Far From Home

"Wait, where am I? That’s an excellent question,” admits 22-year-old Ásgeir Trausti Einarsson, the Icelandic warbler who makes yearning, keening electro-folk under his given name. Upon careful consideration, Ásgeir determines that he’s in Grants Pass, Oregon, in a hotel midway between Portland and Seattle. Einarsson’s spent almost all of 2014 on the road, and wherever he goes feels far from home. He grew up in Laugarbakki, a tiny hamlet in Iceland, and the upbringing forever informs his worldview.

“The first trips we did to New York or London or Paris, I got totally overwhelmed,” says Einarsson. “But, when I got overwhelmed, when things felt out of my hands, I always told myself it was for the greater good, that I had to do this, and get over it. And playing so many festivals, seeing so much of the world, I’ve gotten used to it. But it’s not my natural state. I grew up in a small, isolated town of 40 people. Even the town that I considered the ‘cultural’ town, nearby, it was only 500 people, and you couldn’t buy guitar strings, or CDs. The environment I was raised up in was huge: I was living in a farm area, so close to nature. I had a lot of time by myself, to do whatever I wanted. And my hobbies were sports and music. That’s pretty much all I did ever.”

“Sports” was a childhood spent as a javelin-thrower, endlessly hurling in the grassy pastures of his hometown, competing in junior meets across Europe, and dreaming of making it to the Olympics. At the same time, Einarsson was a musical prodigy: studying classical guitar from six, writing songs from eight, playing in bands from 11, recording on Pro-Tools from 14. His athletics career ended at 17, and it was then that Einarsson, freshly moved to Reykjavík, dedicated himself wholly to music-making, setting out recording the songs that’d end up on his Ásgeir debut.

“Some of the songs are really electronic, some of the songs are stripped-down and acoustic,” Einarsson says of the LP. “I initially thought the album wasn’t quite as connected, song-to-song, as I felt it should be. But then people responded to it so strongly in my homeland, so what do I know?”
 

“The first trips we did to New York or London or Paris, I got totally overwhelmed.”
 

Einarsson was but 20 when Dýrð í dauðaþögn debuted at #1 in Iceland, and after its release, he set about remaking it in English, as In The Silence, working with John Grant on the lyrical translations. “It was difficult, because I found out, with a lot of my lyrics, there was no direct translation for these phrases, for the poetry of it,”

In The Silence unexpectedly cracked the Australian top ten on its release this year; and the album’s stirring, Bon Iver-ish hymnals have earnt plentiful acclaim wherever Ásgeir has roamed. Einarsson is committed to learning to ignore press perceptions and fan opinions. “Bad criticism, good criticism, if I take it on board, or let it affect me, then I’ll probably be doing some shit work in the future.”