"Untitled #8"

I write this in the ringing silence between my ears, the memory of rising house lights still flush in my mind, satisfied and yet not sated. When you have experienced something so rousing, so beautiful that no matter how it ends, it will never have been enough, that is the space inside me at this moment.

I have just seen Sigur Ros.

The brilliant alien music comes from some shining otherworld, and the pealing distortion is the only echo of some unknown geometry. Their first album, Agaetis Byrjun, was the first foray into the ethereal. Their otherwise untitled album, ( ), could only have come from Iceland--the furor and the glacial movements, the minimalist sweeping vistas and the cataclysmic eruptions are wholly a product of their homeland. Takk... occurred as if the band had discovered these things called "songs," and what conventional song structures became was reflective of the curvature of their individuality, recognizable and yet novel.

Their stage presence is magnetic, towering and fragile, as opaque and internal as their music. It begins with a curtain lowered over the stage, and the silhouettes of the backlit band projected onto it, warring for primacy with fragments of video and harshly stylized photographs shown onto it. It is a screen and a projection, and its nonnarrative display allows for a moving interpretation of the visuals (much as they welcome the singular response to their music). At the halfway point the curtain lifts, and the band members are carved out of the darkness with spotlights. Pulsing strobes play when each instrument hits its peak and pushes beyond, into feedback and squeals. The final song of the set, the evocatively-named "Heysatan" (haystacks in English), finds the boys contracting into one single spot, playing their instruments, all other help dismissed, existing in their own world, and the song ends quietly, serenely, with a wave and a thank-you murmured in chirping Icelandic.

The crowd erupts in applause, cheering and waving; people stand at their seats to stretch tired legs. I sit still. I refuse to believe it is over. I want to hear one song, I need it, its propulsive rhythms and its explosive climax. It is the closest to religion I have ever come. I will not leave without hearing it. It is "Untitled #8," a song that begins with a haunted yawning guitar and a glance across the icefields. It ebbs and it flows, the tide rises, and that guitar bobs on the current of a wavering bassline and a steady drumbeat. A beat that gets faster. A beat that heralds the coming apocalypse. A beat that explodes into static and feedback.

It is the beat that I need, it is the explosion I crave. The emptiness that has dogged me these past four months has been beaten back but not defeated. I need this song. I need to feel something inside me, need to feel the building emotion, need the rush, I need the release that forces me to move. I will not leave this seat until I hear this song.

The house lights come up. The stage is empty, with instruments strewn on it half-forgotten. People shift around me. I am clearly in the way.

The lights set at the back of the stage bleed a sudden, vivid red, and they skew toward us. The house lights black out and the screen comes down. The crowd--momentarily accepting of their half-finished spectacle--hushes with an apprehensive breath.

We all hold that one breath, stretched tight in the air around us. To break the silence will break the spell and we all need this last moment. The screen flashes redly and behind it appear the shadows of the band. Picking up the guitar and his bow, Jonsi plucks the winding notes that signal the beginning of the end.

It is "Untitled #8."

The crowd releases its singular breath to scream with one mouth and the tension floods the emptiness. I am a string stretched taut, I am the drumhead pounding, I am the voice driven hard to strain at the edges of the note. We are swept into the wavering song and the drumbeat starts to sound faster.

This is what I need--

--the beat, so primal, rushes headlong, and the tension reaches its breaking point--

--and we are pushed farther, pushed into oblivion, the crowd does not exist and my body cannot take this, I must move--

--and the explosion arrives, the storm breaks, I stand and fling my arms to the sky and call the lightning upon myself. The song is stretching me and I am letting it; the song is breathing me and I empty myself for it. I gather it up inside me and let the sweeping grandeur of this beautiful destruction fill my frailties with static crashing cymbals and the pealing oh the pealing of his guitar. They play as hard as they can their bodies bent and as the song collapses into one sputtering breath the last air in his lungs slipping out at the end of a wail Jonsi falls to his knees and the guitar drops. The screen has flashed static and video clips and fragments of oil lantern flames, and now all that stands large is Jonsi's shadow, his slight form bent.

The lights on stage disappear and we are left with the echoes of the feedback and the whistling distortion. The house lights come up and I stand; I walk; I leave.

Battered, bruised, hollow, I recede into the moonless night and let the headlights lead me home, the whispers of the song dying behind me, like the embers of the lit cigarette flickering on the sidewalk.

It was beautifully fragile; it was thunderingly strong; it was the beginning of the end.

It was "Untitled #8."