“I started playing when I was six years old. I stopped playing for a while to explore some other things but I needed to come back to it. It’s pretty much what I’ve always wanted to do.”
Do you have anything special you want to accomplish by coming to Iceland? What?
We are really looking forward to exploring the countryside. We’ve stopped over in Iceland on the way to Europe a few times, but this is our first chance for us to actually to see it for ourselves.
And what would you want to tell our readers, to convince them to come to your show?
I don’t know what expectations people have about us, but hopefully they are as excited about us playing as we are to be in Iceland.
What got you making music in the first place? What kept you playing?
I started playing when I was six years old. I stopped playing for a while to explore some other things but I needed to come back to it. It’s pretty much what I’ve always wanted to do.
What do you like these days? Anything we should know about?
I am re-discovering some older soul music – Mavin Gaye, Otis Redding, The Temptations to name a few.
We really love ‘Hospice’ over here, but there’s something about the idea of a ‘concept album’ (it is sort of a concept album right?) that puzzles us. Do we listen to it as a story? Do you have to listen to it in sequence? And are all the songs connected to the general concept, or are there strays, too?
All of the songs do connect to the concept. It is sequenced in a way that we felt made the most sense in terms of the narrative. Ultimately, each person is going to listen to the record and interpret its meaning for themselves.
Whoops, we just realised that some of our readers might not have read about the concept behind ‘Hospice’. Care to tell them about it?
The lyrics largely deal with the inter-personal relationships and how we all treat (or mistreat) those closest to us. On the record, the relationship between the hospice worker and the patient characterize this idea.
Is being in a sucessful band on the rise all you thought it would be? Are you ever jealous of your early nineties peers, their big budgets and freedom from blog commenters, filesharing and Pitchfork?
I think it’s better to be in a band now. The music blogs and file-sharing introduce lots of people around the world to music that in many cases they never would have gotten to hear. They’re great resources for discovering new music and often older re-issued music as well.
Make a five track playlist for your planeride over. Tell us why each track is there. Your scenario: you’re just about to land, and you want to mentally prepare yourself for whatever you think is going to meet you.
I would just play the Fever Ray record. It just sounds the way I imagine Iceland to be in some broad abstract way.
The Antlers will be performing at Sódóma on Saturday, at 23:50 o’clock.
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