Somewhere along the line, Janus Rasmussen and Ólafur Arnalds got serious. Well, sort of. Rasmussen (of the electronic outfit Bloodgroup) and Arnalds (a classical composer and solo artist in his own right) still punctuate their conversations with jokes and laughter, often finishing each other’s sentences. If you ask them about influences on their partnership, they’re just as likely to cite the power of beer and whiskey as a shared love of electronic music (Heavy, abrasive, early 2000’s electronica to be precise). They even crack a smile when talking about their self-titled debut’s protracted gestation time. (“Seven years from now we’ll talk about the next album,” Arnalds laughs. “And how we got Bono to sing on it.”) Originally conceived as a way to kill time on the tour bus while Arnalds toured with Bloodgroup as a sound engineer, both Reykjavik-based musicians realized that even if the songs never left their hard drives, Kiasmos was a great way to blow off steam.
“Music is never not fun for us,” says Rasmussen. Tired and slightly hung over after playing a slate of Kiasmos shows at Iceland Airwaves, a slight rasp plays around the edges of his voice. “But even though it is fun, it can become stressful. It can become almost a burden, even though it’s fun. But it’s something that you have to do.”
Encouraged by the initial response to their first singles released on Erased Tapes in 2009, the pair decided to continue publicly airing their creations. But Rasmussen and Arnalds quickly discovered that synchronizing their iCals in order to finish their first collection of songs would be a difficult process. With Rasmussen gigging as a producer for other bands when not writing music of his own, and Arnalds working full time as a composer (earlier this year he won a BAFTA for his work on the BBC series Broadchurch) it took a lot of saying no before they could finally start saying yes to their passion project.
“I had this really amazing movie offer and suddenly I just felt like saying ‘fuck it,’” Arnalds recalls. “I felt like I wanted to do Kiasmos. Sure, movies are fun, but I felt like I was more going to do the movie because it was a big career opportunity … I just wanted to hang out with my friend for a while.”
The two got together in April of 2014, holing up in Arnalds’ Mosfellsbær-neighborhood studio to work. Although their informal sessions had resulted in a wealth of material, the duo decided to start fresh, tossing out all but two previously recorded tracks.
“We wanted all the songs to be written in the same time period, so that they would have the same people behind them,” says Rasmussen. “People change and ideas change. We wanted each song to have a common thread. This is reflective of that month in our lives.”
Pointed away from the dance floor throb of their earlier material, Kiasmos’ self-titled debut features a wash of melodic strings over fractured disco beats and ambient synth drones, all mixed together into a hypnotic, post-pop swirl. It certainly isn’t light by any means—the abrasive pulls of “Thrown” and the deep, twisted thump of “Bent” reveal artists looking to make a grander statement than mere background noise.