before.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "SWORN")
RASMUSSEN: It is a collage of electronic and organic drum sounds and kind of field recordings. The way we process synths (ph) is we send them out and re-add (ph) them, which means we send them into speakers and then record them again with microphones. That way, even electronic synths get a little bit more texture to them.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "LACED")
ARNALDS: So you really start to feel like this is a real acoustic instrument, but the sound is somehow not something you recognize. You can't say, oh, that's a guitar, and you can't say, oh, that's a piano. It's something that sits somewhere in between sometimes.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "LACED")
ARNALDS: When a sound sounds like something tangible, something almost physical, something with character, something you can touch, that's when I feel like that's a sound we can use.
RASMUSSEN: We have something that we call the antidrop (ph). It's pretty much our version of a drop.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "SAILED")
RASMUSSEN: It's something we think about a lot when we make our music and our drops, so to speak, as how can we make it interesting and new?
ARNALDS: We started talking about - what is a drop, you know? What if the drop is not dropping down, it's just simply going into another room? As soon as you break out of the idea that it needs to go down and up, there's infinite possibilities. And that's where we started calling it the antidrop.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "SQUARED")
RASMUSSEN: It's always exciting to see somebody's take on instrumental music where there's no lyrics telling you what to feel - and what is the best way to tell a story when you don't have lyrics, for example, to say whatever you want to say?
ARNALDS: Yeah, that's what's so lovely about at least the feedback that we get from people is that they feel that our music can match their mood no matter what mood they're in. So I think the word catharsis is correct 'cause it can refer to something very emotional, very deep but also can just refer to music being the right thing for the right moment, and that could be writing an essay (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "TOLD")
DETROW: That was Olafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen of Kiasmos - that's with a K. Their newest album is called "II."
(SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "TOLD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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