Growing Sounds: Sin Fang Experiments With Mushrooms For Svepparíkið Score

“Sorry, we’ve been soundchecking,” says musician and composer Sindri Már Sigfússon, perhaps better known as Sin Fang, as he greets me at the door of his studio at the music company INNI. “I’m just gonna take this guy out, and we can start,” he points at the plant he’s holding.

He takes the plant out of the room, grabs a few mushrooms from the bag I brought, and attaches EKG-like sensors to them. An airy, slightly otherworldly sound fills the room. “Wow, this one has a lot to say,” laughs Sindri.

From similar experiments with mushrooms, he composed the score and accompanying soundtrack for the new documentary series ​​Svepparíkið (The Fungal Kingdom in English).

“We tried a bunch of different mushrooms to see what they sounded like. I was basically recording a jam session for hours of just really strange sounds.”

Mushrooms are having a moment

It was only a year ago that another Icelandic musician got involved in a mushroom documentary — I’m talking about Björk, who narrated Fungi Web of Life, hosted by the eccentric British scientist Merlin Sheldrake. Unlike that film, ​​Svepparíkið, directed by Anna Þóra Steinþórsdóttir, focuses entirely on Icelandic fungi. Each of its five episodes explores mushrooms in Iceland through the lenses of science, culture, aesthetics, and sustainability.

Anna’s family are actually mycophiles, or mushroom enthusiasts, themselves. The series is hosted by her daughter, Erna Kanema Mashinkila, who introduces viewers to Iceland’s fungal diversity by visiting local mushroom growers, learning how to cook them with restaurant chefs, and speaking to experts such as Dr. Guðríður Gyða Eyjólfsdóttir, a mycologist from Akureyri, who also runs the Facebook group called “Funga Íslands – sveppir ætir eður ei” and has been over the years patiently answering questions like, “Is this one edible or not?”

“I would say that   I’m a bit of a mushroom hobbyist,” says Sindri when I ask how he got involved in the project. “I’m interested in mushrooms, especially cooking them. I’ve been making these mushroom steaks, particularly when I get large oyster mushrooms. You can’t really buy them here, but whenever I’m in Los Angeles — I’ve been there quite a bit over the years — I’ll buy these big clusters of oyster mushrooms. You can turn them into a steak by pressing them down, putting barbecue sauce on, and baking them. The flavour is incredible,” he continues, and everyone in the room practically drools when he goes on to describe a simple pasta with chanterelles.

Jam sessions with fungi

Known predominantly as a trailblazing indie musician — whether solo or as part of Seabear — and as a composer for film and TV, Sin Fang’s background is actually in visual arts.

“Somehow, music just took over my life,” he says. “Even when I was in school, I started touring and playing in bands and stuff. But I do have this kind of visual or conceptual way of approaching a lot of projects, which I think can be good when you’re doing scoring.”

Sindri had worked with Anna a few years ago, so when the director reached out asking him to score the series, he said, “Yes, of course.”

As a composer, Sindri likes to truly immerse himself in the story. “It’s not like you come in and just do [a bunch of] piano songs or something, you have to consider everything that’s going on in the story,” he says.

Much like the previous film he worked on with Anna, Just Like A Painting by Eggert Pétursson, Svepparíkið’s score focuses on small textural things, rather than big, dramatic moments. “I was thinking about mushrooms growing — what does that sound like when something starts small and then becomes bigger? What does it sound like to walk in a dark forest? What does the root sound like growing in the ground? That was an amazing starting point for making music, just to think about these kinds of things.”

While composing the score, Sindri saw the perfect chance to experiment with the SCÍON module with the biofeedback sensors he showed us at the start of the meeting. He’d seen the tech used on plants before, but never tried it himself.

“When I mentioned this to the director, she brought me a bunch of mushrooms, like you can see in the first episode,” he recalls. “We tried a bunch of different mushrooms to see what they sounded like. I was basically recording a jam session for hours of just really strange sounds.”

In the studio, he shows us how the technology works and how the sound differs from mushroom to mushroom. Some are spiky and excited, while others are more subtle or quiet. None of us in the room knows whether the type of signal depends on the type of mushroom. “Maybe it’s how much energy is left in the mushroom because I guess they start dying when you take them out of the ground,” Sindri shrugs. “Once, I put the sensors on a plant that I hadn’t watered in a long time, and it just went insane.”

He adds, “It could also be funny to just go on stage, sit down, put them on your brain, and just sit still, making music with your brain.”

“I was thinking about mushrooms growing — what does that sound like when something starts small and then becomes bigger? What does it sound like to walk in a dark forest?”

“On the soundtrack that came out, the first track and the last track are just kind of unfiltered mushrooms playing, and it’s very weird — maybe more a sound piece than music,” Sindri says. For the rest of the tracks, he uses the snippets of mushroom sounds and weaves them into a more cohesive piece.

“I was thinking a lot about cutetronica — a movement from around 2000, mainly in Germany, which had this kind of cute electronic music, [made up of] very small sounds. For the percussion, I used a lot of samples of little textural things, and then I put them in the computer, and played them as a drum kit,” he explains. “It’s all kinds of things that I have sampled. I decided pretty early on that this would be the palette: kind of synths, but not very computer-sounding music. It’s live, but manipulated in the box.”

The result is atmospheric, meditative, and strangely magical. “I guess when you’re thinking about things growing, that is magical and kind of like — what does growing sound like? It sounds positive and like, like..,” he pauses looking for the right word. “Sparkling, I guess. That’s what I was going for.”

Sin Fang’s soundtrack album consists of 18 tracks, all of which are named after Icelandic mushrooms — from “Kantarellur” (chanterelles) to “Berserkur” (toadstool) “I just went through the names of Icelandic mushrooms and named the tracks after them,” says Sindri. “They had some very boring names at the beginning, ‘Svepparikið track one,’ ‘Svepparikið track two,’ or something. When you’re making a soundtrack for media, for TV or film, you want to take it a bit away from there and reimagine it for a listener who’s not watching anything.”

All in, always

Speaking of reimagining, Sindri shares that he wrote the music for the series two years ago. But with the long timelines for funding and production in the film industry, he only returned to it and finished the soundtrack just last month. “I think time is actually the best thing when you’re making art. Of course, you work intensely for a long time, but then time gives you a great perspective. When you’re making something, you’re here, up against the thing you’re making, and you can’t really see the big picture,” he says. “Leaving it alone for a few months and coming back, you have fresh eyes, you can kind of look at it more objectively.”

He admits that it was good to let the project sit and brew for a while. In the end, he didn’t have to make many tweaks, but it helped him separate his “creative” and “editor” minds. “I make so much music these days. I’ve updated my Spotify playlist, and it’s 24 hours and 58 minutes of tracks that I’ve made over the last 20 years. So no, I think it was actually pretty good to leave it.”

Whether it’s his solo music, the soundscapes for exhibitions he does with Fischersund, his family’s perfumery art collective, scores for international films, or a small local documentary, Sindri doesn’t take anything as a side gig. “Obviously, there are different profiles of things, but I put all my 100 percent effort into this. And it’s the same with bigger or smaller projects. You just have to calculate how much of 100 percent effort can I put into this and for how long?,” he says.

With at least two scores for international projects coming out right after or soon after Svepparíkið — the Norwegian documentary Fatherhood and the Swedish TV series Vaka, and a new family exhibition in the making, Sin Fang keeps busy. “I’m actually trying to finish some solo Sin Fang albums as well. I haven’t really released one since 2019.”

Svepparikið is streaming on RÚV, for now only in Icelandic. English subtitles are coming soon.