Music
Rejecting the cacophony of the current age, Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds listens to the silence between the notes. By Joseph Earp.
Composer Ólafur Arnalds on the power of silence
By his own admission, Ólafur Arnalds didn’t learn a lot in music college – he dropped out after less than a year. But the Icelandic composer, who is acclaimed for his deeply moving piano-based compositions, still thinks about one thing a teacher told him all those years ago.
“He drew a note on the blackboard,” Arnalds, who’s taking shelter in his studio because there’s construction going on at his house, says over Zoom. “He drew a ‘C’ and then he said, ‘Here’s a thinking exercise. I want you to tell me what the next note should be – the note that is closest to this one, yet not the same.’ ”
At that stage, Arnalds’ musical life was dominated by the heavy-metal and hardcore bands he was playing with. He was interested in classical music, thanks to a grandmother who fed him a musical diet of Chopin. But his exploration in the world of composition was not purely technical. He considered his teacher’s question. C-sharp? According to the teacher, it was not C-sharp. “How could it be closer?” Arnalds wondered. “Could we go into microtonal things?” The answer: it was C again.
“C again is not the same again as C, because there has been a silence between them,” he explains now. “You didn’t actually write in silence, you didn’t write a rest marker. But the C after C is not the same C.”
This, Arnalds says, is the heart of minimalism – the space, the repetition. It may well be the heart of Arnalds’ own music. His tracks – which he has written both for television and his understated albums – are so much about silence, space and repetition that they almost feel architectural. They’re about the distance between two notes, not only the notes themselves. With Janus Rasmussen, the other half of his celebrated electronica duo Kiasmos, Arnalds is touring nationally from July 10, with appearances at the Sydney Opera House and Adelaide’s Illuminate festival, among other venues. It will be his first Australian tour for eight years.
“Meaning gets compounded in music,” Arnalds says. “You can almost think of it as interest, like interest rates. And that build can be exponential as well. You might reach a point when you’ve heard the thing just enough, when suddenly something just switches in your brain. You don’t know why it happened the 40th time and not the 39th, but it tells us a lot about the ritualistic nature of music.”
He is thinking a lot about ritual these days, in part because he’s thinking a lot about silence. Perhaps ironically for a man who keeps himself so busy making music – in the past year alone, he has released collaborative albums with everyone from pop star Loreen to fellow minimalist composer Jon Hopkins – he has an aversion to noise.
The construction sounds at his house are the least of it. He dislikes the buzzing din of any metropolis. He notes that even nature is loud. “I struggle with a lot of the world,” he says. “When I go out in the world, I joke about it, but I tell my friends who live in London, I can do max two or three days there. There’s just no silence at all.” He makes a face. “Even as I say this, my phone is actually ringing.”
His compositions have an element of rebellion, not so different to the vicious sort found in the music he recorded with the German metal band Heaven Shall Burn when he was just starting out, a whole career ago. But whereas metal finds rebellion with excess, a track such as “Saman”, one of Arnalds’ most acclaimed, rebels through its refusal to give in to the cacophony.
“I feel like cultivating silence is a ritualistic endeavour,” he says. “The most obvious example of that would be meditation, which is just silencing your mind. But as a society, we’re forgetting silence. There is constant attention-grabbing visuals and sound everywhere, while music heard again and again can bring us to a spiritual place, to a place that we call silence. We can finally silence our thoughts.”
A lot of his albums do sound like exactly that: they get as close as you can to silence while still making a noise. The result is tracks that fade into the background if you don’t pay enough attention but which blossom with richness and emotion if you give them your full self. Arnalds says that minimalistic music requires something from the listener, a process guided by an authentic kind of listening. “When the sonic or emotional spectrum of music is not as full, we have an opportunity to, as listeners, bring it up to higher peaks and lower valleys,” he says.
Writing such music requires more attention from him too. Arnalds has two “modes” when he is composing – an improvisational mode, where he works out the melody, and then a craft-based mode spent tinkering with the very specific details. “Finding the core idea is more free form – it’s playing with sounds on a computer, it’s experimentation,” he says. “But once there is a melodic or harmonic idea, I often switch and it becomes, for a while anyway, pure, organised sonic architecture. I will think very closely about specific notes. It becomes like drawing a picture or building something. And this is where I spend most of my time, in this world.”
That world isn’t always exactly pleasant to live in – or at least, it isn’t when the real world clashes up against it. Arnalds can’t listen to the music of others when he is composing, not for fear of accidental plagiarism but because it gets on his nerves. “When you’re writing, you go so deeply into music, you almost live in this weird realm of counterpoint and harmonics. And when you hear someone else’s sound, it’s just jarring. It’s uncomfortable.”
Sometimes, when Arnalds is working in his studio and wanders into the office that his management team keep next door, he finds the radio that they’re listening to utterly intolerable. “It’s the most normal thing in the world, them just listening to music. But it really pisses me off.”
Arnalds’ emphasis on improvisation makes its way into his live show too. He finds that he is easily influenced by the spaces he plays in and the crowds he plays to, adding and deleting things from his performances based entirely on the vibe of the space.
“I have this part of my live show that is very improvised. It can be three minutes one night and it can be 15 minutes another night,” he says.
“And it just completely depends on the room. Or on something as minimal as the posture of the crowd.”
With music as carefully and selectively composed as the kind Arnalds makes, the switching of a single note can have profound effects.
If his songs sound different each time he plays them, how does he know when they’re ready for an album? How does he know when they’re “finished”? Arnalds bristles, in a genial way, at the usage of such a word.
“A song is never finished,” he says. “If we can come to terms with that, our lives will be a little easier. An album is just a photograph – it is just the state of the song when we printed it on the vinyl. Because after the album comes out, I will go on tour and every night the song will change, every time. They are live beings.”
For Arnalds, the idea that music can ever be done, that it can be completed, is symptomatic of the increasingly capitalistic bent of the industry. “Finished” is a word that we use to describe a product that’s ready to be shipped and distributed – that’s fresh off the assembly line.
“Would we ever have asked the question 200 years ago of music: is it finished?” he wonders.
“Nobody would have used this terminology. That thinking is a result of music becoming a product: capitalism, something we sell. Something you buy in a neat little package.”
Which brings up a broader issue – Arnalds’ deep scepticism towards capitalism and how it has flattened creativity in music in ways that are both deeply corrupting and hard to spot. Just as cultivating silence is a discipline for Arnalds, so too is cultivating a mindset that’s clean of the creep of conversations about sales and money.
“How do we value our work outside of the capitalistic structure that makes it?” he asks, in a voice that implies he’s asked himself that question many times before.
“When you create goals that are so based on a monetary society, you will always have a problem. Because you’ll have a problem if you don’t reach the monetary goal you’ve set yourself – you’ll be disappointed,” he says. “And you’ll be disappointed for a totally unnecessary reason, because maybe your work is great and has great value for the world, but that value is just not being measured in money. But you’ll also have a problem if you do reach that goal, because then you’ll be like, ‘Alright, what do I do now?’ It switches the brain from creative thinking to something else that just doesn’t matter.”
Loosening oneself from the language and structures of the industry does have its clear benefits – for a start, you end up making music as free form and inexplicable as Arnalds’. But no rejection of confines is ever easy. Without the normal parameters of the industry, you also give up on the metrics of success that others use – the sales that tell you an audience is willing to follow you where you want to go.
It’s easy to say that you don’t care about album streams and I believe Arnalds when he says he doesn’t. But how does he reject the worst, most insidious parts of the industry and still give himself some sense of a goal and a way of measuring his progress? The answer, as is typical of the man, is both cerebral and sincere at the same time.
“In 10 years, will I be proud of this?” he asks. “That’s what I wonder. Can I proudly talk about this piece of music? Those questions are a little bit more abstract, but they’re a way of asking: are you happy with what you’ve done? Does it inspire you? Can you imagine that it will inspire others? And if so, just release it.
“It’s not about whether a hundred people will enjoy this album, or a million people. I don’t think about it that way, and it’s not interesting to me. But music is a communication device of some sort. And in order for me to communicate something, it’s not complete unless there’s someone on the other side … And it’s not even a one-way conversation. It’s actually a two-way conversation.
“So there’s always an idea of a listener on the other side. It might be super abstract; I’m not thinking about actual people. I’m thinking about bodies and how they move, perceived emotions. I’m thinking, What will this conjure up in a person? But I don’t care if that’s one person and they listen for an hour and then get bored or if it’s a million people who will listen to it for the next 100 years. That’s not the measure.”
Now that he mentions it, it does seem like people may well be listening to Arnalds’ music a century from now. Space and time are tools in his arsenal, and one could easily imagine the man playing the same lilting melody – the same C note, even – for 100 years, to find out what it sounds like now, and now, and now, and now.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Sounds of silence".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
