Daníel Bjarnason - Processions - Bedroom Community

Daníel Bjarnason is already a veteran of Iceland’s music scene and his compositions have received international acclaim in recent years. As co-founder and chief conductor of the Ísafold Chamber Orchestra, the 30-year-old composer has recorded two discs of modern classical music on the 12 Tónar label.
 
Strikingly, there is no discontinuity between his work’s grounding in musical conventions of the past and the elements that mark it as unmistakably contemporary. He has lent his talents to artists on the other side of the alleged classical/rock divide—Ólöf Arnalds, Pétur Ben, Hjaltalín and most famously, Sigur Rós, collaborating with that band at their Abbey Road sessions with the London Sinfonietta—before creating this disc with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson.
 
Blurring the line between electronic and chamber music—a familiar style for the Icelandic Bedroom Community collective—the constructions of this recording’s emotional triggers are wholly unique. In Daníel Bjarnason’s Processions - released February 1st - the composer marshals all the technical forces at his disposal to accomplish a musical goal rather than an ideological statement.
 
"Daníel Bjarnason is ‘the other classical composer’ on our label, a throne he now shares with the omnipresent Nico Muhly. Daníel and Nico may both conjure their magic and craft via black dots on manuscript paper and swinging of the arms & upper-body, but their music is as fundamentally different from each other’s as it is from that of Ben Frost or Sam Amidon. If anything else connects it—apart from allowing me to cast my own spell on it—it is that it is all brand-new; taking nothing as given while being fully informed of the past and the possibilities of now. As the fifth member of Bedroom Community, Daníel Bjarnason promises to share his bewitching alchemy with our troupe and our listeners."
—Valgeir Sigurðsson, Reykjavík 2009.