Ragga Gísla and I have worked on several projects together for The Perlan Museum, which is one of Reykjavík’s leading tourist attractions, an immersive museum that showcases Iceland’s extraordinary landscapes and nature in an accessible and engaging way.
Its impressive hands-on, interactive exhibits and shows explain the country’s landforms, geology and wildlife. State-of-the-art technology has always elevated Perlan from an ordinary museum to one that guests will find innovative and memorable. And we have been lucky enough to be a part of that journey.
The latest exhibit, an immersive sphere that takes you on a voyage into a living volcano was so much fun to work on.
Ragga Gísla and me composed the music and I sound designed the whole show that was then mixed on-site in Dolby Atmos by Styrmir Hauksson.
In what is basically a full on LED sphere, the creators of the show, Gunnar Gunnarsson and Margrét Th. Jónsdóttir - together with an army of talented people - designed and built a platform to enjoy the immersive experience, complete with eartquake simulators to highten all the senses of the spectator.
A venue like that is nothing without great content. Enter the team from Normal Studio. Tommy Caron directed the film, under the artistic direction of Roger Parent. We had already enjoyed collaborating with them on Árora, so that was a happy reunion.
Here are some behind the scenes photos:
As per usual in projects like this, me and Ragga came in early and started writing music from ideas and concept work.
The music was always going to be centered around the forces of nature, we begin softly with a sweet but foreboding traditional folk song that includes a warning, then we go darker as we travel down into the earth's crust, and lighter as we get back up to the surface.
When we get into the flowing magma of the eruption, we wanted to see if we could evoke the feeling of deep powerful nature with the human voice, so we got bass singer Halldór Smárason to sing melodies and textural lines.
Added to that we manipulated, pitched and stretched other recordings to get the darkest human voice we could create.
For the final scenes, a breathtaking immersive view of an actual eruption, Ragga composed an ode to nature entitled 'Þín Dýrð' - which translates to 'Your Glory'
Choir arrangements were masterfully carried out by Gunnar Gunnarsson, who also put together a choir of selected performers that we recorded for Dolby Atmos™ use in the beautiful Fríkirkjan church in Reykjavík. Styrmir Hauksson engineered the recording sessions with a stunning array of microphones and preamps that made our audio nerd hearts beat faster.
Happily we always get requests from museum guests that want to enjoy our music outside of the show itself. So now we have put together a short EP album with the soundtrack from Into The Volcano.
The album is available on all streaming platforms, but I would like to highly recommend enjoying the spatial mixes that are now available on Apple Music and Tidal. They will always give you extra depth if you have the headphones or speaker setup to enjoy them.
