Music As Mirror: Futuregrapher On Process, Collaboration And Releasing Music

Árni Grétar is an Icelandic musician best known under the pseudonym Futuregrapher. He co-founded the Möller Records label and has in the past decade made consistent contributions to Iceland’s electronic music scene, ranging from unbound ambient music to accelerating techno and beyond.

“Beats are rolling around in my head during the day and into the night.”

Music mirrors Árni’s emotions. After two decades of practise, techno and acid music comes to him naturally. “I write ambient songs when I feel relaxed,” he says. “My ambient songs are essentially my techno songs excluding the drum machine and bass bits.”

Midnight in a perfect world

Being a full-time preschool teacher, Árni mostly makes music after work. “I start off by getting most of my ideas at work,” he explains. “Beats are rolling around in my head during the day and into the night. When my children have gone to bed I get the chance to get them out.”

Árni frequently remixes and collaborates with other musicians, even outside of the realm of electronic music. For him, collaboration is important, because it gives him a different work ethic. “A collaboration is a shared experience,” he explains. “An idea for a song will turn out totally different in the end, and have a new perspective.”

Inch by inch

His collaborative projects have been born in interesting ways. One example is the forthcoming Futuregrapher vs. Cold split 7-inch record ‘Zebra – Cube,’ out on August 8th. “Ísar Logi–a.k.a. Cold—told me to write a six minute track inspired by an image of a cube I posted online,” he says. “Then I asked him to do the same and voila! the next day we had two tracks.”

July 1 by Futuregrapher

Árni’s most recent release ‘July 1’—named for the birthday of his fiancée—is out now digitally and as a limited run of 10-inch records. “It’s my first 10-inch release, and since I collect vinyl myself, it feels extra nice to have it included in the collection,” he says. “The format is irrelevant in the end though. Releasing music in general gives me energy, and that’s the most important part.”

Find Futuregraphers’s music at soundcloud.com/futuregrapher and futuregrapher.bandcamp.com. Read more Electric Dreams here.