Revisit of the Week - Sigur Rós - Von (1997)

The most fascinating thing about Sigur Rós' typically-forgotten debut album Von is the fifth song, "Myrkur". Von, generally speaking, is quite far away from the sound that we associate from Sigur Rós - that orchestral, crescendo-heavy and dream-like post-rock which they'd already adopt on the follow-up album couple of years later. Instead, this is pretty much an ambient album - the whole record opens up with ten minutes of pure dark ambient straight from a horror movie cavern and it rarely gets out of that mindset. There's a lot more emphasis on soundscapes, so much in fact that huge parts of the album's chunky 72 minutes are more ambience than ambient, like you're closing your eyes and listening to the incidental sounds of the environment you're in - some of it is even literal silence. It takes the album about sixteen minutes to indicate that there is actually a four-member band here, and the couple of songs like "Hún Jörð…" where they get that textural post-rock band dynamic going…