mixed media on canvas
emerson gallery, berlin
2009
sigtryggur berg sigmarssonsigtryggur berg sigmarsson is a creature of horror mostly to himself. he, coming from iceland, drinks a lot. his view on life comes out often when he has hit the ’vacuum point’. the life of siggy is based on the delicate human balance of life and death on an ever tipping scale towards an inevitable bleak death. he has told me that the weight of space rides on his mind like a 4 headed horse, going different directions, tearing his tied down body apart. ’the weight and mass of the space vacuum must be embraced, we have this horror within us, consuming and destroying ourselves every second in time. you cannot run from the vacuum of life.’ In all this bleakness his music takes a few nods to krautrock, mostly the band cluster which pulls him onto a lighter plateau of exhilaration where he can be as easy going as ’a chimpanzee in a leaf filled tree.’ however his mind again takes him into the massive terror of space as soon as the music is over, or when the upbeat music loses its hold. ’I think the best thing for me when I am totally without friends, losing my cluster records, or too old to do anything ’right’ is to be launched into space by a satellite company or taken away by aliens to infect a corpse-less planet.’ there is some kind of mad sickness and depair to his sounds that he gets from wilhelm aschmertz’ studio in berlin where he practically has been living this past month. each track has some cold north wind or vacuum cleaner from promethius recycled death-company sucking in the background. he has gotten a sound which has been equal to the rumblings of his stomach and disintigration of his liver. he slowly promenades these bleak ice blocks into the the ears until you are horrified by what is his stock in trade. ’all Icelanders embrace death as a end of a long celebration. I embrace death as a celebration and stick it upsidedown into life.’ If there is any music that could really make a person want to die, it would be his next release ’evil madness’ which will have a simple chimp or baby controlling a sound generator for the beginning of the cd, and by the end a complete ’symphony of extinction’. If you are not depressed or horrified by the end of the cd, you have ceased your life function already. It’s now time for the rest of the world to hit an audio ’vacuum point’.
-- bonnie banks
brutalsfx san francisco
sigtryggur berg sigmarsson
lives and works in reykjavik and berlin
www.helenscarsdale.com