From Iceland — The Soulful Gardener: EinarIndra Experiments With Earthly Sounds

The Soulful Gardener: EinarIndra Experiments With Earthly Sounds

Published July 2, 2021

The Soulful Gardener: EinarIndra Experiments With Earthly Sounds
Alina Maurer
Photo by
Art Bicnick

EinarIndra is one who likes to take his time, fearlessly modifying his electronic creations until he is entirely satisfied. After three previous studio- albums, Einar’s first full-length offering, ‘Disintegrate,’ has emerged and is ready to carry the listener away into a mystic, melancholic, and soulful world of experimental electronic music, underlined by melodious vocals.

A perfectionist at heart

‘Disintegrate’ is a vast composition of EinarIndra’s personal field recordings, deep lyrics and dreamy electronic beats fused with instrumental piano sounds. The name of the album makes complete sense, as everything was initially broken down before Einar merged the loose pieces back together.

Most of Einar’s music is intertwined and inspired by his personal experiences. He took a brief pause from music in 2018, after the birth of his youngest daughter, and traveled through Europe, which heavily influenced the start of his album.

“We went to Tenerife, Portugal and spent a month in Lisbon. My mixing and mastering engineer that I’ve been working with, called me up and said that we should do something. He inspired me to go for it,” Einar remembers and adds, “I was actually thinking about naming the record ‘While you were sleeping’, because all the songs came [together] when my daughter was sleeping.”

After three years of creating, he finally finished the album this year. “Some tracks I wasn’t comfortable with and changed them 30 times over the course of two years,” EinarIndra sighs. The constant modifications and development of the tracks explain the final name of the album, “I was changing up a lot of my process, so the title of the album came out of that–like old patterns being disintegrated.”

Einar with a slimy friend

Using nature’s tunes

Einar creates his own sounds, underlining his music in a peculiar and enchanting way. “With a laptop, you have the whole world of sound [at] your fingertips. This record is mainly based on the sounds I have created,” he explains, taking a sip of his steaming coffee. “Sometimes I want a sound and it takes me three days to achieve it. I think the more you put into it, the more precious it becomes to you, even if it doesn’t sound better to someone else.”

On the track “Watching things grow,” pebbles can be heard washing up on the shore of his home peninsula Tjörnes, close to Húsavík, lending it some kind of mystic vibe. “It’s one of my favorite places. The recording is from a small harbour, down at the sea. I recorded it on a beautiful summer day, you could hear the stones coming up on the shore. I think that one is my favorite field recording,” Einar recalls.

EinarIndra does it all

EinarIndra does it all—singer, songwriter and field-recorder. His next project, after the release of ‘Disintegrate’ in late May, is creating a music video for the song “Watching things grow.”

As a hobby-gardener himself, Einar envisions his own inspirations for the track to be compiled in a music video. “I planted soybeans in my greenhouse and I have a camera on them. It has been going for more than a week, like a time-lapse. I’m thinking of combining that with videos of my daughter into a music video,” he says and smiles. It’s clear that out of the ten tracks on the album,“Watching things grow” is a special one to Einar. “I love gardening and watching things grow. It was a [fitting] title, both that and watching my daughter grow up. [It’s] this aspect of sitting by and watching something grow instead of interfering with it,” he explains carefully.

We might not all have the patience to watch soybeans grow, but EinarIndra’s beats inspire a sense of presence, infecting us with his ability to slow down.

Stream EinarIndra’s new album ‘Disintegrate’ on Spotify, Soundcloud, and all other streaming platforms–Perfect for daydreaming your sorrows away.

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