Formed in January, 1994, Sigur Rós are an Icelandic four-piece band who rapidly shot to international success. Although until the release of the single ‘Svefn-G-Englar’ on FatCat in 1999, the band had remained unreleased outside of their native country, they had previously released 3 albums in Iceland (all on the Smekkleysa label) - ‘Von’, their debut in 1997; a remix, ‘Vonbrig’, a year later; and in 1999, the awesome new ‘Agætis Byrjun’, which was re-released on FatCat, and was voted as Iceland’s ‘album of the century’.
A second FatCat 12” arrived in the shape of ‘Ny Batterí’ in 2000, including two tracks which featured in the soundtrack of the deeply-moving ‘Angels Of The Universe’ (released by FatCat in autumn 2001), a movie from Oscar-nominated Icelandic film director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson. In 2000, we released their album, ‘Ágætis Byrjun’ which was recorded at Reykjavik’s Studio Sasyrland with engineer Ken Thomas, and went on to garner widespread popular and critical acclaim. This was followed up in 2002 by their second album for FatCat, ‘( )’, recorded in the band’s new studio in Reykjavik (again with Ken Thomas). Again, this met with almost over whelming critical acclaim, and the fol lowing year saw the band play some of the major summer Europen festivals, including Glastonbury and Roskilde aswell as collaborating with Radiohead for Merce Cunningham’s exclusive ‘split series’ project.
