Track By Track: Gunnar Jónsson Collider’s ‘Aeons’

Gunnar Jónsson Collider is a musician and producer from Reykjavík, Iceland. After a couple of storming sets at Airwaves 2017, we asked him to talk us through his excellent krautrock and ambient-inspired album, ‘Aeons.’

Aeons by Gunnar Jónsson Collider

Realize/Remember
I built this song around a sample from some terribly cheesy ‘80s commercial I found online. It’s probably the most hip-hop influenced song I’ve ever done, but maybe I’m the only one who hears that. The title refers to a personal experience, where I thought I had learnt an important lesson about life. So I made a song to remind me. What was the lesson? I’d prefer not to say.

DNB3P
DNB3P is one of the first songs I wrote after buying my old Roland JX3P synth, which is a wonderful analog synth. I really wanted this song to have a drum and bass attitude without being 100% drum and bass. I love deconstructing genres. I also mess with the recipe when I’m baking. That’s just the kind of bad boy I am! Hopefully the song works both as a dance number and an almost-pop song.

Doomsday/Surrender
This is the dystopian counterpart to the first song’s utopian leanings. The song plays with the idea that humanity is done for. It’s the oldest song on the record so I don’t really remember making it, except that I started the song late one evening and completely lost track of time. I remember coming to at about eight in the morning with a finished track, having forgotten to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom.

The Dream
I had been listening a lot to King Tubby and was really keen on injecting some dub vibes. The title and feel of the song refers to my view of life as a dream. Consciousness follows a sort of non-linear, dream-like structure and although we live in the supposedly Newtonian “real world” it is our elusive thoughts and feelings that give meaning and depth to any of it.

[Silence]
This song is mostly silence. It’s a tribute to silence, and the lack thereof. I was going to use a sample of Eckhart Tolle’s voice at one point, but his team didn’t allow it. Note to self: Spiritual gurus also have lawyers that suck! No disrespect to Tolle, though.

End Scene
The sound at the beginning of the song is a sample of my voice that I turned into a synth in a program called Renoise (the sampler is excellent!). It’s fun to decontextualise your voice like that. The title is a reference to death, which I’ve thought a lot about lately. I’ve lost people over the last two years and it’s just really sad, mind-boggling and a reminder that I don’t know anything. You need to try to love the people in your life, because they won’t be there forever.

Terraformer
This is the longest song I’ve released. It’s very new age-y and I had some reservations about it, but I’m glad I released it and people have really been responding positively. It’s basically a drawn out ambient exercise with some dub elements thrown in to subvert the whole “relaxing vibe.” It’s still pretty relaxing. For me, the song conjures up images of a world a thousand years in the future, inhabited solely by terraforming robots and machinery. It doesn’t have to do that for everyone, but I’d love if they do their own daydreaming when they listen to my music!

Read more Track By Tracks here.