by Icelandic experimental rock band Sigur Rós have announced an upcoming North American tour this Fall. For the first time in their career, the three-piece will be touring without a supporting act*, instead offering the audience two sets (with an intermission) starting from 8:30pm sharp at each show. Tickets go on sale this Friday, April 8th at 9:00A.M. PST/12pm EST, with a limited number of exclusive packages available that include the best seats in the house and autographed memorabilia.
The much-anticipated string of North American dates will be kicked off with a bang with a string of three Pacific Northwest dates in a row, first hitting up the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, B.C., then making their way down to Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, and finally Portland’s Keller Auditorium. For further information and to participate in an exclusive pre-sale, go to sigur-ros.co.uk.
The month-long run is comprised primarily of theatre shows, marking the band’s most intimate tour in a decade. In keeping with the scale of the venues, the group will be performing without the string and brass sections that have been characteristic of recent performances, opting instead to focus on the core unit of the band itself. The shows will give the group a chance to road test new music, the first time since the tour leading up to the acclaimed ( ) album in 2002 that the band has performed new material ahead of album recording sessions. Alongside this experimentation played out in public, the band is also planning on attempting new interpretations of old songs that haven’t been played in a very long time.
Though the scale of the venues and band will be reduced, the live production will be characteristically stunning, designed again by the team behind their previous Knights of Illumination award-winning tour.
Speaking of the upcoming shows, the band states: “Every time you go on tour you want it to be different…and every time it is, usually because you have a new album you want to play people. And that can be fun, because you have to work out how to recreate all the complicated stuff you did in the studio for the stage. But there was a time when things were the other way round, when we worked stuff out on the road, and trying to capture lightning in a bottle was a problem for the studio later on.
“This time, in addition to playing songs you know, we wanted to remember the seat-of-your-pants feeling experienced in the wake of ágætis byrjun, when for two years we formed and re-formed the songs that would go on to be the ( ) album live in front of people, night after night. All we can say right now is it’s going to be different, with new unreleased songs, a new show and maybe some other new things. Beyond that, we can only ask you to trust us on this one.”
