ARNA

Reykjavík, Iceland · b. 2003 · FARA Records

ARNA (Arna Kristjánsdóttir, b. 27 March 2003, Reykjavík) grew up in a capital city of about a hundred and forty thousand people where more or less everybody sings in something. Iceland has a genuinely unusual choral culture — choirs attached to schools, churches, workplaces and neighbourhoods, in a population smaller than most European cities — and she came up inside it without ever thinking of it as training. The other formative condition is the dark: four hours of daylight in December, which is not gloomy so much as structural, and which means an Icelandic childhood contains an enormous amount of indoor singing and outdoor swimming in the black. She found her way in through choir from six, in the way that's completely unremarkable there and would be a whole origin story anywhere else. What was less usual was discovering at about seventeen that she preferred her own voice stacked twenty times over to her own voice once — she started multitracking herself into choirs of one and has essentially been doing that ever since. She met JETZT through a shared studio in Reykjavík, and their working relationship is entirely in English, which neither of them speaks as a first language and both find slightly comic.

High, clear, unforced and almost entirely without vibrato, and multiplied — she stacks and layers herself into something that reads as a choir rather than as a singer, a texture rather than a performance, and exactly right for this record. She sings in Icelandic and has no intention of switching; the language isn't a decoration but a decision, and the fact that most of the audience won't understand a word is, to her, the point. No belting, no runs, and a genuine gift for finding the one note in a chord that makes the whole thing lift. Her influences run the Icelandic choral tradition she grew up inside, which is closer to a civic habit than to a musical scene; the country's long line of artists who sing in Icelandic without apologising for it; and, in production terms, ambient and drone rather than dance music — she came to techno through the pads.

Blunt in the specifically Icelandic way that visitors sometimes mistake for coldness, which is simply an absence of padding. She doesn't do mystique and finds the ethereal-Nordic-woman framing that gets applied to Icelandic singers extremely tedious — she's a twenty-three-year-old who sings in choirs and goes swimming, and would like that to be the story. She multitracks herself into choirs of one and has done since she was seventeen; there's no other singer on any of her records. She and JETZT work entirely in English, neither of their first languages, and both find this funnier than it probably is. Direct, self-contained, funny.