Venue: Trg Leona Štuklja / Maribor / Slovenia
Concert date: 05.09.2012
Attendance: 2,000
Ticket price: €33 presale / €39 / €42 on the day of the show
Lost in the synchronized trance of a 2,000-strong crowd, I’m thinking that I’ll never be able to listen to this band’s albums the way I used to, not with the girl on my right sobbing in some kind of pseudo-nirvana because of them. That they simply won’t give me the ecstasy they always have until now. That vinyl or CD or whatever as a music medium is plain bullshit. That Sigur Rós will push me into total album apathy, and that’s why I love and hate them at the same time.
Since Wednesday, practically since the very end of their show, I’ve listened to nothing but Sigur Rós. Ágætis byrjun, Takk, (), Valtari, whatever studio record I throw in my player, none of it gives me the impression of the music I was listening to not long ago. That feeling is gone, not even a flicker of it, as if it wasn’t the same band. Okay, I’ll go watch Inni and Heima again, those are live recordings after all. Nothing, zilch, nada. Sigur Rós personally ruined the pleasure of listening to their music for me. And not because it wasn’t outstanding from the very start, but because Sigur Rós are such damn unbelievably fantastic phenomenal musicians live. Because that live sound of theirs is so full, so rich, so inhumanly perfect that any further encounter with the music in its condensed, album form is more of a daily habit than a need.
Of course I’m not kidding myself – this fanatical high will wear off sooner or later. Sooner or later I’ll happily go back to watching YouTube clips of »Popplagið«. That very closing »Popplagið«, which ripped open the stormy sky on Wednesday and left us standing there motionless, unconscious and half dead. But let’s take it from the top, starting with the location, its backstory and the two opening acts.
This year’s fourth Mars festival took place nowhere other than Maribor, as it should, since it was all about the European Capital of Culture. Everyone who mourned the move from Križanke to Trg Leona Štuklja couldn’t help but keep complaining, even though without the Capital of Culture project itself the concert would never have come off the way it did. Mostly because Križanke has rarely, if ever, seen sound as good as what they managed to pull off at Trg Leona Štuklja. If that was thanks to Sigur Rós themselves, so be it.
The organization itself was, ahem, a kind of fun variant. You had to buy coupons, which you then used to buy drinks. Folks complained a lot about the toilets by the entrance and a few other little things… but those are the classic problems and typical gripes. My biggest complaint isn’t about the organization, but about probably the very same people who weren’t happy about having to buy beer with coupons. I’m talking about the clueless crowd who yell during shows, clap over the most ecstatic parts and spend the whole concert staring into their rotten iPhones, so they always know whether Jónsi is zoomed in enough and whether they’ve got enough battery left. In essence, the whole concert was a kind of embodiment of the band philosophy of Robert Fripp, frontman of King Crimson, who never wanted or liked recordings of music, since they supposedly don’t capture the real experience, while thanks to exactly this kind of people he didn’t like going to concerts or playing them either. Ah, the irony.
So, the opening acts. First up was MojcART, the trio of Mojca Zalar, a charming singer who did a good job of stretching the band’s intimate purpose across such a big stage and the crowd in front of it. After her came Melodrom. Watching them, I thought to myself that they’re basically the Slovenian band that comes closest to the sound of Sigur Rós (though you could hardly say they sound alike), which makes them a perfect choice for the support slot. Dark, melancholic moments, soaked now in full instrumental atmosphere, now in a minimalist rhythmic effect, struck me as really »Sigur Rós-ian«. Singer Mina Špiler also seemed to have the same cold, restrained charisma that Jónsi has. So with their hour-long set, at least in my opinion at the time, Melodrom built things up nicely and got the 2,000-strong crowd (and the 100-odd people sitting outside the fences listening for free) ready for the Icelandic 11-piece post-rock orchestra. But I was wrong. Almost naively wrong, because it was a truly flimsy illusion. However nice our two openers were, however charming each band was in its own way and however good an impression they left, they were completely outclassed by the tiny brain fart of »Victory Rose« (which is how Sigur Rós would be translated, albeit a bit clumsily).
Beautiful. Fantastic. Magical. Those are the clichés you pile on a concert that blew you away. And I’ve been to a ton of concerts that blew me away. Concerts that were beautiful, fantastic and magical all at once. And this concert simply wasn’t only that. This is where the words run dry, because you don’t know how to build a coherent enough correlation between what you heard and what you write. How to get past the typical superlatives through words, because the band exceeded every possible limit of flattery that language has to offer. And I can hardly say this is some bad case of »fanboying« or anything like that. But if, here and now, in this time and this place, in this general crisis of humanity, you can get people with a musical form to open up completely and weep, to instantly experience in some obsessed rapture a state that comes as close as it gets to the definition of the otherwise inconceivable nirvana, and I’m really not exaggerating at all, then it’s truly magic. That primal magic, the kind that every person has a hidden, by now long-forgotten corner for, a corner that nonetheless keeps constantly yearning for the sort of elixir Sigur Rós brewed for us this time.
And the experience kept building from the moment when none of the Icelanders were on stage yet, and the atmosphere was created by partly dimmed lights and ambient sounds that stretched out further and further, which is typical of the band’s music. Music that can sound so minimalist at first, yet with every passing moment it keeps stretching and growing and becoming so huge that it’s impossible to wrap words around it properly. The setlist held no surprises, as it was identical to their previous show in Vienna. Out of all the best-known and most beautiful songs, maybe only “Starálfur” was missing, but that’s nothing you could hold against the band. After an hour and a half of playing, when the musicians left the stage with »Hafsól«, it was of course clear that the ecstasy wasn’t over yet. So I wasn’t even worried back then. In fact, I only got worried the moment they came back on stage for the second time. When they came back for the most natural, and therefore most perfect, ending to a concert ever. With »Popplagið« they created the peak of peaks in the most literal sense of the words. Here the music was truly expanded and perfected to its extreme. And any continuation would only have ruined the atmosphere they’d created and held back the emotions that had broken loose. The band’s bow was met with such applause for that reason too, not just because of the performance as such.
Reintegrating into the real world is hard. At Trg Leona Štuklja, Sigur Rós created an alternative, better world than the one we know. For two hours they locked us in an impenetrable dome, in a long-forgotten place we find it harder and harder to reach these days. In a space built from music that was at times so explosive, yet still felt so safe, so homely, so… soothing. And that’s a world a person would go back to again and again. It’s a world that hardly anyone but Sigur Rós can recreate.
Setlist
1. Lagið Í Gær
2. Vaka
3. Ný Batterí
4. Svefn-g-englar
5. Sæglópur
6. Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása
7. Hoppípolla
8. Með Blóðnasir
9. Olsen Olsen
10. Festival
11. Varúð
12. Hafsól
—encore—
13. Ekki Múkk
14. Glósóli
15. Popplagið
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