Kjartan Sveinsson is a composer, musician, and performer. He first came to prominence as a member of Sigur Rós, the ‘post-rock’ Icelandic band of which he was a member from 1998 to 2012, releasing five studio albums, a film, and a host of side projects, selling several million records around the world in the process. Sveinsson played keyboards and guitar in Sigur Rós, as well as being responsible for the band’s frequent arrangements for strings, brass, choir, and orchestra. After nearly a decade since his departure from the group, Sveinsson has re-joined Sigur Rós. The band made the announcement via Instagram in February of 2022, followed by the claim for “exciting times ahead.”
During his leave from Sigur Rós, Sveinsson broadened his horizons to score movies and expansive collaborations with foremost Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, while also continuing to write his own new orchestral and choral works. With Kjartansson, he has been closely involved in the creation of many new works that have been exhibited in galleries and major institutions internationally. The pair’s first collaboration was 2011’s Take Me Here by the Dishwasher, for which Sveinsson wrote a cod-folk song that was performed by a band of troubadours in the gallery for six hours a day for seven weeks straight, while a film of Kjartansson’s mother and father acting in an 80’s soft-porn movie played on a huge screen.
In 2014, Sveinsson and Kjartansson collaborated on ‘Der Klang der Offenbarung des Göttlichen’, an opera in four movements for Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre. Translated as “The Explosive Sonics of Divinity”, the piece combined Kjartansson’s theatrical set designs for an empty theatre, with Sveinsson’s sweeping and romantic orchestral score. Sveinsson has also extensively worked with Icelandic film director Rúnar Rúnarsson, scoring the Oscar-nominated short The Last Farm, as well as Volcano and Sparrows.
In terms of his own work, Sveinsson’s ‘Credo’ was premiered at the Lincoln Centre’s White Light festival in 2010, performed by the Latvian Choir and Wordless Music Orchestra at St Paul the Apostle church on New York’s Upper East Side. The same night also saw a performance of’ You Can Cage A Swallow, But You Can’t Swallow a Cage’, which set the poetry of Anne Carson to a vocal arrangement for the Hilliard Ensemble.
Sveinsson lives and works in Reykjavík, where he continues to write music, produce other artists, including Ólöf Arnalds and Kristín Anna, and own and operate Sigur Rós’s former Sundlaugin studio.