Usually, when a band signs to a major label, there's the inevitable raised budget, top studio, major producer and deafening promtional fanfare to accompany their alignment with the industry's more corporate elements.
With typically wilful Icelandic perversity, though, brilliant but utterly bizarre buggers SIGUR ROS have chosen to celebrate their union with none-more global magnates EMI by releasing a 20-minute EP of instrumental music written for US octegenarian choreographer Merce Cunningham and his dance company's 50th gala performance.
If we were discussing virtually any other act on earth, the words 'go' and 'figure' would be writ large at this stage. However, Sigur Ros have so far made a career out of the terminally unlikely, and - while "BaBaTiKiDiDo" will hardly trouble the charts (its' format pretty much kills that anyway) - it is something of a (very) quiet classic.
The EP in itself is something of an enigma. Housed in a beautifully embossed white sleeve, it could almost be The Beatles' "White Album" save for the stickers, while the vinyl version plays on only one side, with the sleeve's strange hieroglyphics again scored onto the record's second side.
The music within is equally esoteric. Sigur Ros first performed in harness with Cunningham's company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2003, and while the three tracks here were actually put together at the band's Icelandic studio a month on from there, the experience of creating sounds spontaneously while watching Cunningham's dancers from the Orchestra pit has surely influenced these three 'pieces'.
The tracks are named "Ba Ba", "Ti Ki" and (wait for it..) "Di Do". The opening pair are gentle, tinkly symphonies played on two music boxes apparently procured for the princely sum of £25 from a shop in Bristol. "Ba Ba" recalls Mike Oldfield's "The Exorcist" OST, with a smidgen of Gavin Bryars and Brian Eno lobbed in, with the percussion sounds mostly culled from field recordings of the Dance Company's feet recorded at their Manhattan rehearsal space, while some sombre piano and distant ambienta also drift in and out of focus.
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"Ti Ki", meanwhile, is intially ultra-fragile and child-like and this time a lone music-box very slowly gathers momentum as the dancers' feet become more ecstatic with the results coming across in a disconcerting manner as the track gradually flowers.
Its nothing compared with the weird, closing "Di Do", though, where the strange percussive intro apparently features a homemade device called a "bommsett" (eight ballet shows on a rack, fact fans) and the track itself morphs into a curious Dadaist sound collage with nods to Byrne & Eno's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" before heading for a maudlin, screechy crescendo part.It's disorientating and scary after the minimalism of what's gone before.
"BaBaTiKiDiDo" in places straddles the dividing line between adventurous sonic fun and all-out highbrow pretension, but gets away with it enough of the time to be worth a listen or two. With projects including soundtracks for Scottish and Icelandic films and a collaboration with video artist Doug Aitken for a gallery installation in Paris in the pipeline, as ever it's nigh on impossible to see where Sigur Ros's muse will flit to next. One things' for sure, though: they'll keep their corporate paymasters on their toes, which is surely reason to celebrate in itself.
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