( )
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- For the short film of the same title, see ( ) (film).
The album’s title consists solely of two opposing parentheses. It has no official pronounceable title. Fans have referred to it as "Parenthesis," "Brackets," or "Sausages," after the parentheses' resemblance to the meat product.
The packaging has the ( ) cut out of the sleeve and a natural image (taken from outside of their studio in Álafoss) printed on the CD case under them, visible in its entirety when the case is removed from the sleeve. Four different covers were made for sale in different areas: America, Australia, Europe, Japan. [link]
The album's vocals are recorded in "Vonlenska" ("Hopelandic"), which consists of meaningless syllables and resembles scat singing. The "language" is named after Von, the first song that employed it.[link] Most of the syllable-strings sung by vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson are repeated many times throughout each song, and often throughout the whole album.
Interestingly, many of these Hopelandic "phrases" resemble English words and phrases (for example, "you sigh," "you sold," "you sign no more," "you sigh so long", "you sat alone"), leading many listeners to interpret them as such, thus inventing their own meaning. It is unclear whether this effect was intentional, but for a while after the album's release the band's web site featured a multimedia application that played tracks from the album while displaying various hypothetical lyrics suggested by fans. The album's packaging also included a 12-page booklet of blank pages, on which fans were invited to draw or write their own interpretations of the music.
Sigur Rós would also go on to release a music video for "untitled #1" ("Vaka"). The music video shows a post-apocalyptic world in which children, attending school, get ready to go outside and play in the nuclear snow. The children, after putting on many layers of clothes as well as ominous gas-masks, go outside to play. The play of the children is characterized by fun, and destruction of the old world from which they came. The final scene shows a little girl breaking her gas mask and dying in the nuclear snow, finally seeing the world for its true beauty outside of the glass confines the children have been forced to use. Sigur Rós won the "Best Video" award at the 2003 MTV Europe Music Awards in Edinburgh, Scotland for the "untitled #1" video.
( ) has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.
Track listing
- "untitled #1" (6:38) aka "Vaka" (The name of Orri's daughter)
- "untitled #2" (7:33) aka "Fyrsta" (The first song)
- "untitled #3" (6:33) aka "Samskeyti" (Attachment)
- "untitled #4" (7:32) aka "Njósnavélin" (The Spy Machine or "The Nothing Song")
- "untitled #5" (9:57) aka "Álafoss" (The location of the band's studio)
- "untitled #6" (8:48) aka "E-Bow" (Georg uses an e-bow on his bass in this song)
- "untitled #7" (12:59) aka "Dauðalagið" (The Death Song)
- "untitled #8" (11:45) aka "Popplagið" (The Pop Song)
- All tracks written by Sigur Rós
- All tracks are officially untitled; the other names are the working titles the band members use to refer to the tracks
Personnel
Sigur Rós:- Jón Þór Birgisson – voice, guitar, keyboards
- Kjartan Sveinsson – keyboards, guitar
- Georg Hólm – bass, keyboards, glockenspiel
- Orri Páll Dýrason – drums, keyboards
- María Huld Markan – violin
- Edda Rún Ólafsdóttir – violin
- Ólöf Júlía Kjartansdóttir – viola
- Sólrún Sumarliðadóttir – cello
External links
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