BEDROOM COMMUNITY - The Whale Watching tour
Valgeir Sigurðsson, Nico Muhly, Ben Frost and Sam Amidon
are the founding members of the Bedroom Community, which after three years of concerts, collaborations and acclaimed album releases, headed out for a trek across Europe: The Whale Watching Tour. Playing in the Bedroom Community on the tour is also a quartet of extraordinary musicians; Nadia Sirota (viola), Una Sveinbjarnardóttir(violin), Borgar Magnason (double-bass) and Helgi Hrafn Jónsson (trombone and vocals). Daníel Bjarnason will open the concert with a small orchestra.
"I couldn't be any more full of my own happiness than witnessing this night. Bravo and oh and oh to Bedroom Community for their righteous curation and stellar performances. This is passionate, necessary music. Blessed, blessed!" The Reykjavík Grapevine Oct 2009. See article
"The ease with which Valgeir Sigurðsson assimilates and manipulates both digital and acoustic instrumentation is a testament to his in-demand status (and it's exemplified tenfold in tonight's context) but there's more at work here than pleasing aesthetics. These are beautiful songs and would be even if they were shorn of their tasteful studio wizardry. Wrapping us, cocoon like, in the glistening, amniotic slipstream of his aural candy floss as he darts between laptop, percussion and piano ably assisted by his band. Heck, it might have been freezing outside but tonight was all about musical warmth." Fact Magazine, UK
'What else is left for me to say about Nico Muhly? His performance at ATP simply added further evidence to support my position that the man's talents as both songwriter and arranger are immense. After a rapid solo exposition on piano, he was joined by a band which was to include his Bedroom Community labelmates Valgeir Sigurdsson and Sam Amidon, as well as the astonishing singer/trombonist Helgi Jonsson. During the long English/Icelandic operatic suite of Wonders, it was Jonsson's astonishing declaimed vocals which had most of the crowd standing with jaws agape. The performance of “The Only Tune” which closed the set was quite probably the high point of the entire weekend, with Sam Amidon piecing together the fragments of a typically sinister old folk tune, aided by some unusual instrumentation including free banjo and amplified head-scratching. The song's haunting closing refrain rang out unaccompanied at the end, and continues to ring out inside my head days later." Mapsadaisical, UK
[Sam Amidon & Nico Muhly] did not perform distinct sets, instead performing their own songs and their collaborations in overlapping clusters, working out the set list as they went along, casually swapping instruments, and behaving themselves with the camaraderie of equally brilliant siblings. Bostonist was prepared for mere laptoppery and sensitive warbling. We were delighted, then, by Amidon's jaunt down the aisle to "lope like a buzzard," and the unanticipated liveliness of everything. Muhly handled three sets of keys (piano, synthesizer, MacBook) while seeming to conduct violist Nadia Sirota with his rather articulate eyebrows. Shirley Collins is still alive, but Amidon channeled her ghost anyway. The show culminated in a epic rendition of Muhly's "The Only Tune," a three-part disassembly and refurbishment of a folk song about sororicide and fiddle-making. Echoing the murder that facilitated its construction, "the only tune that fiddle would play was 'oh the dreadful wind and rain"—singing this, Amidon's haunted vocals were caught and repeated in Reichesque loops. (It was the only tune this Bostonist's head would play for the rest of the week.) The Bostonist Magazine, US
"At the foot of the amphitheatre - surrounded by speakers, a laptop, mixer and with a guitar on his stomach - stands a man dressed in black, full of loneliness, pain and longings. His shadow is cast on the big walls and looks like something from Nosferatu, as he, hunched over and concentrated, turns the knobs. But the Australian Ben Frost hasn't come to take, but to give. And he has a lot to give. He opened with the titlesong from this years "Theory of Machines". A song that on an album has an underplayed quiet raw strength, but live was transformed into a boiling fullblooded emotional register. The room was put to great use, not least when it came to spreading the sound, giving the impression that the pure sound was coming from the side-speakers and the guitar-noise from the speakers behind Frost. It's impressive to be able to take music from possibly this year's best album and make it even better live. For an electronic musician, Ben Frost has the rare gift to be able to capture the room and take the audience further."' 5/5 review, GAFFA Magazine, Denmark on Ben Frost